Thursday, November 29, 2012

Demo Reel

I updated my demo reel!--



Demo Reel 2012 from Wesley Cathon on Vimeo.

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...

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Fionn Mac Cumhaill

Hey there!

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.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Finished Intro with Test Music

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!!

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Siskin Window

This is a short animation I've been working on for about two weeks-


Siskin Window from Wesley Cathon on Vimeo.

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!!

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Finished Explorer Logo!


Explorer Logo from Wesley Cathon on Vimeo.

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!