'Ubiquitous' video and evaluation.

For the Digital Cultures and Technologies Ubiquitous City brief, I decided to take a slightly more dystopian look at the role certain technologies might play in our future. I was pretty surprised to learn about RFID tags being inserted into humans, in the same sort of fashion that pets are chipped, so I decided to persue this direction for my video. The video I made is supposed to be a promotional video for a future corporation, trying to push their technology, and their social implementations of it, onto the various sections that make up the community of Leeds. 'Uni-Tag' was the name I came up with for the company, and their RFID technology was to be installed around Leeds to make it a safer, happier place to live (that's their corporate spiel anyway). I'd wanted to have a really neutral, female voice as the voice of the corporation, but everyone I know had too strong an accent for what I wanted. When I learnt about the at&t text to speech program I was massively pleased as theres a voice on there (Audrey, english UK, to give her her credits) that was perfect for what I wanted, even if it does sound like it's having a seizure when trying to pronounce some words. The visuals I used are just a simple selection of shots of streets in Leeds and a few shots of different pieces of RFID technology. There's a track by The Cinematic Orchestra running fairly quietly in the background to add to the corporate promotion vibe. A lot of my inspiration for the video came from reading about New Songdo City, currently under construction in South Korea, which will be heavily implementing RFID technology in the day to day living and running of the City.

My personal feelings about the implementation of RFID technology are mainly negative. I tried to give the podcast a bit of a balance by mentioning the potential use of tags in public transport, just so it wouldn't be a completely Orwellian view of things. The way I see it, RFID tags are essentially offering greater convenience, with the price being greater intrusiveness, less privacy and potentially discrimination and infringement of peoples freedoms. As far as I'm concerned, the modern life we lead has been made more than convenient enough already. There is no actual need for us to be able to ride the bus without getting money out or bypass the checkout process at supermarkets, it is by no means essential to our existence, and I think the risks tags present are far in excess of any benefits they currently offer.

To summarise honestly, I didn't really engage well with this brief, technology in general isn't of much interest to me, which I know shouldn't matter, if works been set you should do it regardless, but I found it hard to motivate myself to take an interest. I was also putting most of my efforts into the animation brief, as I found it considerably more captivating, and I see learning to use flash as being a very important skill. Still, there was enough time for me to have put a better effort into this brief.

Final Marvel Animation

Marvel Digital Comics promotional animation from Tom Thiel on Vimeo.

Here's my final animation for Marvel Digital comics. Although I'm by no means disappointed by my finished animation, there's is a lot more I would've liked to have done to improve it. The animation has a lot of scenes cut from the ones I lined out in my original animatic. I think losing a few of the scenes was a positive thing, as it helped prevent the animation being too drawn out, but there are details I would have liked to have included that didn't make it into the final piece. Things I would have liked to have added to the animation include rain falling diagonally across the screen in the scenes outside the building, as not only would it have been a nice visual but it would've allowed for the sound of rain drops falling to be added. As i didn't create the rain, I used the sound of wind howling down the street for these scenes instead. I'd have liked to have added an illuminating glow effect around the candles flame. The silhouette of Doom in the doorway and his shadow could have done to have his cape rippling slightly as if catching a slight breeze. The bookshelf flickering into sight, which was supposed to represent tube lights flickering on after the switch is pressed really need the tk tk tk sound that occurs as they start up, but I was unable to find or create this sound. That whole scene is different from how I originally intended it to look as all the perspective involved in my original idea, and the gradual lighting of the room from the back to the front proved to be a bit beyond my abilities. In fact a lot of the perspective in the first scene isn't quite right, but its not noticeable enough for me to be able to get away with it. I would have like to include a proper full blown walk cycle at some point. The Dr Doom in the doorway after the archive room is illuminated would have looked better if it were a more detailed graphic, rather than just a lighter version of the earlier silhouette. And the computer screen and the information that appears on it at the end are a little on the unattractive side, I'd have liked to make them a lot more polished. The sounds in the animation are fairly minimal, and I didn't really want to have music running in the background, but I'd have liked to make a bit better use of sound to create the atmosphere. And the whole thing could've done with a lot more tweening.

Now that I've finished picking apart what's wrong with it, I have to say I really enjoyed this module, and I've learnt some useful things in Illustrator and Flash, but I've still got a whole lot more to learn about them both before I'm able to create work up to a standard I'm really happy about. Now that I have this animation in place I'll probably go back over it and add in extra elements to it. It'll provide a nice testing ground for different effects and ideas I'd like to try out.

I've re-uploaded my animatic as the one hosted on blogger looks frankly awful. I've tried hosting it on youtube and vimeo, but the same thing kept happening on both, the first scene kept getting cut off and the sound ending up out of sync inspite of the original quicktime movie playing back fine. I've gone back into final cut to tweak the begining so the first scene shows up, but when uploaded the sound still doesn't sync up. Weird.


Marvel Digital Animatic from Tom Thiel on Vimeo.

Animation Techniques

I've been experimenting with a couple of different animation techniques during this module. I've tried a little bit of stop motion animation in the past, and I thought I'd try some different approaches within the technique. The first style I tried was 'claymation', which is stop motion animation made with plasticine. I used a very simple idea of a stalk growing up from the ground and then flowering.

As with all stop motion animation, producing a clip even as short as this was time consuming, and fiddly. Plasticine is definately a harder medium to work with for animation than id anticipated, even for something as simple as my video. All in all, it seems like quite a lot of hard work for a not particularly great result. You would definately need to invest a lot of time to produce any halfway decent results, so hats off to all the people who've made some of the incredible claymations out there, they must never leave their basements.

The second style I tried was a drawing on method, gradually building up a picture line by line, and erasing parts as they change.

This technique clearly has its limitations, and a shadowy after-image of the erased parts remains behind after. There is an amazing animation that takes this idea much further, onto a massive scale using different mediums.

Just the scale of it is impressive, and the action going on in it is trip-out craziness. I can find no wrong with this work, I absolutely love it.

Flash Animations

I thought I'd put up a flash animation that I like, and my thoughts on it. One thing that's become clear to me over the period of this brief, and I'm sure it's applicable across a much wider sphere of things than just animation, is that if you've got some good content then you dont have to go all guns blazing trying to make it look as jazzy as possible. Im talking substance over style, but not completely letting style go out of the window. If you can acheive the right 'look' for the content and feel of an animation, it doesnt have to be all bells and whistles so long as its distinctive and memorable. Another thing I keep realising more and more as this course has progressed is the importance of sound, and I'll go into this more in the animation I'm going to talk about.

Salad Fingers, created by David Firth, is an animation that's received a sort of cult status, I dont know many people who haven't loved it if they've seen it. The story revolves around the character Salad Fingers, and the strange things he gets up to in his grimy little world. The character models and backgrounds are by no means complex, but they do have a very distinct dark and grimy aesthetic to them, with the characters in particular being very strange, mishapen looking creatures. The thing that really make these animations is the sound. There is always a piece of music by Boards of Canada in the background, and this gives everything that happens visually an underlying feeling of uncomfortableness. Secondly the character voices/sounds (not many of them actually speak as such), especially combined with the way the dialogue appears in a sketchy, handwritten looking format as Salad Fingers speaks, create the weird and unsettling atmosphere. Not to be overlooked of course is the actual content of the dialogue, which leaves you hoping you never actually meet David Firth on a dark night. I do really love salad fingers, I find it equal parts hilarious and creepy. This is the first episode:

Touchscreen Technology

The above video is over a year old, and the advances that have been made with Microsofts Surface since then have been significant, but the thing that I'm interested in here is what this will mean to us as designers. In the actual creating of things, this sort of technology's going to change the way we work in that screens that you can actually draw on are going to become a common place thing, rather than using a seperate graphic tablet. More importantly the kinds of things we're designing are going to change. Being able to have multiple contact points on the same screen is going to totally change the possibilities of what we can achieve in interactive design, as someone being able to manipulate two or more things on a screen at the same time with their fingertips is going to break down the limitations that are currently present in moving a single pointer around the screen with a mouse.

Shadows

For a scene in my animation I wanted to have a shot of a door opening from inside a pitch black room, revealing a silhouette of Doom in the doorway. I made the graphics and then animated the door sliding open, with the motion reflected in the shadow on the floor. After having made it and watched it back, I realised it didn't look right. I didn't know exactly how it should look, but the shadow moving across sideways in time with the door just seemed wrong.



Not having any sliding doors around the house to check how the shadow should move, I knocked up a cardboard model of a wall and a door. I placed a lamp directly behind the door space and filmed the cardboard door cut-out sliding across, so I could observe how the shadows movement.



Watching this back allowed me to see what was wrong in my first attempt. The shadow pivots from the bottom corner of the door as it moves across, making a straight line with the door edge when it reache the halfway point of the doors movement across the doorspace. After a few unsuccessful attempts I managed to get my animated shadow to move in a more natural fashion, and it definately looks about 100 times better than the initial version.

An actual ubiquitous city

I've been researching the worlds first true ubiquitous city, New Songdo City, currently under construction in South Korea, with an intended deadline of 2015 for completion. The city will feature all of its information systems, from business to medical, being linked and will feature extensive technology powered by CDMA wireless communication RFID tags. It is intended to be a test bed for many emerging technologies.
Day to day living in New Songdo will be centered aroud residents smart-card house key. This one card will be used to lock and unlock your house, pay for public transport, access free public use bikes, pay for parking meters and basically anything else you can think of. When I read about this I couldn't help thinking of an idea that's briefly mentioned in the start of Philip K Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly: 'Wednesday in downtown L.A., the Westwood section. Ahead, one of those giant shopping malls surrounded by a wall that you bounced off like a rubber ball - unless you had a credit card on you and passed it through the electronic hoop.'
A clear problem with the creation of purpose buit U-cities like this is that they make no provision for the poor. The very concept of these cities is discriminatory to the less affluent members of society, but I guess if you've invested billions of dollars in a nice, shiny new city where technology is more important than people, then you really dont want hoboes and beggars cluttering it up.

Animations, historical and modern

The historical animation I decided to research is The Adventures of Mark Twain, which was released in 1985 and directed by Will Vinton. Its a stop motion animation, more specifically Claymation. The term Claymation was actually registered as a trademark by Vinton in 1978 to describe his animated clay films. The principle is the same as with any stop motion animation, a single still shot is taken, then the positions of elements within the scene are manipulated slightly, and another shot is taken. This process is then repeated over and over, with large numbers of still frames being required for even a few seconds of finished footage. This sort of animation works around the flicker threshold of the human eye/brain, though was previously thought to work on the theory of persistence of vision, which was debunked in 1912 by Wertheimer. When run together at a certain frame rate these still images appear to move fluidly from one to the next, without any gaps in the movement.

The film is a very enjoyable tale of Mark Twain, and characters from his novels such as Tom Sawyer, traveling aboard an airship on their way to rendevous with Halley's Comet. The film is an absolute masterpiece of claymation, aside from the tale being interesting, you can simply sit back and marvel at the ammount of detail present in all of the scenes. The ammount of work and time that must've gone into its creation is staggering. At first glance the film could be judged to simply be a colourful kids film, but a lot of the content is actually quite dark. This is my favourite scene from the film. The visuals are creative, and moreover its pretty disturbing, I wouldn't want to be left hanging out with 'satan' for too long, he's a right tweaker.



The modern animation I have researched is a music video for the song Young Folks by Peter, Bjorn and John, released in 2006. I couldn't find any sources concretely stating it, but im pretty certain this video was created in flash. The thing that really strikes me about this video is the simplicity of it. The video works beautifully with the music (pretty key concept for music vids, I know), its a simple and mellow song and the visuals complement this perfectly. Coming back to the simplicity again, this video shows me that above all else if you've got a good idea and some basic skills you can create something amazing. When I watch this video I think to myself 'hey, i could create graphics that look as good as those', and even with my rudimentary knowledge of flash I could animate them to the same standard of this video, which to date has over 8 1/2 million views on youtube, so it's really inspiring. Naturally the fact that its a great song that was very popular at the time of its release contributes to the video being so heavily played, so I guess its a good idea to make friends with people who might make some good music.



The comparisson of the two is quite surprising, in that you would probably expect an animation that's 23 years old to be a lot less complex than a modern one, but in this case the greater visual complexity lies with Mark Twain. There is actually very little animation in the Young Folks video in comparisson to Mark Twain, in which there is always some extra nice touch of animation in the backgrounds or outside the main action. The fact that this comparisson is between a 3 minute music video and a full length feature film has to be taken into account, but again this is kind of surprising as music videos, due to their short length, tend to be an area where people go to town, making it as much of a high-tech effects extravaganza as possible. Nevertheless, both animations styles work very well for the respective purposes, their visual aesthetics suiting their contents nicely

Animal Crossing and Nabaztag

I came across the game Animal Crossing : City Folk through my housemates heavy gaming obsession, and thought it had some relevance to the Digital Cultures Brief. The game is essentially a virtual life simulation, much in the way that The Sims is, and even Second Life. Players are able to meet their friends online and converse with them as game offers the use of Wii-speak. The thing that interests me about all of this is the fact that the game is aimed at a pretty young target audience, meaning a lot of kids today are growing up with all of these really advanced interactive features, so in the future they'll be expecting everything else to have the same level of interactivity. This means as designers we need to be aware of our future audiences expectations, as a lot of the things that are currently standard won't cut it with the younger generation when they grow up.

Up next, Nabaztag!!

One of the more positive things I've come across while researching RFID tags is Nabaztag, which is a plastic rabbit with an RFID tag in its nose and Wi-Fi in its ears. This little contraption sits next to your computer and can speak out information from the web for you, from news reports to weather. Yup, great. And as I read on one website ' Your kids will surely appreciate it as the rabbit can read out RFID tagged children books which mean it could take over the role of child's grandmother with ease.' So off to the retirement home with you grandma, nabaztag's made you obsolete.

Dark Futures

For the Digital Cultures and Technologies module I've been watching several sci-fi films, to see some different possibilities/interpretations of what the future may hold. A particular standout was eXistenZ, which I think confronts a very important issue with immersive gaming. With peoples desire to become more and more deeply involved with their game playing experiences the question has to be asked, if you are that deeply immersed in the experience, how do you know what's reality anymore? The film ends with the people who entered the game at the start of the film not being able to tell whether they've actually left the game or not. An important message there methinks.

I also read the novel Neuromancer by William Gibson, which also goes heavily into people immersing themselves into virtual worlds, and it is cited as being the book in which the term 'cyberspace' was first coined, and was also the inspiration for the film the Matrix. I'd previously read another of Gibsons novels, Pattern Recognition, which personally I enjoyed significantly more than Neuromancer. I guess as I've already seen the ideas laid down in this book brought to life more vividly in the years since its release, It didn't have the impact it would've had, but I can see that at the time of its publication it would've been a pretty big deal. Some of the ideas in it are very interesting, the concept of being able to jack into someone elses body, see through their eyes and feel the sensations they're feeling is definately something that I'd like to see in reality, it could do a lot in helping peoples empathy for others.

Second Life

Having had a first little look around the world of second life, the first thing that came to my mind was 'why?'. I found it much like how I could never see the point in sitting playing The Sims video game, getting my character a job and a girlfriend, when I really should be doing these things in real life. Its a very detailed environment visually, which offers lots of possibilities for creating a completely individual character, building a house, making clothes and objects, and again 'why?'. I can see the benefits of an environment like this for social interaction for people with disabilities, but beyond that I can't help but thinking how people must waste a significant portion of their actual lives 'living' their second lives.

Learning to walk

To work out a walk cycle for the Dr. Doom character in my animation, I took two series of photographs of myself walking, one side on and one from behind. This was so that I could see the key moments of movement that occur when walking, so that I could translate them into my characters movements. I wore a green hooded coat during these shots, to be as similar to Dooms cloaked hooded figure as possible.




Then I spent a bit of time walking backwards and forwards trying to time how long it took me to take X no of steps over certain distances, and noting at which point during my steps my body dipped or raised, so I could time my characters walk with this to ensure it had a natural rhythm.

I decided to trace over the images of myelf and modify the length of the coat to make it look like a cloak to use them for the actual walk cycle. I wasn't too concerned that it wasn't going to look exactly like Dr. Doom as I was happy for him to be a bit incognito until his identity's revealed at the end. After getting halfway through creating the walkcycle however, I decided to pull the plug on the idea for two reasons. Firstly, I found I actually didn't like the look of the character, and decided I'd be better off using actual images of Doom from the comic books, as the character simply looked too unlike him. Secondly, the walk wasn't working out quite so well. I'd created the body in seperate sections: a main body, an upper and lower arm section for each arm, an upper and lower section for each leg and seperate feet so they could pivot onto the ball of the foot as the leg came up for the stride. Testing the cycle halfway through its creation, I found strange things were happening, one foot was leaping away from the lower leg and reaching its destination before before the rest of the leg, then snapping back onto it, and the right arm was shortening and lenghthening through its swing, making it look pretty weird. So, for these reasons I decided not to waste anymore time on it, and to go back and have a fresh start with a new character graphic. Below is the half completed walk cycle I abandoned.

Building the city

For the architecture in the street of my animation I headed out into the city with my camera and took photos of various buildings, so that I could pick between various elements of them and combine them to make my own building. I wanted the Marvel building itself to have an archaic quality about it, to emphasise the old way of doing things, and to contrast with the modern towerblocks beside it. I found an archway in Leeds uni that I really liked as the main door to the Marvel building.















I took the above pic into illustrator and turned it into a graphic using the pen tool, then added it into my building front.

























I wanted to have glowing lamposts in the street as it's supposed to be night time. Rather than tracing out one from a photograph I made my lampost using illustrators 3D tools. I was really impressed how you can make a 3D graphic from a single line draming using the revolve effect.

























I created the main post and the head of the lamp seperately so I'd be able to lay the glowing light between them. I'm really pleased with the final result, and the lamposts add a nice bit of atmosphere to the street.



As for the buildings themselves, I've now realised I went about their creation in a rather backwards fashion. I transformed some rectangles into 3D objects using the extrude and bevel effect, and then created graphics for the building fronts. I created arched church style windows for the marvel building to keep with the ancient look I wanted, and they juxtapose nicely with the billboard style Marvel sign mounted on the top of the building. I then used the map art option to add them to the faces of the 3D towers. Afterwards it became clear to me it would have been much simpler, and would have looked slightly better, to just use the extrude and bevel effect on the building front graphics I'd made. Still, learning the long way round's better than not learning at all.

Animation Brief

For the animation module is was initially drawn to the Marvel brief, as I felt it offered a lot of interesting possibilities. I was slightly unsure of the limitations of having to use their pre-existing elements for the animation, but I had an idea pretty much straight away so I decided to go with it. My initial idea was to be aimed at a younger age group, using characters present in recent successful film adaptations of Marvel comics, namely X-Men, Fantastic Four, Spiderman, The Hulk and Ironman. My idea was influenced by the intro to the original X-men animated cartoon.

It was to involve key major characters bursting from the paper pages of comic books, e.g. Wolverine slashing out of the page, Spiderman swinging through the page, and to then have them all racing towards a point from different directions, converging at the same time as in the end to the X-men cartoon intro. Here's said intro, just because its a great start to a classic cartoon.




Though I really liked this idea, and spent a lot of time searching for suitable images from various archived sources of Marvel comics, I decided not to use the idea, as I felt it wasn't going to turn out as I wanted due to the difficulties of finding and modifying the images I'd need. So after going back to the drawing board and kicking around a few ideas, I settled on something completely different. The idea I decided to use involves a very minimal use of character, with the identity of the character (Dr. Doom) only being made absolutely clear at the end. This idea is aimed more at a slightly older audience, people who have been collectors of comics for years, who either have vast collections of old comics and like to keep them in immaculate condition and are reluctant to read them and/or have missed certain issues of their favourite comics at some point in the past. The idea is to show how the vast back catalogue of comics produced by marvel is now easily available in one place online.

Style-wise I'd had the idea of everything being very greyscale until the end when the shot moves out to reveal the computer screen, at which point it would transition to colour. I was interested in having the look of old, uncoloured comic books for the first section as its supposed to represent the old way of doing things. I toyed with the idea of having everything purely black and white with single touches of colour in a Sin City style, but in the end I decided to stick mainly within shades of grey and use colour for a few important elements, such as Doom himself and the Marvel logo. Here's the animatic for my animation:

I've just noticed the sound is out of sync on here, it runs fine on the original QT movie i made, so I can only assume its something to do with bloggers video hosting.

Digital Cultures

I've been looking into RFID tags, mainly their current and possible commercial uses rather than any artistic ones. Pretty crazy stuff going on with these really, the most extreme being the insertion of the passive variety (no internal power source) into the human body for reasons including security and, bizarly, VIP nightclub entry. RFID tags are also generating a degree of concern in some quaters, and rightly so. Though transmission ranges for the currently available passive tags aren't sufficiently large enough, when they do inevitably become further reaching then some quite worrying possibilities are opened up. I'm specifying passive tags as this particular type is able to be printed in a sticker, or a label in clothing. Essentially what this means is if you have a product with one of these tags in then your movements can be tracked anywhere within transmission range of the tag reader.

At the moment they're not quite so common, but with a few major retailers investing in them, and the cost of their production coming down, they're set to replace barcodes in the near future.

Shooting and Cutting

Filming ran fairly smoothly, with the exception of rain stopping play on the outside shots. This meant we had to split the shoot over 2 days, leading to possible issues with continuity. We avoided any inconsistencies by watching back the scenes from the previous days shoot immediately before filming to ensure the clothes being worn, the way the bag was being held, positions of elements in the background etc. were accurate. As predicted, several additional shots were used, while sticking to the basic flow of the storyboard.

Having captured the footage and made a rough edit, we found we were a minute over the briefs 2 minute limit. Being unable to trim enough from the clips to meet the limit, and not wanting to loose any shots, we elected to speed up some of the shots which didn't contain essential action to reduce the overall running time. Although this brought us within the time constraint, the visual effect of cutting from regular speed to 400% speed wasn't pleasing. To explain the change between speeds, and make the effect less sudden, we overlaid graphics of video controls over the footage to pause and fast forward the action. We also added a video filter to the speeded up sections to give it a slightly distorted quality.This eased these sections into the rest of the film in a much smoother fashion. The overall effect on the video is not detrimental, and in fact adds an interesting visual element.

How to... create a how to animatic.

This is the first animatic for our 'How to..... empty a bin' instructional video. My partner Katherine did all the hand drawing of the storyboard, as her technical abilities in this area are stronger than mine. We then scanned the images, and I added colour to the frames in photoshop before taking them into Final Cut and adding sound effects to create the animatic. Overall I think it gives a fairly decent feel for the flow of how the final video should look. I'm pretty sure we'll end up needing a few additional shots when we start filming, or find some shots will have to be modified to fit with the physical restraints of the final filming location, but as an overall guide it works well. None of the shots should present too much of an issue when filming, there is very little to be shot outside so the elements and natural light aren't going to present a problem. We just need to achieve the correct lighting in a dingy kitchen. The animatic runs to 1 minute 13 seconds, which gives us plenty of room to add additional material if needs be, without running over the 2 minute limit.

First lil project for DDM. It's pretty rubbish having to do stuff about yourself, unless you're some kind of self-involved narcissist, so... actually I really enjoyed this brief cos I'm great and really, really interesting.