November 2017: Modified Showreel

I've been especially busy on the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra project this past month. Work has been coming thick and fast but we are over the crest and things are falling into place.

In preparation for the project's conclusion I made some tweaks to my public animation showreel,  I felt like it needed a little more information and flow for clarity, to assist it in working better. These modifications include a few different sequences and details on the project the titles relate to and where I worked when it was created.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Generating the Information

    Working on the first title card I realised that the process of creating text I was using was a rather arduous and time-consuming process. Rather than constructing in photoshop and composing in Adobe Flash like before, I looked into the text generation features in Adobe After Effects to see if I could more efficiently produce the effect of text being generated onscreen.

    First I needed a script, which I wrote up on Photoshop so I could also get an idea of what the text could look like when it's displayed on the side of the animation.

    Text appears using a wipe. Like with the title and exit cards, I aimed for a speed of two letters per frame in order to simulate the camera's computer generating the text. I did have to make a choice between two generation ideas: The first idea was line-by-line, where ext would appear in lines, which a lot of modern computers do. Older computers however (and the sort where green text was common) did letter-by-letter generation. Because of the Alien influences and the fact that computers at the time Alien was made generated statistics via the second method, I stuck with that.

    Working on the text bodies I had the idea of keeping the majority lowercase instead of all-capitals, save for perhaps a "critical error" message, which by that point everything in the scene would be malfuctioning.

    When it came to superimposing in After-Effects however, I discovered that the black background accompanies the text when it was exported.to be inserted into premiere pro, this felt solved when I used a screen filter for the text layer however in light backgrounds the text proved difficult to see.

Yiquanhuabanyiulu: Composition complete

     After a hard few days the composition is complete. While looking for a background I came across photos of Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, world famous for its hundreds of vertical pillars of rock which for me really hit home with the vibe of the Treacy city which is that the designs reflect patterns and structures in nature. So a mountain range that is the opposite, resembling an urban environemnt, seemed like a perfect fit.

    Its unlikely the Chinese government would actually build a city i nthe heart of the park, but such is one of the liberating things about fiction. Who knows, this might not be a unique sight if you look though China hard enough. It is a very big and diverse country.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Final Video

Animation is completed and uploaded.

Soundscape: First Creations

    The first drafts for my Soundscape audio are complete. It was interesting tweaking sound files to make new sounds but I am unsure about the final feel. I suppose partially because this project was quite brief - 3 30-second videos that portray some kind of ambient or active sound. So overall the outcomes were not that complicated. I probably had the most fun making 1 and 3. I had to compress the renders a lot in order to upload them to the blog as at full resolution (1440 x 1080 pixels) the video files measured 1GB in size on my hard drive. I made half a dozen test renders in order to find out what settings I could compress my videos down to although I wonder if I could have simply reduced the number of frames as I learned from mu Maya classes that the 1GB file at 25 frames per second contains 750 instances of the same image repeated over the video.

    Presumably since the images are there for visual association I might be able to escape with cutting down the mumber of frames. Experiences with framerate lulls in video games have taught me that sound and visuals can potentially run separate to each other; for example I have noticed when framerates hit 20 or 15fps for a game designed to run on at least 30, animation and sound for in-engine cutscenes would desync, leading to characters mouthing silently for a second or two after they should have finished speaking as even when framerates drop t oas low as ten per second, the span of the sound file being played does not change..

    I think what I loved about the work on the audio for picture 1 was the vividness I had in my head, so it was one of the easiest to visualise. The moment I saw it I instantly imagined this underwater world. So my head was swimming with bloops, churns and that general echoing ambience you have whenever you submerge yourself in water. It was very fun to make. I was pleasantly surprised with myself that the echoing noise heard thoughout came from recording the overhead ventilation on the lower 3rd floor. Admittedly I didn't exactly go too far out with this one; the "gloop"ing and the sloshing heartbeat came from me messing about with a water bottle.

    As I mentioned in a previous post, this one was made bu trying out various bristling noises. I got an interesting sound from sorting dried spaghetti and I also tried rubbing the bristles of a toothbrush. with my finger to see what sound came out. Perhaps this one could do a bit of improvement with the scratchign being more gradual.

    The final soundscape was another interesting creation. I recognised these as viruses so I had no idea what sound could be associated with them. I had thought about pollen so I considered brushing noises. The ambient hum was acquired from another ventilation system, this time an extractor fan behind a door. I thought it gave a nice spacey echo as at the scale of viruses water and space become less distinguishable (if that makes any sense, viruses are measured in nanometres and can be as small as being only twice the width of a single DNA sequence). It was drowned out by the hum but I had also managed to include a stationary bus engine as an initial ambient noise before including the louder hum.

    Overall, despite a few hiccups I have enjoyed this project. But there must be more to do as it feels very brief. Perhaps trying to improve these soundtracks.

Thursday update 08/01/15: Sounds And Sound Connections

    Since Tuesday I have been exploring Rochester and the UCA campus looking for sounds to record and potentially use either in the current Soundscape or future projects. As of uploading this post I have gathered a total of 41 files of recordings that vary between 8 seconds and one minute that includes the following sources:

• Bus engines
• touching/poking/bouncing a balloon
• Lower 2nd and 3rd campus floor ambience
• footsteps
• materials in contact with wood
• sloshing water
• an extractor fam
• car engines
• a zipper
• fabric rubbing

     Several of them are of better quality than others and some are repeat attempts, but so far I have really enjoyed looking for sounds and for coming-on two days' exploration I feel I have built up a basic but solid sound library to work from.

    I managed to work out a way to upload my soundfiles to the blog. Blogger's video player does not appear to accept sounds on their own, so I experimented with what happens if I combined the audio files with a placeholder picture (in this case an open-source image of a P-47 Thunderbolt) to allow for a successful upload.

    However after listening to the recording several times I realise now that the propellor noise I had created using what I think was the sound of a toy lawnmower is a bit tinny. And I myself interpret it as either something that sounds more authentic to a 1940s recorder than a modern one, or that the engine is dying even before the alarm sound I created starts sounding off.

    For the pictures provided to me in the soundscape project I have had a few thoughts on what associated sounds could be present. From further examination I get the feeling I'm going to need to keep searching for all the sounds I need.

Picture One looks quite fluid. So I have considered using sections and moments of my recordings of moving water to simulate an aquatic atmosphere. I could alter the pitch  with what I have to make the sound file sound closer to what someone often hears when submerged underwater.

Picture Two looks fairly dry but the fibrous bristles that dominate the lower half of the picture could be one inspiration. I am tempted to investigate what sound comes from rustling spaghetti/pasta and disturbing the bristles on a toothbrush or the teeth of a comb to see what sound comes form these.

Picture Three I remmeber from my years of science in school: These are likely viruses. Again pasta or toothbrushes are two options for a source of the sound of hard collisions or I could try some sort of echo  as a really "out there" ambience. Maybe I record combing or rustling hair.

    As well as soundscaping I did spend a little time further trying to refine the story iea with a few idea-jogging phrases and images. It has helped me somewhat as I am building a more solid picture for an initial storyboard which I should see to doing within the next few days. The like-for-like practice on Tron Legacy has given me a better idea of how many sotryboard panels I may need.

Image references

• (Video Image): US Air Force Photo, 2006; 140530-F-RN211-002; available at http://www.af.mil/News/Photos.aspx?igphoto=2000798363 (last accessed 8th January 2015)
• The three images footed by extensive captions were provided as the source material for the Soundscape project.

Lecture update: 31st October 2014

    This morning's lecture was in regards to making an animation that is designed to show the various layers to an animation or composition made in Maya and photoshop. I started off with a bit of trouble as I neglected to put the camera movement on the null layer but Simon was helpful enough to show me how to use it correctly and to angle my animation correctly as I had the layers moving instead of the a null layer linked to a camera.

    There was also a minor blunder that I had accidentally switched camera 1 to invisible which stumped us for a bit and I felt embarrassed that the "motionless camera" issue was caused by such a simple mistake. We quickly fixed it after discovering it and everything worked correctly after that. I am using three slides from a work-in-progress Maya tutorial instead of a scene as this was all I had on-hand at the time.

    In the afternoon my group made a stopframe animation. At first it was a simple idea of Brem lifting up his coat the throwing it down after his head became a wraith mask. We wanted to experiment more so we had the coat being quite literally magic via transformation and peopel emerging out of it like a clown car (my cameo being me "swimming" out then diving behind a ball. It was fun brainstorming ideas and passing them around as to what happens next and some sections worked surprisingly well. Others not so well (We tried to capture the hat in midair but found it impossible to capture it at the right time and when we did, the camera or the software automatically deleted it probably on the pretense of the captured focus being quite blurry) so we never really got great shots of anyone hovering although we tried our best.

    The whole thing goes dark 2/3 of the way through because we had to change the battery and when we put it back in it set itself to a lower light setting. Although it was getting darker outside as the lesson went on.

Animation work 10th October

    Today I became more acquainted with using Adobe After Effects in the form of some basic animation. I kept it simple and in hindsight I think it would have been better if the squares I used (I could have also made a circle or two) had more colour variation than red. I admit I didn't end up making the animation Simon made during the lesson but my attempt I did try some variations of squashing, stretching, timing, tinting and pathing that on the surface I suppose comes off as rather messy at first glance.

    I tried working with the early mistakeof not having the guiderail in the centre of the shape (why the lower square flies about so wierdly) and the third cube that darts between the two was with a shape that had been appropriately centred using the tool.

    In the afternoon Group 4 was assigned a task of folding up paper and then drawing body parts, with other people drawing the other boy parts so we had no idea what was drawn for say the head when it came to drawing the torso. After that they were laid out and revealed. The group was then divided into two groups and each group had to pick one of the characters drawn. My group picked what appeared ot be a pig-nosed dog with huge biceps and brains with chicken feet for feet, wearing a tank-top and a coat of some kind. Our group's task was to turn a simple character drawn on a sheet of A0 paper into our character. The other group had chosen a shrimp-man with a moustache, biceps, a big head with exposed brains, odd eyes and a single fin for a lower body.

    The charcoal animation became...quickly disturbing although the lecturer had no objection to a transformation clip that included blood, violence and broken bones. We had our dogman literally bursting out of the chick character we were given, and then turning into it. We never quite got the full proportions done as we ran out of time but we managed to apply most of the transformation to the point the original character was almost not there any more by the end. Although I think the other group got the "violence" memo when they had their character flex, explode and leave a brain. It was fun, interesting coming up with ideas and a little unsettling what we ended up making.