Light the Good Light

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?

thanks for checking it out!

New Claymation!

Hey there!

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.

Everything Is In Progress Forever

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.

Explorer Test

I've been working on a quick title card animation for Wonder Wonder Post-Production:


Explorer Test from Wesley Cathon on Vimeo.

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!

Milk: The Trials of Todd

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.

Check out Lance's work at http://unioncomics.tumblr.com/!

First Claymation Test!

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!!!

Shooting Today!

Okay. I'm going to animate this beast.

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.

Opening in the Works!

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...

Bad Science

Howdy, yalls!

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.