Marcelo Meneses Portfolio

A Little About Me

Ever since I started high school I knew there was something missing. Never having an arts program, I decided I would teach myself how to use adobe photoshop and after effects to express myself in some way I haven't before. I began making edits for friends and eventually started creating motion graphics work such as lyric videos and logo animations. Once SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) came to my high school, I realized I could make a living from doing what I love. Below you will find my demo reel and a collection of my work. Enjoy! :)

1. Optimistic Nihilism

Nihilism is the philosophical theory that the universe and all the life that inhabits us (including ours) has no intrinsic meaning or value. It suggests that we are insignificant in the totality of existence. Trillions of stars in the universe were probably not made for us. Everyone and everything will be forgotten with time. This philosophy tends to be depressing, so for those who believe it, there is a more positive alternative. It’s called Optimistic Nihilism.

 Since there is no imposed purpose, we get to choose our own. There are no principles to live by, only the ones we decide on. Every mistake we’ve ever made and every moment of sadness and sorrow will one day disappear. An optimistic nihilist must recognize the meaningless of the universe and move on so that they can create their own subjective meaning.

I live by this philosophy, therefore this project is a personal message about what I believe in. And if you find yourself to be a nihilist but can’t see the positive side to it, this piece is a reminder that it can be liberating. That it opens the possibility of finding purpose and subjective meaning for yourself.

Style Exploration

Storyboard

Style Frames

2. Maniac Title Sequence

Madison Kelly and I decided to work on a title sequence for Maniac for our Branding class. For our title sequence, we wanted our main focus to be capturing the physical personification of the inter-dimensional theme the show is written around. The main plot of the show is two patients, Owen and Annie, undergoing MDMA Testing to cure mental illness. The hallucinations the duo have are intertwined and mirror things they have gone through in their day to day life. We want to visualize the recurring symbolism and iconography from the show with a colorful, analog style that is present throughout the series.

Social Media Posts

Our goal was to create a versatile pack of social posts for platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. They can be easily plugged into any sponsored ad or Netflix teaser.

GRTA Model

The GRTA Machine is one of the main "characters" in the show. The machine is a smart computer used in the NPB experiment and it is the key to the entire drug trial. As the title sequence progresses we travel through the GRTA Machine.

Netflix Mockups

We created Netflix mockups for previewing what it would look like when a user hovers over the thumbnail and the title sequence starts playing. We also included thumbnail frames since Netflix changes it frequently and sometimes it could use parts of the title sequence as these thumbnails.

3. Adidas Clima Ultraboost

Adidas is one of the top shoe and sports apparel company in the world. It specializes in athletic wear that also counts as high fashion. With lively, upbeat, and modern animation, their brand has remained relevant throughout the years. For our short form branding indent, Madison Kelly and I decided to do adidas. We are focusing on their recent Clima UltraBoost campaign which involves clean, B&W, energetic glitch animation to interest and excite the viewer. The project also includes square and vertical video format. Project also includes digital and analog mockups.

Mockups

4. Reunion

Alexandra Munro and I approach the word "reunion" in an abstract way by using only shapes and music to drive the animation forward. The style is simple and elegant, with slow camera drifts and cutting in between the two shapes. The music will also play an important role as well since we’ll be synchronizing the piano notes with the shapes colliding.

The story begins by these two shapes that are considerably far apart and suspended in space. They start colliding with other shapes as the piano plays and they begin to be launched forward towards each other. When the music stops for a brief moment, gravity comes back on and they fall but as soon as the piano hits again, they become suspended again. They circle around each other like to massive objects pulling on each other’s gravity, and finally they merge into an organic shape with the rest of them revolving around them.

Cinema 4D, After Effects

Music: Reunion by Todd Baker

5. Logos

Here are a couple logo animations I made for Motion Branding class at SCAD. The exercise was to create simple and effective logo animations in a short amount of time.

Behance is a leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. Companies explore the work and access talent on a global scale. In this logo animation I wanted to play with the rectangle shape on top of the first “e” in the Behance logo.

VSCO is a photography app that is used to take, edit, and share photos. Not just a filter editing app, it is now famous for its ability to take RAW images and the ability to edit videos as well. The app itself is classy and minimal, which will be conveyed through this logo animation. There will also be a subtle use of the grid that appears in mobile photography.

Vimeo is a professional video-sharing platform that is popular among many creatives. Their logo color is blue even though they use a wide range of bright colors on their website. I wanted to include these wide range of colors, along with many different shapes, in order to represent the variety of creative professionals who use Vimeo to share their work.

6. RED

Red is a short 1-minute film that has been glitched to achieve the effect of cliché horror filmmaking. Due to the piece’s theme being “insanity,” the film is about how this kind of mental illness can distort and affect thoughts and experiences. It showcases these in an exaggerated manner that makes the viewer uncomfortable and slightly terrified. Black and white contrast the bright red to help make the distinction of what is going through their head and what is not. This film takes advantage of the relationship between visuals and audio and how they complement each other, using the track’s ambient and electronic elements in the piece to help create synchronization between the visual imagery and sound.

Much of the experimentation was conceptualizing and filming rather than technical experimentation. However, even though it has been done in the past, “breaking the video” in hex fiend and step-printing are all techniques I have never done before, so it was still lots of experimenting from my point of view. Hex Fiend was the main tool I used for real glitching. Once the footage was in After Effects, I started experimenting with blending modes, step-printing, displacement maps, time displacement, color correction, and kaleidoscopes. One of the most interesting aspects of the glitched footage was that sometimes, if brought natively to After Effects, the glitched footage would show pieces of other footage even though there wasn’t a video overlapping it or even in the same comp. Somehow the glitched footage got a hold of frames from different parts of the project and would play it randomly. Of course, eventually those frames disappeared and I could not figure out a way to replicate it naturally the same way unless I closed AE and opened the file again.