Z-Motion in Motion

I’ll admit it.  I bought After Effects and spent about 4 hours with 2 different books and gave up on learning it. It just didn’t seem very intuitive to me. I kept meaning to learn it, but there was always something more interesting for me to learn. So it sat there. Oh, I upgraded the software a few times, again, with the intention of learning it. But never learned it.

Enter Apple’s Motion. I was very excited when Motion came on the market, but didn’t buy it when it was available as a standalone. Somehow I now have a copy of the standalone version on my bookshelf, yet it’s never been installed, or even opened for that matter.  But when it came with Final Cut Studio, I installed it. And I opened it, and used it. And learned the basics. And I understood it. And I LIKED it.

Sure, it had it’s limitations, but for what I was doing, it was great. Some basic graphics here and there, I even made a pretty extensive graphic for a political commercial at one point. But I also started noticing my Motion tricks growing stale. I needed something more.

And along came Motion 3, which added somewhat of a 3-D space, and cameras, and better lighting. NOW we’re talking! So I picked up on a few things. Got a Wacom Bamboo tablet and learned some more, but I still felt like I wasn’t pushing the software to the limit. I had a pretty good, solid understanding, had picked up a couple of tips from different online tutorials (like the ones at MacBreak Studio), but I found myself reusing the same tricks.

Well, this winter, a friend, Patrick Sheffield’s long awaited book “How To Cheat In Motion” was released. This is a great book. It has very simple, step by step instructions on how to create hundreds of different effects in Motion. It comes with a companion CD that has many of the project files and elements used in the text. It does require a basic working knowledge of the Motion interface, however. Sheffield isn’t going to hold your hand. This is a 200 level course. You don’t need to be an expert, but you do have to know your way around the interface.

Now, don’t get me wrong, you’re not going to read this book and say “I’m going to use that project here, and this project there.” You might even look at the projects and think they’re basic looking. But what you will realize soon after you start working your way through the book, is that what it does is takes your basic knowledge of Motion and expands it. Have you ever said “I bet Motion will do it, but I don’t know how…”? This book will give you the knowledge to do it.

It’s so much more valuable than a book that teaches you how to do 20 different kick-ass effects.  This gives you the knowledge to create unlimited custom effects that you’re not going to see in every other project for the next year and a half. Very quickly, your thoughts of this book will go from “Well who would want to do that anyway?” to “Oh, I could add this technique to that other thing I’ve been doing, and splash a bit of that project in there and have something supercool.”

In fact, Sheffield himself calls it a cookbook in the introduction. Which is a perfect description. The best recipes don’t come straight out of a cookbook. They come from the chef’s originality and knowledge gained from cooking through many cookbooks.

Pick it up and give it a workthrough. Your graphics will improve, I guarantee.