Some cool news to announce! We have just finished recording a horrifying new blog show with a frightening theme! But more on that next week!

Another exciting development is a a new workflow plug-in for After Effects! Coming this week!

Now, this plug-in doesn’t make light sabers or energy fx, it might not even change your life, but this utility we developed will speed up your AE work flow! Embarrassingly enough, the development began last year when I started working on Intercept! And while I am still finishing the VFX for my short, this new plug-in is done and so we’re going to release it! Is that progress!? I DON’T KNOW!!

The good news is we’re jamming on a lot of projects behind the scenes, but this year has been a very humbling and rejuvenating experience for me. And it is simply managing ideas and execution. How do we continue to push ourselves creatively and build better consistency… I don’t know if we have it all figured out, but at least we are asking the right questions now!

For example : Here was my thought process on the Saber plug-in:

1. Man, my short film is taking way too long I need to release something cool now that I’m back from Star Wars!
2. Let’s release the Saber plug-in. That thing is pretty cool!
3. I haven’t posted cool stuff in a while though, This plug-in needs to be sweet!
4. I Should make a trailer too! How long will that take?
5. S#!T The plug-in is just not good enough yet and it comes out in two days!
6. Let’s add more features! Let’s add displacement noise and presets! We can make it!
7. Crap! We’re late! Now this thing really has to be amazing! Let’s add text outlines and mask shapes too!
8. What have we done!

Being late because of high expectations makes my expectations higher. A dangerous loop.

So you can see the real challenge is I want to make awesome stuff but it’s easy to underestimate how much time it takes to pull it off! (Cough Cough, Intercept!)

This year we added some fantastic new people to the VC Team and I’m able to get everyone more involved in our shows and do more simultaneous projects that are spread out over time so there are things always in development and more people can be involved in finishing projects.

I think at the end of the day, walking around with a Video Copilot apron has really helped my focus!

Office is on fire now!

A photo posted by Video Copilot (@andrewkramer) on Sep 28, 2016 at 12:42pm PDT