Erik Buth is a motion graphics designer, animator and creative director living and working in Los Angeles

For this project, we created 11 mini-worlds, all out of paper, for a complete refresh of Sweet ‘N Low branding materials. Photos of the sets were used for the sweetnlow.com website, web banner ads, magazine print ads and as reference models for the 15 second animated spot.

All of the elements were made by hand out of paper, cardboard, glue and tape, inspired by the original and innovative Sweet N Low paper package.

Role: Creative Direction, Design. Produced by Blind

This installment of the MX vs ATV video game franchise introduced many key improvements to the realism of the racing dynamics, physics and player interactions throughout the game and we wanted to feature these moments throughout the trailer. The sequence we came up with follows a pack of adrenaline-fueled riders as they fight through a spiraling, bumpy course, knocking one another off one by one until a lone hero, Supercross champion James Stewart, remains as the victor.

Created entirely in Maya using adapted game assets as well as many original elements created by our team exclusively for use in the trailer.

Role: Creative Direction, Design, Edit. Produced by Blind.

Not that long ago, mobile phones had buttons instead of touch screens. Some, like one of the Kyocera phones in this spot, also opened lengthwise to reveal a full keyboard. The opening and closing of the phone resembled a butterfly and this became the inspiration for the creative concept. 

The primary goal was to create a campaign that emphasized the human connection that the technology could enable, rather than focus on specific technical details. This led to the use of watercolors, paper, pen and ink.

Role: Creative Direction, Live Action Direction, Design. Produced by Blind.

Chili’s created new BBQ flavors inspired by various regional specialties throughout the American South. To illustrate the variety, we envisioned a fun filled road trip, complete with side trips, roadside diners and great friends, all captured with snap shots later assembled into a memorable scrapbook of the journey.

This spot was shot over two days on-location in Prague and the surrounding countryside.

Role: Creative Direction, Direction, Design. Produced by Blind.

I designed and directed the opening title sequence for How I Met Your Mother, including logo design. I posted a few of the alternate logo explorations. I also shot still photos for a lot of the background elements using a Lomo camera and a bunch of extras that we had meet us at a local bar. 

This was the fifth or sixth show open that I had worked on with the same studio creative team, all of the other shows having been canceled after either only a few episodes or never making it out of pilot stage. Luckily this show broke that string of bad luck.  

Role: Design, Art Direction, Photography. Produced by Blind.

The main goal of this ad was to show a variety of runners and iconic Los Angeles locations. We shot the runners on green-screen and then used a variety of real watercolor textures and footage to create the final effect. Honda sponsored the event for many years and reused this ad for several years in a row.

Role: Creative Direction, Direction, Design. Produced by Blind.

For this set of network ID’s created for Fuse TV, we were tasked by the clients to create pretty much whatever we wanted, as long as it contained the words “Fuse Original Programming” and was 10 seconds long.

Role: Design, Art Direction, Photography. Produced by Blind.

This was a pretty complicated sequence to choreograph, because we wanted the whole spot to be seamless and we had a lot of content to fit into 30 seconds. There was also small dogs and kids and a curved dolly track and a Technocrane to fit in.

The car was created almost entirely in CG animation, except for the seats and the steering wheel, which were real Mini Cooper parts. We built the platform for the actors to accurate scale.

We made a few pre-vis test sequences using stand-ins and temp animations to help map out the timing and blocking of the overall sequence.

Role: Creative Direction, Direction, Design. Produced by Blind.

This series of ads announced the physical re-design and new features of Google Chromecast. The first version looked like a rectangular USB drive and then was redesigned to be round.

We made a lot of type animations and other fun animated elements to be integrated into the live action footage to give the spots a fun party like atmosphere.

Role: Creative Direction — type and motion graphics elements. Produced by 72andSunny. 

Designed and formatted specifically for the outdoor video display on the United States pavilion at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai for American Airlines. This video announced the start of direct flights from Los Angeles to China in a playful heartwarming way by showing two children passing a paper airplane back and forth between the two nations, passing many memorable landmarks along the way.

Role: Creative Direction, Live Action Direction, Design. Produced by Blind.

Introducing the new Fitbit Flex and Fitbit Charge models! These announcement videos were designed to highlight the latest features of the new models, such as the new Flex being more fashion forward than previous Fitbit trackers and the updated Charge model includes many new advanced features.

Shot on-location in Venice, Santa Monica and west Los Angeles.

Role: Creative Director, Co-Director. Produced by Los York.

Series of three Google Nexus Launch ads created to announce the latest models. All three of these new products were still in development at the time that we produced these spots, so we modeled them and created the ads entirely in 3d using Maya. 

We also had the opportunity to explore design ideas for a Nexus end tag logo animation for which I designed several style frames. In the end, a much simpler logo reveal was used.

Role: Co-Creative Direction, Design. Produced by Brand New School.

Featuring the professional sports uniforms created by Russell Athletic, we created several mini moments of sports intensity featuring elements of football, basketball and baseball games. Each sport required a whole new cast, set elements and props, yet had to maintain the consistent look and feel of the campaign. Animated sound waves and particles integrated in post further severed to bring the tension, focus and intensity of the moments to life.

Role: Creative Direction, Direction, Design, Edit. Produced by Blind.

Verizon can integrate with your small business in a seamless way and to represent that idea, this entire video was designed to be one continuous flowing sequence, where characters would interact with an ever changing environment. The actors were shot on green-screen, with minimal set pieces and props and then everything else was created in post in 3d CG animation.

To plan and time everything correctly, the story was mapped out ahead of time with a rough pre-vis sequence. This enabled us to figure out what props had to be real, when and where to include interactive lighting cues and helped to choreograph the actor movements and placement on set.

Role: Creative Direction, Direction, Design. Produced by Blind.

Working from the tag line "What do you want your numbers to add up to?" the concept was to build an entire world from financial data: the people, the environments, everything. At the end of each spot, we see the animating numbers finally resolve into the real life rewards of making wise investments over a lifetime. 

Live action shot on location in the Czech Republic and on a gigantic green-screen stage in Prague. Editing at Blind in Santa Monica and animation by Nathan Love in New York. Final composite at Absolute Post in New York.

Role: Creative Direction, Live Action Direction. Produced by Blind.

With the objective of humanizing the sometimes technical world of international money laundering, we created silhouettes of people shot against green-screen to hold footage representing various financial data, global business locations and commodities. The sequence is then stitched together with seamless transitions to further represent the always on, worldwide reach of MF Global.

Role: Creative Direction, Live Action Direction. Produced by Blind.

If you don’t know what Moe’s Southwestern Grill is, it’s a lot like Chipotle or Subway. You customize your own burritos and tacos at the counter. These ads were designed to illustrate the inner workings of the minds of the customers as they ordered their favorite items.

We shot these on-location at a Moe’s store in Atlanta. Moe’s is headquartered in Atlanta.

Role: Creative Direction, Direction, Design. Produced by Blind.

One time Microsoft made cell phones. The interface design was derived from the design of the Zune. Zune was like an iPod. iPod was a thing that evolved into iPhone.

This was an announcement video for Windows Phone 7. This video premiered at a mobile device conference in Barcelona and was introduced by then Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer. People all over the internet tried to figure out what the hardware device seen in the video was, but it was a fake mock up. The phone screen was green-screen when we shot it and not intended to be real hardware.

Shot on location in downtown Los Angeles and a green screen stage.

Role: Creative Direction, Direction, Design. Produced by Blind.

For this spot we needed to include a short clip of a “viral” YouTube video, so instead of attempting to license an actual video, we went and shot our own video of a dog on a skateboard. That dog was good at skateboarding.

This is the directors cut, the on-air version is 60 seconds long and has a lot more 1-800 numbers and full screen graphic cards with the offer details.  

Role: Creative Direction, Direction, Design. Produced by Blind.

A series of spots for First National Bank’s 150th anniversary. First National Bank is based in Omaha, and we shot several actual bank employees, customers and local leaders including the Mayor of Omaha for these spots.

The look and design elements we created for these spots was so well received by the bank marketing team, that they decided to extend that design language to all of their print materials, billboards, web ads and even limited edition 150 year anniversary credit cards.

Role: Creative Direction, Direction. Produced by Blind.

We spent of lot of time in research and development to get the CG plants to look like they were growing in a realistic and accurate fashion for this :30 spot for Asgrow brand soybean seeds. The target audience is soybean farmers, and they would know if it looked wrong.

Shot on location at a soybean farm in Missouri and at the Asgrow research labs just outside of St. Louis.

Role: Creative Direction, Direction. Produced by Blind.

This ad was created to introduce the new Optimum mattress from Sealy. It is designed to pull heat away from your body while sleeping to create an optimum sleeping temperature. Our primary challenge was to visually represent hot and cold air flowing easily around our model while she was peacefully asleep.

Role: Creative Direction, Live Action Direction. Produced by Blind.

(video coming soon)

download original pitch PDF deck

download original pitch PDF deck

i’ve designed and animated several projects for clients under the hexeosis brand name and have a separate gallery of that work at hexeosis.com

I’ve included a few samples here, but there are many more music videos, album covers, custom gifs and more. go check it out! thanks.

I designed a couple of different kinds of stickers for sale in my webshop. I have sticker sheets based on the five platonic solids and also sell individual stickers in the shape of the hexeosis logo. 

I've sent out hundreds of stickers to fans / supporters all over the world.