We’re a pretty creative lot in Oregon. And one of Red Giant’s Portland neighbors is the award-winning production company and animation studio Bent Image Lab.

Founded in 2002, Bent Image Lab is known for its animation expertise, encompassing stop-motion and strata-cut techniques as well as CG and motion graphics. Their visual artists and animators have created characters and commercials for clients such as MasterCard, Red Bull, Kellogg’s and Reebok, to name just a few.

One particular character who became a celebrity in his own right is loveable Luchadore El Tabador, who featured in a series of commercials for Canadian cell phone company Koodo. We discovered that the artists at Bent used Trapcode software to really bring this character to life.

Brian Kinkley, 2D compositor at Bent told us, “I used Trapcode Starglow to add a nice shiny effect to the car on the Koodo mobile spot. Then I used Trapcode Shine to simulate volume light and how that light interacts with the character in front of the light source. In fact, I use Trapcode Shine on pretty much all that I do. It’s an extremely useful tool!”

Got a new tutorial for you, folks – Creating a Looping Particle System.

OK, some of you have probably been following my work for a while and know that I already did a looping particles tutorial at Creative Cow. But this is much more in depth and covers both creating looping particle systems and creating looping particle shapes using Trapcode Particular’s custom settings. You can find that tutorial here.

We’ll also use some of these techniques in a later tutorial… (more…)