The winner of the 31st Telly Awards were recently announced. It turns out that Daily Planet ltd. won two 2010 Bronze Telly Awards. The first one was in the “Online Music Video” category for Headlights “Love Song for Buddy” and the second one was for Groupon “How It Works” in the ” Online How-To / Instructional category.

I wanted to share a few photos from the video shoot yesterday with Money Money Money. The video is going to be editied by Maeve Price and graphics done by the Daily Planet ltd. team. Be sure to keep an eye out there and on the Daily Planet ltd. website for the final video as soon as its ready. You can check out more photos on my Flickr set or on the Daily Planet ltd. Facebook page.

Maeve Price, Ken Hunnemeder and myself were invited along to document each step of the brewing process for the 2010 Symposium Ale for the Craft Brewers Conference that is happening this April in Chicago. The video was shot over the course of four to five months and edited my Maeve Price. It was a wonderful experience to help produce a documentary from start to finish. Hope you enjoy the final product.

Starting off the new year right! Here is a new spot that we recently finished at Daily Planet ltd. for GetGo.

Credits
Client: Giant Eagle
Agency: Y&R Chicago
2D Animation: Jon Adler and Brad Chmielewski
3D Animation: Jess Donofrio

I join Nick Campbell in the latest episode of his Demo Reel Critique. The two of us look at three different reels from Kyle Richtsfeld, Andrew Cornett and Hein Lagerweij. Hopeful we gave some pointers and gave you some ideas on how to make your reel even stronger. If you’re looking to have your reel critiqued, leave a comment on Nick’s original post entitled Reel Critique Rules and Overview.

Justin McClure has put together an amazing animation resource site for motion graphics artists and fans called SqueezeMe.TV. I’m extremely excited to be included. Welcome to all the new visitors! If you have anything you would like me to feature on the site, please let me know.

It seems like lately I have been doing a handful of spots that are heavy with text animation. Well, here is the latest one I just finished. This is a fairly simple treatment I worked on at Daily Planet ltd. for Chicago Creative Partnership and Bob Evans. The type was animated in Cinema 4D and After Effects, and the final edit was done at Film Workers.

I’ve been a podcast fan for years, some of the ones I listen to have come and gone. I thought I’d take a moment and share with everyone a few of the podcasts I currently enjoy. I try and check out as many of the new episodes as I can. I find it is hard to really focus on a great article all the time, but I can listen to podcasts while I’m working or walking to work. Some of these are video but are just as enjoyable in audio format as well. Let me know if you find any of them helpful or if you know of any others that I should check out.

FX Guide
Good Beer Show
Indie Spotlight
Hop Cast
MacBreak Weekly
MacCast
NPR: Planet Money
Six Pixels Of Separations
The Reflex Blue Show
The Beer Genome Project
The SmallBiz Pod
This Week In Tech
Two Beer Queers
You Suck At Web Design

Being a skateboarder, I’m surprised that I have never been snowboarding. I’ve always wanted to give it a try but living in a flat midwest state, it isn’t always an easy task. I wanted to share some text animations I recently finished for Look At Rubbish and Flow Snowboards. This video will play on the Flow website and is used to to explain the product and how to put everything together. The animation on the type is pretty simple and isn’t going to break any barriers with anything, it was meant to accompany the video. Enjoy!

I just launched a new microsite for Dreams On Screen. They asked for something that would provide them with some sort of web presence while their larger site was being put together. The site I designed showcases some of the latest music videos Dreams On Screen has worked on and provides updates of current videos in production.

Over at Daily Planet we recently got a ping pong table for the office. After hours, lunch times and even during some long renders you can usually find someone playing or at least talking about playing. When I’m not sharpening my skills on the table I am sometimes checking out some of the great matches on You Tube. Here are five of my favorite ones I have seen recently.

Last week Matt Stone and I launched a new blog called Phazd. I am a huge fan of motion graphics in music videos and thats the point of this new blog.  Phazd seeks to be a source of inspiration for the art and craft of music videos within a visual effects environment. The is some amazing work that is done for musical artists that aren’t in the top 40s and are rarely seen by anyone but that small group of people who may have worked on it. Sure there are sites like MTV that showcase many music videos but Phazd was created for anyone who appreciates graphics and visual effects in music videos. Matt and I are still working on getting the site fully together so bare with us while we get it together. Email submit@phazd.com if you have or know of any videos you would like to see posted on the site. Although Matt and I try to add as many great videos as we can find, we can’t find them all so your help is greatly appreciated.

If you’re smart, by now you have some sort of portfolio website promoting yourself and showing off your skills. Having the site is the first step but the next issue to think about is how to get people to come look at your work. Sure if you do good work people will find you eventually. But you shouldn’t just sit around and wait to be discovered. People should be able to find your work when they search in google or whatever their favorite search engine might be. I thought I’d take a moment and share a few tips that anyone should be able to do on their portfolio site that will help boost traffic. The first goal of your site as a designer should be to provide users with an attractive site but also one that is easy to use. Now I know the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be somewhat intimidating and scary, but there are some simple SEO things anyone can do that really isn’t that difficult. Here are five tips that should help bring in some more visitors.

Number 1: Content!
Your design should look good but no one is going to want to look at your site if it doesn’t have good content that people want. Search engines want new content to index, they love and can’t get enough of it. But the important thing to remember is that good content is what you want on your website. Posting new work is useful, you don’t want your site just sitting there with an out of date demo reel. People may think you have stopped working. The best thing that can generate content is a blog. Sharing with people the knowledge you have is helpful and rewarding. Potential clients also like to see that there is a voice behind the art. There have been a few times that people I do work with have commented on some photos I posted or something I’ve written about. But blogging full time is a lot of work and everyone just doesn’t have time for it. If you can’t blog then make sure to update your site with new work as soon as you can, it is well worth it.

Number 2: Header Information
There is a lot of code that goes into the header of a website and one of the most important things in it is the title tag. The title of each page is that page’s topic and represents the content of it. A unique title for each page isn’t only helpful for users to know what page they are on but also when search engines index your page the title is displayed in the result as the most important piece, it is the first thing users will notice in the results. The usual place where search engines take the keyword from to rank for your site is in the title. If the content on the page is different, the title tag should be too. Also in the header is the meta information. The meta tags these days are no longer as important as they were in the past so coming up with keywords shouldn’t be something that keeps you awake at night. A long time ago meta tags were the secret to SEO, but thats the past. It is still good practice to put in a few meta keywords just so they are there because they do have some effects. But todays search engines are looking for great content, written in by real people. The only meta tag that really matters now is the description tag. You want to make sure it describes the page in a way that explains what a user searching for your content and what they might find on that page. Think of the meta descriptions as a kind of mini ad that should be descriptive.

Number 3: The Alt Tag
When you use images, don’t forget to describe what the image is in the alt tag. The alt tag provides alternative text for when images cannot be displayed. Images are an essential part of a website especially for designers. As smart as search engines seem to be, they currently have no easy way to tell what an image looks like. This is where the alt tag comes into play, it helps search engines know what the image might be. When you do add the alt tag information please don’t just dump a bunch of random keywords into them either. For example on your header image you don’t want it to read “Cool Designed Neat Web 2.0 Header” all this tells me is that it is some sort of header. You also don’t want it to to be non-descriptive either like “Header Image” again, this just reads as some sort of header and will just get lost in the search results. Instead use something like “Your Name / Title – Header Image”. Now the alt tag contains descriptive and easy to understand information that search engines will be able to display to the users and now the users will understand what the image is if it doesn’t load correctly on your site. Overall just make sure the alt tag of an image is titled properly so that it describes what it is.

Number 4: Build incoming links
The number and the quality of incoming links can play a huge role in the placement of your site in the search results. Having quality and unique content is a good way to get people to link to your site. Again this is where good content comes into play. Good content will get shared and posted on other blogs and that will bring more traffic to your site. Another way is to be generous with links on your website. On my site I have a friends section on my about page. Some of those friends also list me on their friends page so this is helping both of us without getting in the way of the sites content. While you’re working on building your links make sure you have submitted your site Google otherwise it can sometimes can take several days if not weeks to get listed.

Number 5: Sitemap
Make sure you have a site map. This is an xml file that describes the structure of your page. Just a few clicks of buttons and you can take care of this. There is a Google sitemap generator that create an XML sitemap and will update as needed, informing Google of any new pages you may have.

If you’re a designer and don’t dive into the code very often, I hope these tips will help get your feet wet and maybe boost some traffic to your website.

I wanted to share a couple new boards I recently completed at Daily Planet. You can check out the full set in the boards section on the site. The clients ended up choosing a different look so these didn’t end up getting produced.

I took a shot at datamoshing for the latest Greyscale Gorilla’s 5 Second challenge themed, “Old Video Games“. Datamoshing is basically a compression technique that artifacts your video and creates digital glitches. There were two videos that brought this technique to the main stream, Kanye West’s video for Welcome to Heartbreak and Chairlift’s Evident Utensil. For my datamosh experiment I took screen captures of eleven different Nintendo games and edited them together. I then ran them trough FFMPEG and AVIDEMUX. Mostly I was following along with a great tutorial by Rosa Menkman. The end result was something very interesting and unique. If you’re looking for more information about the process, check out Motionographer they have a great article that’s worth reading if you have a few moments.

In an unrelated design note I picked up a new bike that other day. It’s a 54cm classic 1966 Schwinn Super Sport. I was looking for something that was a little faster then my old bike and since a single speed has less bike components they are usually lighter and faster. This one was going for $200 on craigslists and seemed like a perfect deal. Riding a single speed bike is a different thing all together, since there is no worry about when to shift gears you are free to enjoy the ride. The downside is you have to use a lot more energy when going up hills.

A few of us at Daily Planet worked on this quick little teaser animation for the HTC Touch Diamond.