Here's a quick project I've been working on the last couple of days:
It's not done, but I thought that I'd post up something as it's been a little barren up here that last week or so. All of the objects on screen were painted with watercolor on paper, then sort of isolated in photoshop, and then arranged in aftereffects. In the initial composition, all the objects move from right to left in a linear motion. There was no curving in the camera motion either. The two things working to accomplish a turning point of view are the slight blurring at the edges and a warped lens effect that stretches everything as it nears either side of the frame.
So like I said, it isn't done. I got a little tired of it, but I know I can push it a lot more (or at least more in the couple of days that I still have before it needs to be submitted). I'll have a new, hopefully more fleshed out version of this on Wednesday posted up here.
Also: WWOOOOOOOO no more projects due this semester!! I can do WhAtEvEr I want for the rest of the week while everyone goes crazy over finals. Happy times.
The music was Slag Boom Van Loom's "Poppy Seed (reprise)" which I hoped would be as whimsical as a lot of the work I've done. I've wanted to do this for a while since I started using color a lot more, at least in the animations. I sort of wish that I had higher quality versions of some of those clips. Unfortunately, I didn't have a better export of the first IDAE episode (all that stuff is on my other hard drive), I would have edited some of that in there. But yeah! other than that, I'm pretty excited about it. I mean, it has taken nearly 3 years to compile this stuff...
I know things haven't been too exciting around here for the last week or two. I've been working on a miniature set for an I Dream About the Earth episode. I suppose first off I should let people know that I aim to have claymation be consistently present in the show from now on. Or at least stop motion animation in general. The claymation opening has kind of been the catalyst for that. Anyways, this main set I'm working on is going to be the staging ground for the story of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, a very old Irish legend. The episode is going to be more narrative based, so that should be really fun to do. Here is what I have gotten done so far:
It looks pretty crappy and empty right now, but It's still being worked on a lot haha (the lighting in the studio isn't all that great either). I also haven't gotten the foliage yet. I initially was going to use torn up and stained sponges, but wimped out and just bought some actual model foliage/moss stuff. It'll look better in the long run anyways. I've been trying to base the design of everything off of some really great watercolor-ish looking images I've found:
I've been using this as some basis for the design of the character too, but that is a different story. He's normally portrayed as a bulky, hairy dude, but I liked kind of the innocence of how youthful he looked in these paintings. It's not too direct. I've been doing a lot of different stuff with it (some of the things literally because I'm struggling with the model I've built. That leads me to some thoughts about building clay models in general.
Well, actually, first off I can show you a crappy picture of Fionn and his band of warriors, the Fianna:
The Fianna are all going to be black and white paper cut-outs that move as a single chunk. I may have to make a different version of them that can move around the set, because they are a little big for it. Fionn is an alright size, but the way I built the armature was dumb, so I'm going to have to redo him almost entirely. The wire I used for the skeleton was too thick, even though it felt alright initially. The clay gets too soft when manipulating it, and so when you try to shift the figure in any way, either the wire holds too well and you can't move it without shifting everything all over the place (making really subtle movements impossible in the animation) or the clay simply pushes through and falls right off of the armature. either way, it makes it pretty clear that you need to reeeaaaally consider everything that goes into making one of these.
I've recently been told that the best thing to use for the armature is (surprisingly) pipe cleaners! Imagine that, those goofy things are making a come-back into serious work now. And I can totally see why; they are super easy to manipulate, they are twisted wire so you don't have to worry about them breaking if you bend the joints too much, and they have all that ridiculous fur on them so that the clay will actually cling to the wire! or any other material for that matter, if maybe you wanted to use actual fabric for the clothes. I don't know why that isn't an internationally announced truth of the universe. It's so simple! Anyways, enough of being excited about that.
I've still got a long way to go on this animation. So what I want to do, is complete another episode in between the time it's taking to finish this one. I was thinking, maybe something about blue dwarfs. I could still do claymation for planets and stuff, that wouldn't be difficult at all! And I could use the new intro too. It would be like an ease-in to all the new claymation stuff. So yeah, that's what I'm currently working on, hopefully you guys think it's as fun as I do.
ps. I just finished up my internship with wonder wonder, so I'll have monday and thursday mornings to devote to working on stuff... or sleeping in? YoU dEcIdE!!!1 No really though, gonna be putting more time into these now. At least for as long as the semester goes, I believe we have three more weeks before holiday breaks and whatnot.
Here's an almost done intro! (the music is temporary until I can finish something original):
The only things different are
-no more sunrise in the background
-animated text
-sound & (borrowed) music!!
The white text was all animated with pencil on paper that I just keyed out and brightened. I figured the only thing that could compliment something already so organic was something else that used traditional media.
The music is by Boards of Canada, which was heartbreakingly perfect for the animation. ALAS, what are we, heathens!? Nope, I'm aiming to make this all license friendly. I have a few things I'm working on with a similar aesthetic, so something will fit eventually.
Anyways, I'm working on the claymation for the first re-vamped episode right now. It's turning out to be a lot of work, but based on how this first project turned out, it's definitely worth it.
Thanks for checkin' it out, and have an awesome Saturday dooodz!!
This is something I've been wanting to try for a little while. The concept isn't entirely new or anything; the internet has been stocked full of everlasting gifs for a long time. I think the problem with that idea, however, is that gifs are made for immediate payoff. With something like this, I wanted to glorify a really subtle moment in time. I also wanted to address the idea of how limiting a story can make the world of that story seem enormous. It's something seen a lot in children's books. The stories are told in a very simple manner so that they can be easily understood. In return, our imaginations were free to create the entire rest of the world the way we wanted to make it. It's the same idea of "not seeing the monster makes it scarier" but applied to every part of the project. I've taken away any sense of narrative, but in doing so kind of allowed anyone who sees it to come up with their own situation.
ps. the background painting and music are both mine. YeEeEaAaAaHhHh!!
Alas! Something finally breaks through a wall of completion. Amongst many different projects, I'm a little surprised the one to finish first is the one that has nothing to do with thesis. It took a lot longer than expected because I was honing a few secret, ancient after-effects techniques, a few of which I'm probably going to try and use frequently from now on.
One of these is something a little more familiar to those who work with real cameras: rack focus. That's when you change the focus in-shot to emphasize something in a different plane further or closer to the camera. Here's a good example:
To accomplish this in after effects, first you have to make a solid layer (or I think adjustment layers work fine? I don't know, just keep it a 2d layer). Then you add the "ramp" effect; a ramp is literally the same thing as a gradient in photoshop. Anyways, make it a radial ramp (in the effect options) and set the colors to black and white, black on the inside and white on the outside. Move the center of the ramp to the furthest location you want to be focusing in on. It doesn't matter where it is in the layers.
Now what you've just done is make a map for your focusing. Make sure that you have a camera layer, and apply the "Camera Lens Blur" effect to it. Somewhere in the controls, you can set that ramp layer as the map for the blur (once done, you can make the ramp layer invisible because it is only a map to tell the camera where you want the blur to encompass. It doesn't need to be seen in the composition). Once you've done that, you can play around with/keyframe the blur and focal distance controls to move the focus back and forth from the camera. WEEEEE! Also- for these shots I moved some of the foreground layers on top of the ramp layer so that they wouldn't be affected by the camera blur. It just made it easier to make them stand out more.
The other technique I was messing with (that was a lot easier for me to wrap my head around) was the lighting underneath the trees. All that was, was a series of adjustment layers with random shapes made with the pen tool. Those shapes served as masks for a "Brightness and Contrast" effect that bumped up the brightness of those areas. Feather out those masks and voila! You have some static light rays bouncing off of whatever is on screen! You can mess with this further by making them 3d layers, and pushing them behind certain other layers. This could make it seem like light beams falling through trees, instead of just overlaying highlights. and stuff.
Anyways, enough of that technical junk. This is the first time I've ever made anything like this. It was a lot easier than animating traditionally, but I lost a lot of life in the character. I thought this was okay though, it's really only about 18 seconds. The puppet tool made up for a lot of that. The explorer in the second shot was actually one still image that I was able to bend around and animate from a crouching to standing.
The sound was mostly just random tidbits of public domain clips. The music was taken from an older song I was recording a few months back. FUN FACT: The flute used in the music is called a bansuri flute, which the blog is named after
So yeah. Hopefully the claymation will be done soon. I just need to buckle down and get the music for that finished. Until then, enjoy life! And gezpacho!
The new I Dream About the Earth episode is done and uploaded!
There was a load of green-screen this time, which made everything much more complicated. Especially having to edit down all of the random crap we were saying. I feel like this one started out pretty strong, especially with the blinking noises and the music by Jan Hammer (famous for his work on Miami Vice). Then I started running into a lot of audio trouble, specifically with the mic falling out of place during certain scenes. The framing on some of those shots could have also been a little better.
Initially this episode was going to deal with the relations between light and sound waves. I even have this batch of footage that was taken outside in this awesome dog park, but I didn't use any of it. The only thing left over from that footage was the dog, Manco, sitting in the chair with the tie. There was going to be some talk about the way dogs perceive light and audio, as opposed to humans. So maybe I was aiming a little high for this episode, which is why it took so long to get out. However, I don't regret anything about the episode other than the audio... and maybe the music choice towards the end. I think these short videos work better with a consistent rhythm.
I definitely want to keep pushing these videos to be more clean-cut, and more witty. Less jokes that fall flat haha. I also want more cohesion, as in a sense of place.
I found an entire episode of eyewitness documentaries:
What makes this show so great is that every shot and every little investigation flow into each other, whether through old 90s graphics, or through Martin Sheen's omniscient presence as the narrator. The entire thing builds this fictional place, where you can pull up any bit of information and experience it right in this 3d museum. I mean, it's totally goofy, but that is what totally makes this series.
I don't know how well this concept can mix with being funny, but I'm definitely going to try to give it more a more defining character (not change the character hosting the show, but just explore the tone more). I'm still just kind of reaching out in different directions, hence all of the green screen. If anyone feels compelled to let me know if it's working or not, throw down some phat comments below! Should I focus more on the map room, like I was initially doing?
So, I'm ridiculous and wanted to shoot the animation of the rotating globe over again and try to fix a few of the things I didn't like about the first one. Here it issss:
I'm really tired and have been sitting in front of different projects all day, so I'll go through a bit of the process went I don't feel like my brain is melting out of my mind. I'm sitting in the dark and want to go home and die
-ps. disregard the stock footage at the end, I forgot to clip off the tail end of the composition.
I've been kind of all over the place the past week; there are 3 big projects that I'm trying to get done at the moment. The new episode of I Dream About the Earth is being edited (whenever green-screen bits are used for any project, you can pretty much tack on a few more days of work), I'm getting ready to reanimate the miniature globe set with more attention to the light and consistency of rotation, aaaand there's the paper cut-out animation for wonder wonder that I'm also working on.
So I've been really busy despite it being a little quite up here the past week. It's actually felt a little strange because these are all different mediums and stuff, but they feel very similar- as if they are all sharing some kind of tone or aesthetic or something. I'm totally for this though, the cohesion has pushed me to try and get these things done faster. So, if I can do that, expect a few big posts up here this coming week.
I've got this lighting project that I'm supposed to be doing too (however I'm playing with the idea of turning in the IDAE episode for that seeing as how the subject is light) but if I have time, I was thinking about doing something similar to an old project that I worked on:
I made this video using all public domain footage and music. I was really into the thought of mixing science fiction with opera, for no specific reason I guess haha. I was watching and reading a lot of stuff like "2001: a space odyssey", the comic "2001 nights", and the animated short "Magnetic Rose".
Anyways, I know old projects are as exciting as used socks, but I can't really post up anything yet. Hopefully tomorrow or Tuesday I'll have gotten through one of these beasts.
It's pretty short right now. Well actually the entire thing is probably going to be pretty short because it's just a title card. Anyways, after this shot the explorer is going to step out from the bushes and discover an ancient temple. On top of the temple is going to be a floating "wonder wonder" logo. It's kind of a goofy idea, especially for a post production company that specializes in really tight, glossy commercial work. At least it'll be a cool portfolio-something if they decide to bury it in the depths of their tape archive.
I'm still working on this shot (especially the sun); I'm thinking about adding birds and clouds to the background to make it less static. I might also add extra background to the part on the ground level. So yeah, I don't know what else to say about that. The whole project popped up really quickly, so I thought an easier way to accomplish the animation would be to just key-frame the motion. I want to see what I can do to make it more yoshi's island-esque.
ya know?
Cool Beans! Hopfully this little guy'll be done by the end of the week so that I can keep on working on other stuff. Latuhh dawgs!
Hey guys! Got a special post today; this is a 24 hour comic I finished about 4 years ago (PS READ IN THE ORDER POSTED, NOT AS THEY ARE IN THE SLIDESHOW)
Oct. 4-5 2010, I sat in a basement and sleepily made this alongside his eminence, Lance Orr (who made his own as well). So this is pretty old at this point. The idea of a 24 hour comic is to complete a page an hour for an entire day. Depending on the style, this can be a really grueling experience. There gets to be some pretty funny deterioration in drawing and story. During the course of the story, Lance and I actually came up with this idea of having crossovers occur in each of our comics. His "Super Lobster" character crosses through and we tried to find ways to incorporate each of the other's story into our own. The last few frames in each of our comics were identical. Hopefully I can get up the nerve to try it again sometime sooooooon.
I'm in a bit of a rush so I'll make this quick. Here is the raw animation I finished last night!
I haven't tampered with it too much, I'm going to go through and do some color/light corrections on specific frames. I'm thinking about doing some extra compositing with birds, or maybe some paper cut-out splashes, or traditionally animated text. OR ALLLL OF THEM. I'll write a bit about the process and why it was the most fun/painful thing ever when I get home, but for now, enjoy!
Alright I'm back. At first run through, I was hoping this would be a little smoother. Then I kind of remembered this was my first try at this stuff haha. These things will get better, hopefully. Anyways, as I was talking about in the last entry, this was such a fun environment. It made me want to immediately start writing out some ideas to use the model and characters in the future. Also, just that sort of solitary, total focus was really awesome.
The downside of getting sucked into this process is leaning over a waist-level object and camera for 3+ hours. Towards the end, I was getting a little sick of it (and unfortunately that shows because the whole globe starts to rotate a bit faster) and that's one big rule I learned:
-Always follow through with your process, ye heathen
Another thing I found out was that the camera was automating some of the different things like exposure and white balance. It was really subtle, but enough to make a difference. So another rule I learned:
-Be in control of every aspect of yer dern camera
I think the last big thing I found was from when I would be going along, making up how things were animated on the spot. There were points when I'd think, "man I wish the camera was angled slightly more upward," and then try to ease into that in the next few frames. It really shows; it obstructs the smoothness of the overall motion, again leading to:
-Always follow through with your process, ye heathen
If you find something wrong mid-shoot, just go along and make the best changes you can with the objects you've already designated as "moveable". Or just be better at making those subtle changes. I had to go through and reposition some of the frames in after effects.
Anyways, that's all! I'll post up when I get through some of the additions I mentioned. To Wooork!!!
So far, I've only set it up in the green screen room. We don't have the program I wanted on the laptops yet, unfortunately, so I'm just going to shoot the frames raw and sequence them in after effects. I'm kind of just jumping at this with no instruction, so hopefully good ol' intuition will be enough.
I'm not using the greenscreen room, however, I'm simply using the black curtain that you can pull across the screen as the backdrop. If you've gotten a good look at the model, you'll know there's quite a bit of green all over it, so green screen wouldn't have worked anyways. For anyone unfamiliar with the green screen process, what happens is that when you apply the effect to footage, you tell the program what to recognize as "green". In any program, a specific color has a numerical value to it; when you say to the program, "hey I need this color(number) to be subtracted from the composition, it identifies anything in the frame with that value and gets rid of it. If you're not careful, you may end up subtracting bits and pieces of the thing you are trying to shoot because it has green parts (or the reflection of the green from the floor or the screen is bouncing up onto the subject which is hellishly difficult to control).
Anyways, I'm rambling. some of the things I've run into that may be troubling are:
-the space on the sd cards for the images
-the camera's battery
-keeping track of every object on the mini-set that needs to be moving for every frame.
-life itself
The space on the sd cards may not be as much of a problem because you can change them out without removing the camera from the stand. Still, I imagine keeping as much variability out of this process as possible is a good idea. The Battery on the other hand requires the camera to be shifted around quite a bit, which is death if you need the framing to be consistent for every shot of an animation. this is actually the reason for this post :/ I decided to stop and charge the batteries to avoid this. As for keeping track of everything, I've made a rubbish little chart of all of the objects:
As for life itself, sometimes that shit just sucks. But you gotta be able to dive into doing something you love to do and say, "hey screw that stuff I'm makin' science today."
Anyways, it looks like the batteries are charged now, so wish me luck! I'll post up anything that I finish today, and will probably be in this studio really late. If nothing else, because this is something I've wanted to do since I was little, and I'm already enjoying the atmosphere more than anything else I've accomplished in the last couple of years.
On that note, here is an older demo reel of some of that stuff. If you keep watching, eventually you'll catch some clips of another (more futuristic) miniature set I worked on freshman year, using the same room, and the same black backdrop. Funny how these things come full circle. Enjoy, and thank you guys for following me on this stuff. It really means a whooooole lot :)
UPDATE:
Just finished shooting and this is going to be so cool. Hold on to your potatoes, doctor Jones.
As a follow-up to yesterday's post, I wanted to mention the opening title sequence I'm working on for future "I dream about the earth" episodes. It is going to be a rotating miniature set, with little animated figures and things moving all over it. It ends on a little continent where a little clay guy in a suit is sleeping on a bed, and the title will appear. Here are a few in progress shots of this nonsense:
So hopefully I can do this well. I haven't actually done claymation since I was in middle school. I was also thinking about using this little set to animate other moments in the show. Kind of like how Zoboomafoo did. This whole design is pretty heavily influenced by the old Aardman Animation logo that I used to see a lot when I was a kid:
Anyways that's all! I'll be animating it this weekend, and hopefully (not promising) I'll have it done by next episode. At the same time maybe not... I wanted to have a really awesome opening theme as well. We'll seeeeee...
I feel as if I'm still building the background for anyone reading about my work, so I'll introduce another side of the things I do. Science in general has built up its own sort of aesthetic. This is something that is directly influenced by the way it is introduced to the public. I mean, when we are little we are exposed to science with goofy characters, strange sterile environments, and almost a form of narrative to mask the fact that we are learning. A good number of these things stick with it as we grow up. Through the years of developing different kinds of media, we link whatever sounds or looks "new" (anything from synthesizers to crazy digital graphics) to that idea of exploration and and investigation. Hence why we would describe some kind of new wave electronic music as "spacey". These two things are completely unrelated, but by both being somewhat new and unknown to us, they become one in the same.
Here is a video series I have been working on for a while that tries to both be a part of, and enjoy the fiction of that aesthetic:
Episode 1:
and Episode 2:
I mean it's taking influences from a whole bunch of different places, like trying to capture really genuine moments of Bill Nye the science guy, with a weird, sort of self-aware, dead pan comedy. I almost feel like being goofy is necessary, because we really don't know all of the facts. It's kind of like how a teacher would tell someone to "write what they know", it's also taking into account that we have big gaps of not knowing what we are talking about at all, and using that as material in itself. Ultimately, I would like to get more in depth with the different subjects that are being looked at. I think that the deeper the hole we dig for ourselves, the funnier it will be when we fall on our faces.
So, in short: I'm making this out to be like a bad high-school science report.
At the same time, I wanted to use this as a vessel to reflect all of the things I get excited about when I see old documentaries and things like that. I already mentioned how much I loved the environment that Bill Nye set up. There was another old kid-oriented show I used to watch when I was little called "Eyewitness Documentaries", the opening sequence will stick in my head until I die:
This captures everything I ever wanted to make or be when I was little. I wanted to live inside of this fictional museum, and spend everyday learning random facts. Actually, this still kind of encompasses everything I've been trying to do with this. Almost. Maybe? I don't know, it's still something that is almost coming together by itself.
Another one of those old shows that I loved to watch was Wild America with Marty Stouffer-
I've tried to do this project before, but it always quickly died, or was just too much work for the time:
Now that I've got a whole year of thesis to work with, I decided to finally have fun and make this the way I wanted to. There is something I enjoyed about the length and overall actual investigation of the early versions though. That, and how there were multiple characters and whatnot. I wanted to use this as something that my friends and I could work on. There aren't a lot of times that I can collaborate with my roommates or friends, but this has proven to be pretty damn fun. Hopefully it's something that keeps growing.
The story dealt with these cloaked characters who have the job of raising the sun up in the morning. In this other world, instead of rotating around the planet, the sun simply shrinks down into a miniature form and hovers there until morning. In order to create this change, there are beings that are assigned to conduct the whole proceeding. This is where that idea of music comes in to play. What eventually happens (not animated yet) is that the cloaked guy (named the conductor for future record) raises two giant statues out of the lake. both of them are classical looking figures holding instruments, standing on top of pillars. The conductor motions them to start, and then it was going to be this sequence where he directs the statues, instruments aimed at the miniature sun, to play music, making the sun grow into it's normal size. Eventually the sun shoots up into the sky, ending the animation.
It's a fairly abstract story. I don't know if I did a good job describing it with words. But anyways, this was my own attempt at using sound as sort of an element that made physical changes throughout the story.
The characters really stuck for me. I had been searching for something for a while, and I knew I wanted something kind of strange with an elaborate headdress. I'd say the first big thing I saw that really made me stop and think "wow, that could be a really fun thing to animate" was the cover (strangely not the movie) of 1984 "Amadeus"
That stark silhouette, just kind of radiating energy, hands outstretched, totally blew me away. I'm not even really ashamed at how much influence this single image had. I was more amazed that someone hadn't really tried to give it motion, and develop it further than just some abstract rendition of the live action film.
From here I wanted some more animal influences. I was really into the shape and function of things like moths and bats, which is ironic being that they are natural enemies. I also kind of enjoyed the idea of implementing the hearing abilities of bats.
I mean, we all are familiar with that exaggerated, pronged look. I also had the thought to switch around the way the ears perceive all kinds of wavelengths with the ability to emit sound. Think of that: large fixtures on a creature's head that serve the purpose of a voice, almost like a tuning fork. Thus the design of the conductor came into being. That is also how these creatures would communicate, and control the giant structures: by emitting frequencies with the prongs on their heads. I reminds me of the scene in "Phantasm" where one of the characters discovers a portal to another dimension made by two vibrating nodes. He tries to close it by placing his hands on the top of them.
This stops them from vibrating, just like a tuning fork. Anyways, those are some of the thoughts behind this specific animation. There's plenty more nerdy back-story and other artwork I've made based in this world, but I'll save that for later. King K. Cool, too Kool for school, Baduuulioooo. Yeah. Thanks for reading!
I've always been interested in the use of music as a sort of force, like something that is used as a physical thing as much as a soundtrack. It's something that has been done before. If you've ever played any of the later Zelda games, you know what I'm talking about. The music transcends being some external influence in the story and becomes a factor that can change things within the story. And that leaves a lot open, because you can create a whole science behind how the whole "magic of sound" works. Since there are no rules around it, you can make music do pretty much anything. If you need to make rain, play a tune:
And you could open this whole idea up a bit, and say, "well musicals in general do the same thing." And they do, I mean there are just intervals of time where everyone falls under some goofy spell and can only interact by singing.
Another big moment that pushed me into this direction was watching the 1984 film, "Dune". There is a major sort of science that is used in the story, where the Atreides family finds that thoughts can take shape as certain sounds. Later on, this science becomes the turning point of the big war. A whole system of technology and weaponry is built to use this:
Eventually, Paul pretty much becomes the dovahkin (no doubt skyrim took some influence from this) and can change the world around him simply by yelling out cool sounding words.
So these are just a few things that have poked at using sound in new ways. There are countless other examples of sound as something a bit more tangible. I mean, you could even reach all the way back to the idea of musical leitmotifs in things like "Peter and the Wolf", where all the characters are represented by specific instruments.
In the next day or two, I'll post up some of my own work that has been influenced by these ideas, along with some of the other ideas I had about character design and settings and stuff. Till then, hopefully this was kind of interesting at least.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Hey there! This is a blog, so I'll be bloggin' here from now on. I assume that's how it works.
