How Engine House created practical ink assets (with a free giveaway!)

Want to get your hands on some free assets? Read on!

Ink visuals are a really big style in animation at the moment – swirling, bleeding, dissolving and splodging, countless videos are using flowing ink as a stylistic approach to storytelling. We’ve (Engine House) recently been involved with numerous inky projects including the Assassin’s Creed cut scenes and a project we worked on with Ogilvy HK.

It has a distinctly oriental feel, but can also represent femininity, certain vintage time periods as well as a glamourous, luxurious style.

We’ve also seen some other cool projects such as:

Coco Inside Chanel – a piece about the life of Coco Chanel.

The Next Black – an intro to a documentary on clothing.

 
But how do you create these kinds of assets for your own work?

When sitting at your desk and starting a new creative task, your natural instinct is to dive onto the internet and start searching for material and references to use. Creating your own practical effects would be time consuming and expensive right?…. Well, not always.

It is quick and easy to purchase a pack of generic elements online from sites such as Video Hive or YouTube, but, aside from the importance of taking a break from your computer screen and exercising some other parts of your creative brain, it also adds value to your work when you can create your own transitions to suit your exact need.
 
Here at Engine House we like to experiment and try new things, and making our own practical effects was the perfect creative challenge. Setting up a workstation of watercolour paper and printing ink, we got stuck in and tried different methods.

Whilst it is important to us to get hands on with projects when we can, we know that it isn’t always feasible to spend time in experimental stages – whether it is budget, time or resources that hold you back. With this in mind, we have decided to start releasing assets, starting with the ink clips we captured. They are yours to download, play around with, experiment – do anything you like with! We’d also love to see what you’ve come up with – tweet or email us your end results.

These aren’t the only assets we’ll be releasing, sign up to our non-newslettery newsletter to be the first to hear about other bits and pieces we’ll be giving away for you to have a play with. We’d also love to hear from you about the kind of assets you’d like us to share. Check out the lot here: http://www.engine-house.co.uk/practical-effects/