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?

Full Moon Safari

Came across this on the first onedotzero dvd Anna very helpfully put me onto, it's a short flash animation directed by Ben Hibon, the creative director of unit9. This won the best flash animation award at the OFFF festival in 2002. It's really stylised, all made in red, black and white. The story is pretty inconsequntial, but the execution is extremely slick, I didn't realise you could animate things so smoothly in flash, and I don't know how the 3d perspective effect was created on the road and street lights at the beginning. It doesn't really seem to say anything, seems more like a vehicle to show off how well and stylishly Hibon can animate. But to be fair, he can. And I like it.

http://www.unit9.com/videos/fullmoonsafari/view_movie_flash.htm

Mr Scruffs visuals

Went to see Mr Scruff a few days ago, proper amazing night. One of the coolest things about it were the two massive screens either side of the decks, playing animations of his dodgy little characters. With him being high up and hidden away behind his decks it gave a good visual focus, kind of like what I mentioned in my post about his honeydew video. It was all pretty simple stuff, there was a sketchy looking speaker that pulsed in time with the bass through some parts, and all the rest of the stuff was mainly images being scaled, rotated and moved around the screen, but it was all effective nonetheless.

Squirrel Nut Zippers - The Ghost Of Stephen Foster

Brilliant animation for the Squirrel Nut Zippers song The Ghost Of Stephen Foster. This won Best Animated Music Video at the 1999 Vancouver Animation Festival. Really nicely done, in the style of old Fleischer animations like Betty Boop, and imaginatively set to the lyrics and music of the song.

Saves The Day - At Your Funeral

This video was made in 2001 by Maureen Egan and Matthew Barry for the Saves The Day song At Your Funeral. They made this video using motion control. To summarise it in brief, motion control involves having a camera set to run through an exact motion over a set period of time. This motion can then be repeated over and over, meaning different things can be fimed with the same shot then composited together. That's how the effect of having one continuous rotational shot, inspite of having the elements of the room change, is created. Very similar to the effect in The All-Seeing Eye installation, but created in a completely different way. The singer who stays constantly in the centre of the shot would have been filmed against a green screen and then composited into the footage. It all produces a pretty interesting end result, showing the life of a man from birth to death within the walls of his home, then the start of the cycle anew at the end. Lovely.

The All-Seeing Eye

The All-Seeing Eye (The Hardcore Techno Version) was an installation by Pierre Bismuth and Michel Gondry at the BFI Southbank Gallery that I saw late last year. Basically, a projector hanging from the ceiling continually rotated through 360 degrees in a rectangular room with white walls. The projection was of four walls of a room, each projected onto a wall of the space, giving the impression that you're in the room, so i guess they set the space up so the wall sizes were in proportion to those in the footage. There were cushions in the middle to sit on, and you had to keep spinning round to follow the film around the room. As it progresses you gradually start to notice things going missing from the room, a chair, some books and so on until eventually whole kitchen units are going missing. It's almost imperceptible to start with, leaving you feeling unsure if something really was there in the first place. The whole set up is pretty hard to explain in a few lines of text. The 'special effects' are actually being done in real time, the room is actually a scale model, and as the camera they're filming with is rotating they lift out various parts of the furniture until its just a blank room. There's a TV in the room with a section from Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (directed by Gondry) where Jim Carrey is finding out about having memories removed playing throughout the whole film, tying in with the pieces dissapearing out of the room. All in all it was an extremely interesting and enjoyable experience, you have a level of involvement as you have to keep following the film around the room instead of sitting passively watching a screen. I love the fact that the objects dissapearing from the room isn't a post production effect. Well worth seeing if it's ever on somewhere again.

Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free

http://www.chaletpointu.com/clips/zombie.html

Awesome stop motion remake of John Carpenter's 'The Thing' using GI Joe figures, made by Simon Gesrel and Xavier Ehretsmann as a music vid for french band Zombie Zombie. The Thing is a great film, and this is such a good remake. I really like the sets, using glue sticks for the ice samples was a particular favourite.

AE Rotoscoping

The tutorial turned out to be really useful, I just followed it through step by step without too much hassle. I used some old footage of my buddy Jake skating one of the grimy spots in my hometown, as it's one of the only shots I've got filmed from a tripod that hasn't got too much going on in the background. The hammers in the funfair in the top left are swinging in the footage, so I tried to get them at a point where it looked natural for them to be still for the background shot. The effect's not as good as it could be, due to the fact that my mask isn't very tight and the movement slows down in the middle of the screen, meaning I only managed to get 3 Jakes on at any one time. From doing this I've realised you'd really have to plan the shots you were taking if you were intending on using this effect. Although it doesn't look too hot, I've definately learnt a fair bit about AE through messing around with this.


AE Rotoscoping Trial from Tom Thiel on Vimeo.

Rotoscoping in AE Tutorial

I've been getting interested in learning how to use After Effects lately, and I've found a tutorial on rotoscoping in AE that seems pretty straightforward and easy to follow, so I going to have a crack at reproducing the echo effect from the DVS advert I previously wrote about.

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/oconnell_pete/roto/video.php