Personal and Professional Development

I thought I'd start off my personal and professional development posts with something relevant to why I chose to do the course. My interest in skateboarding and watching and making skate videos was what brought me to start studying digital media, and skate films continue to be an interest and an influence of mine. Editing a skate video can be compared to editing a music video in many ways, with sections usually being set to a song of around 3 minutes in length and with the visuals being linked to elements of the song, eg tricks being landed on the beats. Often as not though, the sections between the actual skateboarding contain the most interesting video/post production work, and this is what I'm going to look at now. Arguably the biggest skate video released in 2008 was 'Fully Flared', directed by Ty Evans, Spike Jonze and Cory Weincheque, which really raised the bar in every aspect: skating, filming and editing. One of my favourite sections of this video is the '6 square' section, in which the screen is divided into 6 boxes, each containing a different skater, in different locations such as London, Paris and Barcelona. We see them all apparently interacting with each other between their different boxes and geographic locations, throwing a pack of cigarettes between Paris and London, passing a football, and actually jumping from one box into another. Inbetween these parts the action in the 6 boxes synchronises with all the skaters peforming the same tricks shot from the same angles at the same moment. The squares containing the action rotate and move like cubes at the points where cuts are made between shots. The whole idea is very interesting, it's well thought out and executed, you clearly have to plan things very carefully to acheive the interactions between the squares, and I like the playfulness of the whole section.

'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.