Starting to understand stuff

A good week this week in terms of getting to grips with things; messing around on Flash and After-effects for live at five has helped me gain a better understanding of the programmes, and I am now happier with my weather graphics although they still need cleaning up and I fear that this could mean having to start the whole thing again, although now I know what I am doing it hopefully will not take as long.

Anyway this all helped in yesterdays workshop as I could focus more on getting the lip syncing right instead of trying to remember how everything works. I think I got the lip sync about right on my self portrait but as Andy pointed out the animation dose not really fit the mood of the sound recording. Hopefully I can go back and re-record my characters quote or change round the animation to fix this, paying more attention to the character’s emotions.

This conveniently brings me onto today’s screening; I thought that the emotions conveyed in lot of the films were really effective and well animated, for me this especially stood out in Pencil Test which showed how much could be achieved despite having a very basic character to work with. I also thought that Geri’s Game was really good; the character’s walk and movements, I thought, where very well done, creating a feeling of frailty. I also liked the use of quick cuts between camera angles to condense time and make it seem as if there where two characters playing each other.

I mentioned last week that I was becoming interested in cinematography so this week I have got myself Hebert Zettl’s Sight Sound Motion, Applied Media Aesthetics, which looks big and complicated. I have not actually started to read it yet but that’s this afternoon’s job.

After-effects and other computer based fun

Sorry that this is a bit later than usual; it has been one of those weeks. Will start by saying that I thought the After-effects session with Pete was really good, having the instructions in front of me was really helpful as it allowed me to work through it at my own pace and the Photoshop tutorial was a good re-cap and got me more familiar with the functions on this version. I would not say that I am exactly skilled in either, which was more than confirmed yesterday but its early days and I am hoping it is something that I can get my head round.

The essay was an interesting experience; I was comparing Stanley Kubrick’s films to The Iron Giant and Spirited Away. Having written this epic on Friday night, which was way over the word limit, I read it Saturday, did not like it and started again. I tried to keep this new version much more to the point and in the end I only talked about one of the ten or so points that I made in the original one. Despite all of this and making some pretty stupid mistakes, such as misplacing my notes on Dr. Strangelove and subsequently forgetting to include it in my essay and writing a page about Artificial Intelligence A.I. and then discovering it was released after Spirited Away, writing the essay has got me really interested in cinematography and I want to try and start reading up on the subject.

Getting the work done for motion studies has also got me really into character design; I took a lot of inspiration from an interview I saw with Quentin Tarantino a while ago, I can not remember if it was on Friday Night With Jonathon Ross or The Culture Show, where he talked about how he came up with characters and plots for his films, explaining how I tries to get into the mindset of the characters so that the film writes itself.

It's 11:32 and i'm writing an blog :P

Shot and sweet this week as it’s late, I am ill and I am half-way though this essay, which is rapidly becoming too long. Will start off by answering Andy’s comment from last week; I spent my holidays watching way to many Bond films and that rubbed off on me and I ended up creating my Bond villain chair, complete with secret-agent, incompetent henchmen and unfaithful mistress disposal buttons, plus five more for any unexpected situations. I think I scribbled this somewhere in my notes and I even ended up doing some observation sketches from the films, glorified scribbles really. Last week I referred to ‘dodgy bits’ on my chair, this is an extremely technical term and basically means that there are some bits on the chair which I could have probably done better if I had taken my time; this was mainly in areas such as the piping on the cushions, which suddenly gets a bit thick or distorted in places, I think a hole appeared somewhere at some point on the back but I hid it by bashing random buttons and swearing a lot, and if you put the model in wire frame mode there is a mysterious collection of lines on the bottom of the chair, don’t know how they got there but you can’t really see it so I did not worry about it. Somehow I don’t think I am cut out for 3D modelling.

Quick note on this week; I really like Flash, which is a relief as I have been struggling to find something I can actually do. The animation I did on it was dire even by my standards but I wasn’t trying that hard and it was the first time I have used it. I like using the graphics tablets though. The old essay is coming along ok, a bit too well, as it is a monster of a thing and nowhere near done so it will need hacking up a bit to meet the word limit. Also, spending a week being fuelled solely by coffee, pasta, Nurofen and Stanley Kubrick films has done strange things to my head so I have babbled on a bit for a couple of pages about capitalism in Spirited Away, which I am not even sure exists. Anyway, Sergi Esenstein’s The Film Sense has once again proved to be useful when talking about camera angles, montage and the like, which is just as well because it is the only book on the reading list I have finished, I am still attempting to read Richard William’s The Animator’s Survival Kit, Timing for Animation and Anatomy for the Artist all at the same time, as well as reading Brian May’s biography, no relevance to anything I know.

Oh, quick note for Andy, I but the film titles in last weeks blog in italics but when I transferred it from word the computer took it off and I forgot to put it back, just though I would mention it as its something we get marked on.

A Bit About Everything

First week back and I am finding it surprisingly easy to get back into the swing of things; got the Maya project done although I think I might have rushed it a bit as there are some bits where the piping went a bit dodgy so I will probably get marked down for neatness but all in all I am farley pleased with it. Once this essay is out of the way I hope to spend some more time on Maya trying to learn everything and just having a general play.

My character for motion studies has been completely revamped and I can actually draw him reasonably quickly now. Here is the video i talked about last time:


I have done some Photoshop pictures of him over Christmas too and I have tried to continue doing that since I got back but the version of Photoshop that’s on the studio computers is a lot more up-to-date than the one I had at home and all the buttons are in different places, so I will have to sit down one day and figure all of that out. I am really starting to get into the storey for this character and have started to jot down some ideas for scenes and I am finding that going through ideas with Rosie, my partner for this project, is producing some good ideas, although I am a bit worried that I tend to take over on projects like this.

Ideas for the essay are coming thick and fast too; I read Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man the other day and I think I could just write the essay on its relationship with The Iron Giant. I have also watched Porco Rosso and The Incredibals which have helped me to establish some recurring themes and trends in The Iron Giant and Spirited Away, if I have the time I want to try and watch some more of Miyazaki’s films mainly because I have never really been into anime and I am finding the differences between this and western styles really interesting. I have also found some really useful stuff on the internet, including interviews with Bird and Miyazaki, below is a list of them:

http://www.onlineghibli.com/spirited_away/
http://nausicaa.net/miyazaki/sen/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayao_Miyazaki
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0594503/
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/people.php?id=51
http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/hayao_miyazaki.shtml
http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,1569689,00.html
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0083348/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0129167/
http://www.timeout.com/film/chicago/features/show-feature/3073/cartoon-crusader.html
http://movies.nytimes.com/person/81910/Brad-Bird/filmography
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/features/film/e3i653608aa3a0ea3bba6ec63fa98301e01
http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2004-11-02-bird-secret-identity_x.htm
http://www.slate.com/id/2169280/
http://uk.dvd.ign.com/articles/594/594806p1.html
http://www.collider.com/entertainment/interviews/article.asp/aid/5920/tcid/1
http://www2.warnerbros.com/corpcomm/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Animation
http://www.animationusa.com/wbmore2.html
http://www.xsibase.com/articles.php?detail=67

So now I think I need to go through all the stuff that I have found and see what is the best angle to approach the essay from.