User Profiles

Tell me about Minton Design & Motion

Minton Design solves creative problems. Many of our clients are animation companies that come to us for concepts, storyboard presentations or creative consultation. Beyond motion we create corporate image, print, character design and illustration. Minton Design has a creative partnership with James Rodgers of SFO Design in San Francisco. His collaboration on projects large and small is invaluable. James’ web site designs for entertainment and corporate accounts include Cher’s World Tour, NBCi, The Grateful Dead and other distinguished clients. The combination of the “Two Jims,” Minton and Rodgers, allows us to confidently accept any creative challenge. We have won national and international awards including as Emmys, Tellys, New York and Houston Film Festivals, Broadcast Marketing, Broadcast Designers and Broadcast Designers Latin America to name a few. Our clients include many multi-national corporations and program producers We have created animated imagery for NASA, CBS, NBC, TNT, ESPN, Barney & Friends and Televisa to name a few. Our short films have screened internationally and won top awards for Animation and Effects.

What tools do you use?

We are all Mac, all the time with workhorse Mac Pros and lots of RAM. We use Adobe Suites heavily for web and motion and Apple FCP Pro Suite. Photoshop and Illustrator are our primary tools for conceptualization. After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop and Illustrator are standards in our design workflow. Plugins have given us the opportunity to embellish, refine and enhance our work. Digieffects plays a major role in our success and has for many years. You might say we are Digieffectophiles.

How did you find out about Digieffects?

I had already been a fan of Digieffects software, using them in Photoshop and After Effects. With updates to After Effects, many of our plugins were giving us problems or not working at all. The CS and CS3 curses put us in a bind not having the plugins we had loved, purchased and needed. I contacted Robert Sharp at Digieffects who helped me download information and update the software and getting got us back on track with our motion design and animations. Testing some of the newer plugins gave excellent results and exciting possibilities.

Tell us about this latest project using a Digieffects plugin

The Scab is a short film I animated, based on a short flash poem by award-winning horror author, Michael Arnzen. The Scab was one of eleven short films created by an international collective of filmmakers and new media artists. To match the theme of the story I added the look of vintage old film with Digieffects plugins. Lots of noise and grit but just a few scratches.

The current project I am working on incorporates both the Simulate: Illuma and Simulate Camera suites. I am animating a series of vintage photographs with the light leaks and dust you would imagine in the parlor 100 years ago. The project will employ 3D layers and Depth Cue. I am creating these as samples for a new personal demo reel to contrast the work on my commercial demo. The new reel will incorporate many experiments and unusual looks branching off from the work done in my short films. The new Minton reel should be available soon on our newly re-designed website.

What do you like most about Digieffects tools?

It is tough to say what I like best about the Digieffects plugins. Lots of controls to get extremely varied looks, sometimes to an extreme where it begins to look like something else. If not for these tools, my work would not have the environment and finesse these plugins can offer..

Would you recommend Digieffects to a friend or colleague?

I have been using and lauding Digieffects for years based on the results I have seen first-hand. They have been recognized as primary, de-facto must-haves. So, yes, I have been recommending these plugins. Why wouldn't I? These new Suites offer the creation of natural-light looks. One of the things I have continuously attempted to do is improve good design with an embellishment that appears natural or mimics real-world phenomena. The new plugins take creative potential to new, sophisticated highs. The tools need to be in every video designer and motion graphic artist's arsenal. Everyone's!