Lectures

Margarita Higgenbottom
I enjoyed what seemed like an extreme obsession for detail for an artist who was himself obsessed with people watching african american women. She pointed out a few examples that showed that for the time that the paintings were he was ahead of his time as far as racial equality. However he took it to another level with the woman's large buttocks on the beach. I felt it was a bit fantastical and a fetished look at african american women as an treasure.

Polly applebaum
I'll state how i feel in one sentence. She was a great conceptualist with amateur technical skills. Good concept can only take you too far until it just seems as though you are good at finding the concepts that allow for less effort. It's is kind of a pet peeve of mine to see what i call the "amateur aesthetic" but i generally don't speak out about it for there are people that like it. Just not me.

check 11/30

all footage is edited and composited into after effects and levels adjusted. i've added the dragon fly to it's scene and am currently in the process of adding particle elements shedding from andrew's body in his running shots. It is not fully complete and yes i am behind schedule. I don't exactly have a choice to set back and reexamine anything so i'm just going to keep working till the end. It will be done on time.

Recap 11/23

still a little short of the mark as the woods clearing scene isn't fully complete although it's close. I just need to add the other wolves fading into the shot and it's complete. second i have my footage shot of all the live action sequences i just have not digitized them. Other than that i'm on target. I have the woods running scene completely finished and I added a close up of the run. My calendar still isn't changing as i don't have much to catch up on and i'm really only held back from getting a camera to digitize footage with and that will be completed today.

update thurs. 11/18

ok so the final scene is nearly done as i had intended yet i missed my mark for the woods running scene. I had intended on having it completed with my run cycle included but i'm having trouble compositing my wolf run cycle. It won't export correctly from toon boom to use as a composite so i tried exporting as a .mov yet it has a white background. I'm going to keep working on it. other than that the scene is redrawn high quality and animated correctly ready for the run cycle with a still plant in it's place.

i hope to also add a close up of the dog running with the new woods showing as a background. i experimented with the texture of my open woods scene to try and see if it worked as well on the run scene. This will take a bit longer to sort some things out but i don't believe i must change my calendar as of yet. i will still be filming this weekend and beginning to composite the footage by tuesday and have the woods run done and final scene 95% complete.

Calendar

ok so i've been working all weekend on my assets and feel like i have nothing to show for it cause it's taking forever to do a canine run cycle and repaint a high quality render of a landscape. i guess i can just set up a schedule to attempt to adhere to.

thursday 11/18
will have the final scene nearly complete and the wolf run cycle done
woods run scene will be completed.

Friday 11/19
Shoot scenes of running on gayoso ave. and alleyway shots.

tuesday 11/23
andrew running scenes will be composited into after effects and worked on.
Final scene should be fully completed.

Sun. 11/28
return from Mississippi from break.
Back to work that night

Tuesday 11/30
will be connecting my other shots of animation and video together with animation.
effects added to running scenes
the totem scene will be put together
woods run and final scene will be touched up fully.

Thursday 12/2
nearly completed with clean-up and touch up of the effects to transition from andrew running to a slow motion wolf run cycle
This transition should be done.

Tuesday 12/7
animation roughly completed allowing for touchups everything pulled together leaving room for dvd build and finalizing all projects.

Concept render

Ok so i drew up all the assets for two shots of my animation. I figure i'll go for a desaturated look to emphasize light as in most film noir movies. If there is color it will be one color and because of the black and white, will contrast more. I think the smoke works pretty well for now with just the brush tool and turbulent displace. I have another render of particle fog but for this stylized scene i feel soft brushes will work better. I must take the wolf into toon boom or flash and loop a cycle of him for this scene as well. the hand drawn look will be nice with this and will provide a nice style to be flexible with as well.

Storyboard

Throwin up the shots for the animation i posted on previously

and also here's the outline structure stuff.

Proposal Write-up

I'm going to combine two things that i've been wanting to do in animation, compositing real footage animation in a style that transitions from the footage into animation and animating dark sequences so that i may play with lighting effects, glows, and particles. I have a story in mind that is fairly short so that i may focus more on minute details and aesthetics. I plan on the story involving a man walking along a dark street (this is filmed) as he turns to see a large totem of a wolf (which will be drawn and composited.) He turns and runs with a shot following him on a frontal shot as he runs down the street. Side shots of him passing go by as his shadow is shown to be some sort of creature (also animated). As he runs his figure begins adjusting gradually into wolf-like features starting with his ears. Suddenly it's a wolf-creature running down the street and the scenery transitions fully into animated woods. Moonlight shines through the trees and beams of light sweep by as the wolf jumps across terrain, over logs dodging bats and night creatures that swoop down on him. After a tiring sprint he finally reaches a jutting rock that has a expansive view of the moon above a foggy terrain. The wolf collects himself for a minute until finally howling. Thousands eyes appear below him and shapes of other wolves fade in from the background. the camera shoots in as the center wolf spins to stare at the camera. black.

I had this video before but i enjoyed the lighting that he used so i'll show it again.

Final animation throwup

So the few ideas i have so far are to either continue the microbial animation to create an even longer and fuller story complete with my original idea of more realized mosquitoes flying in and stabbing people in the eyes, or complete the other half of the poem for the kinetic type piece. or possibly both if possible.

Second i have been thinking about ideas for my bfa and i could use this assignment to do intro animations for various news media organizations that i have made-up. Along with advertising to show as breaks between news reel footage and the animation underneath the news anchors.

Effects explained

Ok i did four different examples some quick and some more extensive.

The first one i did in class was a combination of layers and overlays with hue/saturation effect along with a fractal map layer that i prerendered and used as a trackmatte for footage of ink flowing behind a compisition of bill o'reilly that i had warped with a liquidator and applied the vegas effect to. The vegas effect i had specifically tinkered with and inverted the settings so that only the layered showed through the glowing edges of the effect.

2. One solid layer with six different effects gave me a flowing microbial texture. Took aaaaa lot of tinkering so i'm not sure if i can show exactly how i got it but i still have the project file. I used a fractal noise layer along with tritone to get started on a cellular look. It took doubling the fractal noise and color embossing to truly add a microscopic feel. next i needed to pull out a majority of the harshness with median and add proper coloring with colorama. All these effects add up the the Microbe image i have showing.

3. More extensive usage of particle playground. It took 2 hours to prerender a comp that i set the particle opacity of polygons to 1% and birth rate to 2000. the high particle usage creates more depth the the smoke i wanted but it takes forever to render. I then added two layers of turbulent displacement. and duplicated the layer three times and added colorama to them all with a variety of settings to add depth. after that i prerendered what i could which only added up to about 7 seconds into another comp that i layered a colomns on top of one another and changed the time of each to have them move in succession. i then used cc sphere with the same particle layer i had rendered with a texture layer of the background to create a nice crystal ball.

4. the last one was something i threw together for fun. I had a hall fire layer from action essentials and constructed a hall real quick in 3d with a light that followed the fire up the screen. Afterwards i added my renditions of joe's text character and used a separate fire composite to light his little hair on fire.

Kinetic Repost

i added another few verses and tweaked the whirlpool action to be a circular pattern rippling out. These little changes took a lot longer than expected but it's cool i'll keep working on it, i have a good start on nice addition to a demo-reel. I plan on continuing the veins part once i draw an ornate pattern in illustrator it's just going to take a whiiile and i ran out of time. I like this project so i'm gonna keep working.

type upload

Here's the next installment of my kinetic text. i spent a long time working with the effects to create a realistic light box that mimics an 8mm projector without using any actual footage so i can keep the comp on my project and reuse it for any footage i want at any quality. There's a lot more text to go but i'm only going to do half because i know the project will be due soon and i can't let myself just throw out the last bit in a short time and it be crap. i have to live up to a quality so i plan on keeping up the standard i've already set and finish half. this will leave me more to accomplish outside of this class as well.

kinetic type project

for the type project i want to dabble into a motion graphics essential of kinetic typography. i've never done it but i figure i need the practice for commercial work. I want to take a poem called Lamerica by Jim Morrison and use speak the words myself if i can't find him speakin another poem.

Lamerica

Trade-routes
guide lines
The Vikings & explorers
Discoverers
The unconscious

a map of the states
The veins of hiways
Beauty of a map
Hidden connections
Fast trampled forest

Madness in a whisper
neon crackle
The hiss of tires
A city growls

rich vast & sullen
like a slow monster
come to fat
& die

here's an example of what i'm working on in after effects with it.

(this is actually what i finished thursday after class cause i had a few more lines done to show)

midterm

forgot to get this up, i was a little loopy. i buuuuut here's what i turned in. i've been tinkering with a transition scene to make the scenery make more sense and i want to take this thing and make it a lot longer throughout the semester. i get a little anal retentive with effects and details and it took longer to get out what i wanted. I'm going to split it into two parts and continue the next from when the next cell stabs the third cell.

Assets and Character Design

So i spent a lot of time experimenting with the style of the piece. After using the lightbox to take organic images of dough at various densities i built all my characters around it as a background. I feel a pretty solid aesthetic is being established. I left all my assets in one photoshop file that i can just import into after effects when i'm ready. I don't believe that i am completley done with every single asset but i have the majority done and enough to complete one act. I could do an entire animation of what i have but it just wouldn't meet my standards nor the class. I really like the 3 characters i made tho and the virus is pretty much there i just need to figure out the internal parts that would work better.

Story

A. The theme of my piece is to show the molecular level of ideas spread through our mind as a virus infecting our eye. It starts out with a landscape of a cell zooming out to see it is a nerve cell being attacked by viral organisms. The organisms stab through the outer wall killing smaller cells within the structure. Pieces of structure pour out of the end of the virus into the cell and assemble into smaller sharper edged beings. They attack other cells making them create more of themselves as the original cell explodes. zooming out we see the mitochondria powering the cell except the invaders have attached themselves to it and are using it to power an electrical barrier. we keep zooming out to see the rest of the cell completely taken by the organisms only to zoom out further and further seeing the tattered landscape forming into an pupil than an iris.

B. Characters - Virus 1- Giant virus initially invading (acts as mother ships)
Virus 2- smaller parts that move about the interior of the cell.
Civilian Cells (Cells that act sort of human like with a few interacting and talking or caressing)

Outline:

1st scene. Pretty simple just starts showing medium angle then distant shot of overall attack

Second scene back to medium angle as they get gouged and matter is poured into the cavity.

3rd is where matter assembles and attacks another cell.

4th is the mitochondria being made into a foreign power center.

5th scene is the outward zoom away from the cell to show the eye in the end.

Storyboarrrd:

Proj5 Revise and Proposal

A. I took the advice of using the shape of the house more in the piece and added it over the popcorn shaker instead of the brain. I added another Mask of red liquid flowing over the whole piece to show a negative feeling of doom. The original doctor shooting a laser with the cat face was moved earlier to not be in the way of the popcorn movement. i also added an unmasking of the word "eat" as if it was drawn on the screen quickly. I thought the word on itself would play a double meaning to obviously eat the popcorn but also a greater purpose of being forced to consume what you are seeing.

B. Proposal - Since i've been dealing with consumerism and advertising I feel like i will take the first project i did with the mosquito and continue on with that image to further delve into our minds on a visual scale. The mosquito gouging the eye is step one. After infiltration the advertising is injected into our eye and overtakes the organic matter that is there. I wanted to take inspiration from the way a virus invades a cell to show an organic landscape with mechanical beings "rewriting" the cells to create more bioengineered cells that will spread the goal of the advertisement. From there the battle pushes forward to the mind as Machines of war go on a full assault of the senses. Blimps fly and rockets are fired at onto a small city where the people fall one by one as the destruction only causes them to rise again, only under the control of another entity. Mindless zombies attacking the rest of the city until not one self motivated individual remains.

McManson's from wreckandsalvage on Vimeo.

Aesthetic Inspiration

Kadavre Exquis-Vassili from Kadavre Exquis on Vimeo.

Hermanos Inglesos feat. MeMe - Wanderland from Kristof Luyckx on Vimeo.

Animation Tag Attack Episode 8 from Scott Benson on Vimeo.

REsearch

thanks to a stroll through the library i came across a few books that i otherwise would not have found dealing with primitive culture and the ways in which it is formed along with the civilization that that created it. I now have more solid information to back up previously held ideas on the use of advertising to use culture as a way in which to control consumers. We use culture as a way to define ourselves as a society, by creating this culture using products from a certain company then it becomes stitched into the fabric of our minds. To help illustrate this I also checked out a book on the structure of the retina to use many of the organic forms as a battleground of information from various media sources.

Below is a list of hard copy books that i have checked out and am resourcing for information:

The structure of the Retina, Ramon Y Cajal
Man Culture and Society, Shapiro
Robots are Among us, Strehl
Evolution and Culture, Sahlins and Service
The Science Century, Magnus Pyke
The Essential Foucalt, Paul Rabinow
Magic Science and Religion, Malinowski
Objects of Desire, Adrian Forty

My play with masking was somewhat amateurish i know but i liked messing with old advertising and imagery that will grab attention. I have in my head an image of mechanisms across an organic landscape trapping or ensnaring various organic forms symbolizing the entrapment of our own gaze.

opp and alike

alike:
dust, ash, cinders, powder, snow, sift, spray, float, fire, flame, granules, grit, soot, soil, dust bunny, lint, sand, fiber, thread, hair, grass, beard, bristle, light, soft, scratchy, strand, lock, mane, unappreciated, unnoticed, small, looked over, forgotten, ignored, drift, reject, deaf ear, helpless, null, void

opposite:
dense, sparse, lush, barren, fertile, sterile, productive, negative, positive, unsure, secure, unstable, steady, broken, mend, destroy, restore, hurt, healthy, fragile, tough, vulnerable, protected, attack, surrender, clash, agree, discord, harmony, threatening, laid-back, hostile, peaceful, barbaric, calm, primitive, modern, ancient, young, mature, immature, wise, foolish