Minute Vids Evaluation

The One Minute brief. I'd say this is the brief I've enjoyed the most so far. Video's always been my strongest interest, and after doing several briefs that were less relevant to what I want to do, I was losing interest in general, and this brief got me going again. It was great working on something like this with Szymon and Rob. Being able to work with people you get on with, who have a desire to do something good, and who have complimentary skills is a treat. We worked well together, it was good having several projects on the go between the group, being able to ask for opinions and share knowledge, and it kept things fresher than just concentrating the one collaborative effort. The idea for our one minute film Slug Sumo stemmed from an old idea I'd had knocking around about a shady underground insect racing circuit, that evolved during our idea generating discussions into the final video. I took care of storyboarding out the film, but we didn't make an animatic as the full script for the commentary hadn't been finalised, so we didn't know exactly where we'd be cutting between shots. With this being the case we shot more footage of each shot than we'd need, in order to have flexibility when editing to the audio.

I took care of the main part of the filming, and I gotta say, I'm pretty pleased with the footage I got. I'd wanted to work on depth of field, and got a nice shallow depth of field on a few shots by opening the aperture wide and using the ND filters to stop the shots being over exposed. Szymon took care of secondary camera work, and Rob took care of lighting. The lighting was a little tricky, as the red heads were a bit too powerful for the small space we were working in, but using diffusers helped bring the levels down a bit. We didn't have any major props or sets to worry about, just the time old issue of working with animals (slugs). Rob took care of recording the audio for the commentary, and Szymon worked the audio editing, while I provided the faux cockney voice. The actual editing of the footage was done together as a group, everybody had a bit of input and made adjustments until it flowed properly in the 60 seconds.

I think our individual efforts all benefited from each others feedback and second opinions. It's a good thing having people with different approaches and ideas around, it can help stop you from getting in a rut or getting too caught up in your own idea.
My film is a misleading build up to an unexpected conclusion. It's mainly comprised of close up shots of two men's faces. Originally there was going to be audio of the mens internal monologues, but this was substituted for the sounds of skipping and a punchbag being hit. Both were intended to give the impression of the men preparing to fight each other in a boxing match. The shot then reveals them sitting in a cardboard box, then riding down a flight of stairs, completely changing from the expected course of events. I'd like to improve on the final two shots, I think they could be refined, and the final sound could be improved on. Was fairly pleased with the lighting on the close ups on this though.

All in all, a really good project, I'm looking forward to concentrating on working with video in the second year.

Complementary Areas

There are quite a few areas of video practice that are complementary to my other areas of interest. Outside of video my main area of interest is animation, and there's a whole lot of stuff that's equally useful in both. Lighting is an area that is incredibly important in video work, and the same is true for animation. Whether you're physically lighting stop motion animation as you would a video shoot, or creating virtual lighting set ups in maya or AE, the same fundamentals and principles apply. I also have an interest in photography, and naturally lighting well is essential to get the right results. Lighting in general is an area I intend to learn a lot more about, as it makes such a massive effect on the look and mood of whatever you're working on.

Storyboarding and idea development process for video is also exactly the same as the process I use for planning out animation, albeit without the character development. Storyboarding is essential for both video and animation to ensure you know how shots in a scene are going to flow together, and so you know exactly how you want things to look when you actually shoot/compose a scene.

The general level of organisation and planning needed to sucessfully shoot a scene in a video can and should be applied to all other areas of work. The organisation of equipment, people, locations etc and the planning of lighting set-ups, camera tests, shooting schedules etc are really important to a good outcome, and spending that ammount of time preparing for any kind of work will help acheive a better end result.

Colour Grading

Colour grading. Oh what fun. Now, colour grading is definately something I should've been doing on previous videos I've worked on, but this is the first time I've actually gotten down to it. Having footage shot on two different days inevitably meant the white balance and exposures of the footage would be different. I've got to say, the first days footage was pretty much perfect, but this just highlighted how much worse the second days was. The shots had a yellow tint and were a little on the dull side, so they had to be adjusted to match up with the day 1 footy. This meant playing around with the levels in the colour correction setting on AE until the cootage matched up more closely. Fun fun fun. But necessary.

One Minutes

Right, it's about time I put something up about the progress of the second part of the video module. Exciting brief this one, working in a team of 3 (myself, Rob and Szymon) making a 1 minute film. Started this one out spending a lot of time watching the winners and entries for various minute film festivals from the last few years (well, as much time as you can spend watching 60 second films). Standards varied considerably, there were several on The One Minutes that were really quite poor. Nearly everything on the filminute site was really good though, and it showed the variety of ways you can make something really interesting and engaging in just a minute. As we were all quite into this brief, we decided to make several films, making one each on a more individual basis, with input and help from each other as it was needed, and to make one film as a proper collaborative team effort. After getting together a few times, in various states of sobriety, we came up with a pretty big selection of ideas to work from, in terms of both content and style. Collectively we worked on a documentary (mockumentary really) about the new blood sport of slug sumo. My individual effort is a misleading, anti-climatic drama.

We made a lot of effort on this one to ensure the production quality was high, getting the lighting, white balance, exposure, focus etc as dead on as possible. The things that could have really done with improving on mine and Katherine's video for the first part of this module were the white balance being a bit off and the focus being a bit soft, so I was keen to try to improve on those areas for this part.

My ideas went through several different stages of evolution before coming to their final versions. Steven D. Katz, in his book Film Directing Shot By Shot, writes 'As I understand it, the imagination does not guide the hand, but is led by the hand when we have forgotten ourselves in the application of some craft. Once each stage of invention is committed to some substantial form, it is like a mirror revealing the imagination to itself. Suddenly, things we did not see before become clear, or new possibilities emerge, and there is new material to work with.' This is probably the truest statement I've come across personally, in terms of getting an initial idea to fruition. More often than not, my ideas remain as just that, ideas. The times I do actually get pencil to paper, ideas usually open up in completely different ways to how I first saw them, and develop into something much better than the original thought. Same goes for when you're not sure where somethings going to go after a certain point, just get it down in some form, and a solution is that much closer. Going off on one a bit there, but it's just something I'm really realising the importance of, and I'm going to try to stick to it and hopefully generally be more productive, rather than having ideas knocking around without anything to actually show for them. Deep lesson right there.

Second Life Gym Evaluation.

Our idea was to create a workout space, which would directly appeal to our target audience - people that use SL. It seemed pointless to do something that, though good in the real world wouldn't appeal to the people that use it (The government department responsible for attempting to use second life to communicate to pensioners and indeed much of the computer literate public is deluded).
So with this in mind we have worked on exercises that are important and accessible to people prone to spending many hours at a computer screen. You don't need equipment for any of the exercises in our zone, and many of them can be done without even leaving your chair.
We built the space to appear professional yet welcoming. It's strange how difficult it is to ignore conventional rules of architecture - such as gravity. We had several ideas for the space - such as floating islands held aloft by birds and giant spheres with their own gravity. Interesting as it would have been to try these ideas out, they were not suitable for the client and target audience - what any public service like this needs to be is simple, clear and accessible. We hope we've achieved this, we've tried to make navigation and immersion as intuitive and clear as possible (with large signs, easily identifiable entrances and easy to use assets.)
The project could carry on or a long time - we outlined many ideas in our presentation - live workout events, dietary advice, menus, timed reminders, more exercises, forums. We are all really excited about the film project though and are eager to finalise this, and without some serious networking and government permissions, there seems little reason in pushing this any further. it's in it's infancy, but it's got legs.
We work well in a group. We all pulled our weight in and out of the studio, with different skills and expertise brought to the group. So no complaints.

I think we all learnt a bit, even about other programs such as photoshop/illustrator/avimator. There's some coding in there too.

Tom, Rob, Szymon.

SLurl

Rotoscoping

When I was learning about rotoscoping I found these videos very useful in explaining the uses of the technique. It pretty much gives you the basics of the process and how it can be used, but it's a good starting point, and the guy narrates it all fairly clearly, with one of the less annoying american accents i've come across, so that's a bonus.

Science of Sleep

I'd find it really hard to say who I liked better when it comes to Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, but I think if it really came down to it I'd have to give it to Gondry. Science of Sleep is a great example of his work. It's a really interesting and engaging film, switching between english, french and spanish. It is interspersed with sections of animation which add to the surreal dream feel. Imaginative, endearing and funny, it's a good place to start with Gondrys work.

Motion Control

This is a really good video to help understand motion control and it's many applications. I came aross this while trying to learn more about motion control, and it's a really thorough lowdown of the equipment they use and the different uses for it. I didn't realise it was used for so many different things. It definately helped me realise how lot of shots in various films and videos had been made. Makes you really want to get your hands on one of those milo rigs, they look incredible. It's a pretty long vid, the whole thing I originally watched on google video doesn't appear to be there anymore, but heres the first part on youtube:

The Pharcyde - Drop

Another gem from 'The Work of Director Spike Jonze' is the video for The Pharcyde song Drop. Pure Jonze goodness this, demonstrating just how inventive he is. In the whole video, the fotage is played through in reverse. The boys from the Pharcyde had to learn to lip synch all of the lyrics backwards, so it wold appear they mere singing normally when it was reversed. It must've been real hard work to get that together, then combine in with walking backwards bumping into three other people. Top notch choreography. Got to love this video, it loks amazing and works so well, all coming from what is essentially a pretty simple idea.

AE Rotoscoping Round 2

I had a go at refining the masking technique I used to make my buddy Jake skate along after himself in the style of the DVS echo ads. Havin only about three tripod shots without action in the background, I ended up using one of myself. Pretty self-indulgent I know. But I am great. So, this clip turned out to be a better one to use, and I got my mask a lot tighter, so I managed to fit a lot more copies on, and milked it out with slo-mo. Could definately be tightened up and improved, but it's still progress from my first attempt, and it's getting me more used to after effects. Oh yeah, the quality is LOW.


Echo from Tom Thiel on Vimeo.

How They Get There

Goddam I love Spike Jonze. This short was on his 'The Work of Director...' dvd, and is a great example of taking a simple little idea and making something really nice from it. Providing you've got a bit of your budget set aside for blowing cars up. This film start of seeming like a nice, pretty low budget affair, and then BAM, it just changes on you into some exploding, fireballing flipping car hollywood action moment. Spike always manages to do something a bit different, and this is just a little nugget of what he's good at.

Softlightes - Heart Made of Sound

Lovely stop motion video for the Softlightes song Heart Made of Sound. i've noticed over the past few years that it's been becoming quite popular to have song lyrics appearing in text in music videos in one way or another. This video pushes that to the limit, the whole thing being lyrics from the song appearing in a variety of imaginative stop motion animated typography. I like this video for the sheer ammount of different mediums they've come up with for the typography and how they make them move. Some of them rattle by so fast that it's hard to appreciate what they are, until you've watched the video through a couple of times and maybe paused it in a few key places. A couple of favourites ate the word made of ice cubes melting in the sun, and the plastic army men in a baking tray in the oven that appear to melt (it seems they replaced the figures with little blobs of paint in the same colour to make it look like they were melting). The video flows along nicely with the feel of the song, and draws attention to what the singer's on about (who sounds like he's been listening to a little to much Connor Oberst).


Softlightes - Heart Made Of Sound from Modular People on Vimeo.

How To Cheat In Flash

Got a copy of this book and it's actually amazing. Really wish I'd come across this book before doing either of the flash briefs. I've sat and gone the whole way through it, which is unusual for me for this kind of book. It's filled with so much useful stuff, every page has some new way of doing things, in an applied practical sense, that leave you either thinking 'right, why didn't I think of doing that' or just knowing that Chris Georgenes is the boy when it comes to Flash. Excellent book, if you want to get better with flash, get this.

First complete walk cycle

When we were doing the 2d animation brief, one of the things I attempted to do, but failed in, was create a walk cycle for my doom character. I spend an age getting about halfway through, and then finding that it was a total mess,nothing was moving as i'd expected it to, and loads of weird stuff that I couldn't figure out was happening. Having now watched and read several tutorials relating to character animation, I went back and had another go at creating a walk cycle with the graphics i'd previosly created. I now know loads of fundamenal mistakes I made when making my first attempt, such as how to group things properly and moving the translation point in the first frame before creating the end keyframe (which copletely explained why my characters foot was leaping out in front the first time round). So here it is, an actual working walkcycle. It could do with a lot of refinement, I think the strides could do with being a bit longer as the legs look a bit like they're shuffling/sliding along while the arms are taking quite long swings. Lots of other thing that could be done to improve on it, but for now i'm happy bits of the anatomy aren't flying all over the place.

The Daddy of Flash Tutorials

I'd been considering buying this guys book, How to Cheat in Flash CS3, as it seemed to be highly recommended and to deal with more practical, applied uses of flash, rather than being yet another book explaining how to tween a square from one side of the stage to the other. I'm definately gonna hook it up after watching this video tutorial. It's the absolute boss of character animation tutorials I've come across, covering loads of techniques and genius little tips. It's really good seeing techniques applied in a practical manner, and the results that can be acheived through using them. The quality of the video isn't the highest, so it can be a little hard to see what he's doing on the timeline etc, but if you already have a basic idea of things it's no problem. Learnt a lot from this one.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/adv_char_anima.html

More Flash Tutorials

There are a several good tutorials for creating a character and assembling it functionally on http://animation.about.com/. There are a few parts of this guys methods for doing things that are a bit backwards, but between these text and picture guides and the previous video tutorial, you get a pretty good overview of how to assemble things in order to be able to animate them properly.

Creating a character:

http://animation.about.com/od/flashanimationtutorials/ss/flashlesson5.htm

Nesting Symbols:

http://animation.about.com/library/blflashless5step10exp.htm

Animating a character:

http://animation.about.com/od/flashanimationtutorials/ss/flash_less7_4.htm

Flash Tutorial

I've been trying to up my knowledge on flash, as I'm still at a very basic level, and animation is one of the areas im most interested in. I've been working through the Adobe Classroom in a Book and the For Dummies guide (and my, what scintilating reading they are), and they've been kinda useful for picking a few things up here and there. I've been particularly interested in how to group sections of a character to animate them through a full range of movement, and I came across this lil tutorial on youtube.



This 6 minute vid is so much more useful and to the point than trawling through those fascinating tomes, definately put me in the right direction. Where would we be without youtube and people bored enough to sit down and make video tutorials?

Maya Evaluation

3D animation. I may have finally come round. I started this brief having no interest in creating animation in 3D, and a fairly strong dislike of watching 3D animation in general. Initially I completely hated Maya, it just seemed like a total nightmare, a thousand hidden menus, loads of concepts I hadn't come across before, and a pretty steep learning curve. I really thought I would never make it anywhere with this project. After struggling to come up with an idea for the animation, I finally just knocked out an idea in a couple of minutes, and amazingly it ended up working out pretty well for me. My character, a snowman, turned out to be really easy to manipulate and animate. I initially chose a snowman as I had no confidence in my modeling skills, and it would be easy to assemble from a few spheres and cylinders. Once it was parented together and had deformers in, the range of motion I could get from it was surprising. My first idea was the snowman meeting a hot waterbottle, falling asleep with it and waking up as just a pair of eyes and a top hat in a melted pool of water. The idea I actually ran with involved the snowman starting without a nose, then discovering a carrot and sticking it on his face as a nose. Following a thoughtful pause, he was going to remove it from his face and place it in a phallic position, and end with a sly wink and a Fonze-esque 'eeyyyy!'. Timewise, with the 30 second maximum length, I found I couldn't achieve this without it all feeling too rushed, so I cut it at just placing the carrot on the face and smiling. The snowman has quite an emotional rollercoaster in his 26 seconds of existence, beginning looking forlornly around, before being startled by the sight of an unfamiliar object on the ground. After bounding over to it and picking it up, he scrutinizes it before before reeling back in surprise at the realisation of what he has in his hand. Finally he cracks a happy little smile at being complete with his new nose.

The graph editor was one of the hardest parts to get to grips with. Making the snowman look like he had weight when he impacted on the bounce was quite tricky. There are some parts where the movement could definately do with smoothing out more, particularly after he's picked the carrot up and is waving it around in front of his face.

Lighting wise I tried seting up 3 point lighting, but it didn't really look that great, it wasn't producing enough shadow. In the end I settled on using a single spotlight, which created a nice sun rising, early morning sort of look.

Rendering ended up presenting a few unexpected problems. I foolishly decided to render out in 720HD as it looked so good, but it took an absolute eternity. After spending an age rendering out a section, I found the texture on the tree trunks was moving around as the snowman did. They'd somehow been parented to the snowman at some point, so after correcting that I had to render it out again. As it was all taking so long, I left a long section rendering overnight. Coming in the next day I'd made the schoolboy error of rendering through the wrong camera, so all you could see was trees. So I sacked off the HD nonsense, and quickly rendered it out in 640x480.

I had wanted to add sound to the animation, but I didn't want to use audio from the internet. I was planning on recording the effects for it, but ran out of time in the end, so I decided to leave it silent instead of just cobbling any old bits of audio onto it.

To sum up, suprisingly, this has actually been the project I've been most pleased with. I've pretty much hated everything I've produced so far, but I'm almost kinda happy with this one simply because at the start of the project I felt like I'd never get anywhere with it. There's a lot of refinement that could be done to improve it, but it stands up as a fairly complete piece as it is. So, the good thing is I think I'll continue using Maya, and considering I'd have sworn blind I'd never touch it again at the start, that's a pretty big deal. Im less interested in using it for character animation, but creating assets to composite into video or flatten into flash is pretty appealing, I can see a lot of potential there.

Maya brief. Done.

Good and Bad Animations

The first animation I'm going to look at is Bernard the polar bear. Now, I've been unfortunate to come across this 'character' on TV a couple of times before, and couldn't have been much less impressed. This is the exact kind of aesthetic that in general puts me off 3d animations, the overly smooth look to the characters. Combined with this that there is something about the characters that is totally unappealing, the way they move, their facial features and expressions. It's not even saved by interesting or amusing storylines. Poor show Bernard.



An animation I like is Robert Crumb is in the Woods. I like the aesthetic of this piece a lot, nice combination of hand drawn elements and bitmap looking graphics, and the flat 2d depth look, which I'm really into at the moment. Short and pretty random story this, but it's enjoyable to watch.


Robert Crumb is in the Woods from joseph Pelling on Vimeo.

Fleischer Animation Studios

Max Fleischer was an early pioneer of animated cartoons. He invented and patented the rotoscope, a technique for creating realistic movement in animations by tracing over images of live film projected onto a frosted glass panel, frame by frame. This method is carried out by using computers nowadays, but the basic principle remains the same. Fleischer was also the first to synchronise sound with animation. Fleischer Studios (formally Out of the Inkwell Films), set up with his brother Dave Fleischer, produced many well known classics, such as Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor, and the Superman cartoon series.