There are hundreds of font sites out there, and literally hundreds of thousands of fonts, some of them thankfully are free. When it comes to selecting something for a specific purpose, or hunting for a font you know the name of already it helps to limit your search to the most reliable sources for freebies before spending your currency on a font you may only ever use once. Here is a list of typeface sites that I find the most useful on a day to day basis, hopefully they will prove useful to you too.

1. FONT SQUIRREL

Hundreds of well sorted and very classy fonts on a smart site, organised into style categories – there is no rubbish on this excellent resource, a real favourite here.

2. 1001 FREE FONTS

Lots and lots of fonts sorted alphabetically and by category.

3. BETTER FONTS

A fair number of free fonts that are nice and easy to preview before downloading.

4. URBAN FONTS

A tidy site well organised and categorised list of 8000 freeware fonts.

5. FONTSTOCK

Another good selection, clear and categorised.

6. FREE-FONTS

A font search facility that will hunt for a free version of a selected font.

7. ABSTRACT FONTS

13,086 fonts and counting, categorised and alphabetised, some very useful fonts here.

8. DA FONT

Massive selection of free fonts.

9. ELE FONTS

Yep, you guessed it, lots more free fonts here.

10. ACID FONTS

Another extensive range to trawl through or search for.

A few other sites with some nice typefaces offered free by the designers

DIVIDE BY ZERO

EXLJBRIS

BLUE VINYL

IDENTIFONT

The process of Brainstorming sounds very painful, and I guess sometimes it can be, but in this article are a few pointers to help you get the most from your brainstorming session and hopefully make it an enjoyable part of the creative process. After all, the idea is always the most vital ingredient to any successful film, animation or graphic treatment, the same with everything we create. Making the ideas flow easily and enjoyably working with your colleagues or whoever you want to bounce ideas off, and most importantly, getting the feedback and fresh input that you need to make your ideas develop, is the key to giving yourself the best chance of achieving the best results.

This advice for Motion Graphics Freelancers and all those who work in Film, TV, Motion Graphics or animation is free to read here and can be downloaded as a pdf file.

There are more Free Articles,  downloads and more here in Resources.

You can download a few more hi res Pre-Keyed and Layered PSD files of dingle, hedgerow, trees and whathaveyou for use in your projects as foreground elements or anyway you like. They can be grabbed over in resources where all the other downloadable stuff hangs out. These are huge res images and are ready to go.

I like to use them in After Effects or whatever compositing tool is at hand and bring them close to camera with some nice bokeh. They are large enough to work well close up for focus pulls or tracking shots.

The photos were taken on a day out to the National Trusts Winkworth Aboretum, a great day out in the sunshine enjoyed by all. I have posted some more images of the Arboretum on the photography page, check out the environment category.

To be audibly inspired take a look and more importantly a listen to Miguel’s site. He is a very talented musician and composer who is fast attaining an enviable credit list for film and TV scores. He is able to create breathtaking sounds from his vast collection of instruments, conduct orchestras and grow veg… he’s also a top bloke.

Here is a little test using sweep  nurbs in Cinema 4d and some sound fx. It was composited in After Effects.

Treatments are a necessary and very useful part of the pitching process. In fact the storyboard and treatment are equally important and go hand in hand with each other. There is an article written especially about the process of writing treatments on this very site (fancy that eh?), so take a look and may be there is something to learn or some new angle you may not have considered. We touch on all the basic aspects of writing a treatment. Style, content, length, language and phrasing. We discuss the use of imagery and reference material, as well as technical breakdowns and audio considerations.

All this advice for Motion Graphics Freelancers and all those who work in Film, TV, Motion Graphics or animation is free to read here.

There are more Free Articles,  downloads and more here in Resources.

The Showreel Archive run by Jacques Alomo is a website focussed on bringing it’s audience a host of the best showreels online as well as daily inspiration in all things motion graphics animation and visual effects. DazPix was selected for the Showreel Archive critique and assessment feature, so check it out here. There are some constructive comments here from someone who sees a LOT of reels. If you want to be a splendid chap / chick, please follow the link and click on the rating stars on the right of the page – the more stars the better!

Here are a short series of 3 desktop wallpapers for you to download and use. They are all widescreen format, in 2 size flavours 1920 x 1200 or 1280 x 800. I have used the dazpix logo and colour scheme for this first batch.

They are designed to leave a space for your icons on the left of screen. You’ll no doubt have many numerous icons clogging up your desktop if you’re anything like me, but they should read very clearly off of this background gradation. If your icons are on the right then….tough, or flip the image!

DOWNLOAD THEM FOR FREE Here

After Effects is a very RAM hungry application that uses as much of your RAM as it can get to preview your footage and compositions when you press the ‘0′ on the numeric keypad. The green bar is displayed in your timeline any time you RAM preview your composition. The one thing you will notice when you go to open your editing program or another RAM hungry app is that your computer will start running very slow or it may lock up and crash, this is especially true if you are running a Windows machine. After Effects will keep hogging your RAM until you purge your cache. You will notice that there are five options under the purge menu, All, Undo, Image Caches, Snapshot and Video Memory. If you select ‘All’ everything in the list will be purged. This includes all of your Undos, so to clarify once you select ‘All’ your Undos will no longer be available. The ‘Undo’ selection will just clear all the Undos. The ‘Snapshot’ and ‘Video Memory’ will only purge these items in the RAM, but the ‘Image Caches’ is the most important one to remember to clear out in order to release the maximum amount of RAM. Just make sure if you select ‘All’ you do not need to use the Undo feature.
Sometimes when the system is all bogged up, you need a shortcut to get you out of trouble and working as soon as possible again. The shortcut for ‘Purge All’ is CTRL (Control / Command) ALT (Alt / Option) followed by / (forward slash, but only using the numeric keypad).

This one has saved my sanity in the past, and also stopped me destroying my machine in frustration. It’s a good one to remember.

Here is a list of online places you might want to upload your Showreel or Portfolio of work to get it noticed.  Most of these sites are aimed at Motion Graphics Artists, Video Editors or Animators wanting to get their work noticed, commented on and shared. The more places your Showreel is located the more people will see it, and hopefully the more enquiries you will get for work. It is also a great idea to gain respect from your peers, and a good way of starting to network and communicate with other designers and editors. Have a look at the sites listed below, peruse the Showreels there, tell people what you think of their work (be positive generally, or at least politely critical) and you may well start to expand your network of contacts from all over the world.

There are many sites that offer to display your videos and Showreels, and there are more and more appearing every day, but here is a list of the more popular ones. If you know of any more good places, leave a comment and tell us about it.

1. Vimeo

Perhaps the most likely place to find showreels and all kinds of creative content, Vimeo has become the leading place to find animation, visual effects, film-making and motion graphics. You can sign up for the basic account for free which allows you to upload 500mb of video per week. You can then join groups, channels and make contacts, which will encourage people to look at your reel and comment on it. You can also get the embed code for your uploaded work to place into another web page elsewhere.

2.Youtube

The Daddy of video hosting, Youtube is a great place to get your work seen, even if it’s not genre specific. With such a variety of material on youtube it’s not necessarily the first place people will look for talent to hire, but create a channel and get your profile looking good with your masterpieces and viewers will soon start to flock to your pages to see what you are up to.

3. Carbonmade

Carbonmade is a nicely designed interface, you can manage your online portfolio with a variety of tools that allow you to change how you display your work. The core idea behind the design of Carbonmade is to keep your images or videos at the forefront. The free option plan (meh!) can only upload 5 projects and 35 images, for $12 or £8/month the Wooh! plan comes with space for up to 50 projects, 500 images, 10 high quality videos, and your own custom domain name.

4. Motion Exchange

A great place for motion artists, designers, animators and visual effects artists to create a profile for free and upload as many videos as you wish. You can guarantee that other users will watch them and probably leave comments and constructive criticism for you to help you improve your reel. There won’t be many clients here, but it’d the best new place to put your work in front of your peers.

5. Postfolio

PostFolio.org is a creative community of people who do and love visual effects and postproduction. You can showcase your portfolio without going through the hassle of creating and promoting your own website. Create your profile, upload your videos, make friends and get involved.

6. Smoothdevil

Another great place to create a profile and upload your portfolio of work, smoothdevil is aimed at all those in tv, film, audio, vfx, post production and video game developers.

 7. Showreel Archive

This site is dedicated to Showreels. You can browse hundreds and hudreds of showreels from around the world, split into many categories. You can also send your details in and get your own showreel featured on the site, where it will be showcased on the homepage for a period of time before joining the archives with all the other reels.

8. Behance

Here you can join thousands of people from all over the world and from all kinds of creative industries and build a multimedia showcase of your work. It will only display still images, no video can be uploaded, but it’s great for showcasing your special selected stills or some of your amazing storyboards that you put so much work into but never get seen.

9. Dailymotion

Dailymotion works in a similar way to vimeo and allows you to upload video once you have registered, but it states that there is no video length limit, you can have a chance of getting featured on the site, and your HD videos will get HD encoding. You can also distinguish your videos on the site as ‘creative content’.

10. Vfx Connection

Vfx Connection allows you to embed your reels from another video hosting site, but here you can network with many other vfx artists. It aims to link together animators and fx professionals, and allows you to see many statistics about how much your profile is being viewed. Its an interesting and slightly quirky place and worth looking at.

11. Creative Cow

The Cow must be the most viewed site in all of video land when it comes to video editors, motion graphics and visual effects artists and designers. Its a great place to put your demo reel and watch the hits rise quickly in the first few days. See how long you can stay on the New and Notable page, and you will be amazed at how many views your reel will get. This is must place to upload to, you may even get some nice comments and a 5 cow rating.

12. Vfx Jobs

Apart from the Jobs aspect of the site, given away in the websites name, this forum based community is a good place to upload your reel and ask for some constructive criticism from more experienced artists and designers from around the globe.

13. Vfx Talk

Similar to VFX Jobs, this is another forum based community where you can upload your reels for others to see and comment on.

14. Flickr

Well known for photogrpahers to display their work, Flickr is also a great place to upload your stills and storyboards. There is a huge community here, many groups to join and your work can be seen by many people quickly if someone decides to link to it. You will need a Yahoo! account before you can use Flickr. If nothing else, it is a very vibrant place to share and discover imagery.

15. Facebook – Ads & Pages

Facebook is not somewhere you might think to post your showreel or portfolio due to your audience being mainly your own circle of friends, but with the Ads and Pages tool, you can create a free profile for your freelance or studio business and get it seen by the enormous quantity of users on facebook. People can become ‘fans’ of your page without needing to be in your friends list, so its another way of getting your work seen by the world.

16. Shooting People

Shooting people targets film makers, producers, writers and directors, but there are many post production based members and the video section of the site is another place where you can display your best work. The audience here may well be able to offer you some work, but often the work here is low paid. It is a great way to meet new people in production though. It costs £30 or $40 a year to be a member and be part of the 37000 community making films.

17. Reel Clever

ReelClever is a site still in beta, but looks very interesting. Not only can you create an online portfolio of video and work to promote yourself, but the site offers you tools to help with project management, collaboration, storyboarding and how to find cast and crew. There are even sections with free articles and a Q&A section where you can get your query answered. Check it out.

18. Reel-Exchange

Reel Exchange is a professional business-to-business community that connects you with other film and video professionals around the world. Members will find project work and permanent positions, hiring opportunities, and potential collaborators for on-spec projects. Reel-Exchange hosts demo reels and other types of professional content (trailers, short films, sample commercials, etc) that demonstrate professional skill in the various disciplines. Search based on geographic location, discipline, equipment/format, project credits, and more.

19. Imagine Animation

This is an all encompassing site aimed squarely at animators of every type, from traditional to stopframe, to cgi. There is a ‘Show and Tell‘ section of the site where you can upload your work and show the animators of the world.

20. Your Own Website or Blog

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it is a great idea to start a blog or small portfolio website to point clients to directly. It shows a level of professionalism and understanding, and allows you to showcase your work without offering any distractions to the viewer. There is no need to spend lots of money, just sign up for a free blog, get a vimeo account and embed your work into your blog. It’s simple and effective.

GET THOSE SHOWREELS OUT THERE FOR THE WORLD TO SEE!