It sure was a blast animating that Gorilla (actually called Goodrilla!). This definitely made us want to animate more fun characters like these. We could see doing more of this for game apps and app trailers. Any game studio out there? Drop us a line we’d love to work with your characters!

Here’s a recap of some of the big highlights for Thinkmojo in 2012:

• A bigger, stronger team: we expanded our full time team and started working with talented writers, designers, animators, sound mixers, from all around the world. We’re now also located in both California and Canada with a cool new office space at the exciting Startup Edmonton hub.

• Startup-videos.com became the #1 web reference: with over half a million visits this year, startup-videos.com got mentioned a couple of times on Techcrunch as well as the Wall Street Journal for being the go to website to discover the best startup videos on the web.

• Partnering with the Founder Institute: we devoted some of our time helping newbie entrepreneurs explain their startups and communicate their visions using the power video.

• Hand crafted over 60 original videos: this includes the creation of our first multilingual videos (Brazilian and European) as well as our very first live action production which we can’t wait to release within the next couple of months.

• Worked with fantastic clients: from early stage bootstrap startups to Y-Combinator graduates to fortune 500 corporations we got to collaborate with many teams that come in all shapes and sizes.

For all this, our team would like to send a huge thanks to all of our clients, partners, advisers and creatives for helping us hit these milestones! We would not have had such a great year if it weren’t for people like you. So, here’s to a kick ass 2013!

The “Sunburst Creator Kit” is a free After Effects project (CS4+) that makes it super fast and easy to create sunbursts, radial rays, sun rises… or whatever you call them!

Just import the AE project into your project, then drag any of the 6 ready-to-use comps into your scene, or start from scratch and customize it just the way you like. Learn more about how to use it with this quick video tutorial.

Project Features
————————————-
- Free AE CS4+ project file
- 14 animable variables
- 1280×720
- 100% scalable, 100% editable
- 8 ready-to-use sunbursts
- File size – 2.7 Mb
- Quick video tutorial (over here)

Hope you’ll enjoy it!

In this tutorial we’ll see how to create a retro “8-bit style” video game title screen in After Effects.

Here’s what we’re going cover:

1:05 – Designing and animating a simple (yet cool!) character
19:22 – Using the loopOut() expression to repeat an animation indefinitely
23:27 – Creating a moving background with the CC Tiler effect
27:08 – Creating a cycling color gradient effect using the Hue/Saturation effect
32:55 – Creating an 8-bit look with the Mosaic and Posterize effect

Hope you’ll enjoy it!

Read the full article on Weblance’s blog

For those of you not familiar with the founder institute, it basically is a network of startups and mentors that helps entrepreneurs launch high-tech companies. Through this pre-seed incubator program, entrepreneurs can launch their dream company with expert training, feedback, and support from experienced startup CEOs, while not being required to quit their day job.

Below you can find a recorded presentation given by @californyann, Thinkmojo’s super duper co-founder. The presentation includes tons of tips on how to produce a kick ass explainer video for your startup and was recorded last month during a session about product development with Phil Libin of Evernote, Dan Arkind from Jobscore, and Adeo Ressi, president of the FI.

It’s always a treat for our team to read in the press about startups we’ve helped get more traction for. This is yet another example of how explainer videos are not only an invaluable conversion tool for your homepage but also great aid to facilitae coverage from journalists and PR firms. It’s all about making it easy for them to understand what it is that you startup does.

So, Kudos to Shoptiques and her charismatic founder and CEO, Olga Vidisheva. To more press coverage and a healthy growth!