Audio 29/5

I left my hard drive at home so I ended up working on my 3D character that was due in at 5pm today. I dont have too much left for my tutorials to hand in next week which is good, thanks to the homework over lockdown.

Drawing 28/5

Student draw-offs, first pic is trying to imitate the reference picture, 2nd pic is drawing it in our own style.

Round One - Ichigo from Bleach

Round Two - Xerneas

Round Three - Bob from Bobs Burgers in own style

Research 25/5

Everything must be submitted by midnight next monday (1st june) for installation on 2nd june. We have decided on the artsteps template for the virtual gallery and wix for the website. 

Emma is currently working on setting up the pages for all our links and video hosting. We need to make a decision on what image frames to use and whether individual ppl can choose or keep them consistent.

So far the majority are submitting images, at least 5 of us multiple images. I think having the artist statements on the wall could work, although it will be a lot of text so perhaps the other idea the group had of a small image(or maybe the avatar) and then the artist statement pops up when interacted with. Not much else we can do at this stage until projects start getting sent in to the class email.

Screen Arts 25/5

Infamously Bad Directors

What makes a movie bad? You cannot assess a movies value on critical or financial success. Batman vs Superman(2016) only scored 27% on Rotten Tomatoes but made $850 million worldwide. Ridley Scots Bladerunner(1982) was a commercial flop and barely recovered its $28 million budget. This movie is now in the US Library of Congress for preservation. The Golden Raspberries is the counter to the Oscars, created in 1981 to celebrate the worst movies in the film industry. Anyone can join and there is even a buy one get one free membership. Movies like Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey and the Emoji Movie have all won raspberries. Sandra Bullock won a golden raspberry for All About Steve the night before she won an Oscar for The Blind Side. She accepted both awards in person. 

A Good bad movie, like an unscary horror movie can switch genres into comedy making the film more enjoyable to watch. Ultimately its completely subjective.

Tommy Wiseau's The Room(2003) cost $6mill USD and grossed $1900 in the 2 weeks it played in the two theatres it debuted in. Cumulative gross worldwide as of 2007 is $7,840,034 total. He inspired a book called The Disaster Artist starring James Defranco. This movie won golden globes for best actor and best motion picture-musical or comedy. It also won an oscar for best adapted screenplay.

Roger Corman was known as the "Pope of Pop Cinema". He has 395 films to his name including Sharktopus, Dinoshark and Piranhaconda. He gave a number of Hollywood stars their first break inc James Cameron Avatar, Martin Scorsese Taxi Driver and Francis Ford Coppola The Godfather. Scorsese had been working at editing when he was asked to direct the sequel to Bloody Mama. Corman gave Scorsese complete freedom on the movie Boxcar Bertha but he had to work with only $60,000. Carman was considered the best post grad training you could have in America. He is considered as incredibly generous and gentle with newcomers. He won an honorary award in 2009. 

Ed Wood Jr. was born in 1924 and died in 1978. He was affectionately knows as the world's worst director.  His trademark wad sci-fi and horror with cheap props and visual effects. Orson Welles is one of his heroes and despite trying to emulate Welles triple threat(writer, producer, director) he was terrible at all three.

Russ Meyer. Born 1922 and died 2004. Meyer served as a combat cameraman in WWII for the US army. After the war he spread out into photography doing glamour shots and playboy spreads. He is known for Vixen!, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

Lloyd Kauffman was born in 1945. He began his career in shock films. In 1975 he funded an independant shock film studio. This studio published Patricks movie Offensive Behaviour.

In 2005 Patrick Goldstein wrote a piece in the LA Times about Hollywoods failure to produce ocscar worthy films. He claims that Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo was oscar worthy. On feb 2005 Rob Schneider bout a full page ad in the Daily Variety stating"Maybe, Mr Goldstein, you didnt win a Pulitzer prize because thy havent invented a category yet for Best Third-rate, Unfunny pompous reporter.

After reviewing Deuce Bigalow, Robert Ebert speaking as someone who has won a Pulitzer prize, stated that in his "official" capacity, "your movie sucks"

How Did This Get Made is a podcast that features a bad movie each

What are some movies that you consider bad?  Why?  

What are some movies that you consider to be so bad they're GOOD?

What are your thoughts on the sexism and politically-incorrect material prevalent schlock/exploitation films?  How do you think schlock/exploitation films have evolved over the decades?

Screen Arts 18/5

Proposal

Audio 15/5

https://youtu.be/GEG6RYOMyhA Music Replacement link

Research 11/5

Virtual exhibition examples - https://www.artsteps.com/

"Secret"

https://www.artsteps.com/view/5e7b310389f83a18220d19c0

"Titanic's Museum"

https://www.artsteps.com/view/5c51875682dc6d6a175eb81e

"Thea Hicking Gallery"

https://www.artsteps.com/view/5b968c997c47144a75fa55c7

Visual Install team - Ben, Emma, Ian, Vinnie and myself

Things to do as at 11/5:

- Get a list of what size area people want for their exhibit
- Who has physical installations that need to be digitized somehow
- How to display artist statements: embedded in the exhibit photo or as a separate image with Artist Statement to click.
- Neutral walls: white/light grey, wood textured floor?
- Artsteps for virtual exhibition or alternative?
- Wix for gateway website?
- Single room or sections
- Get logo from Marketing for Artsteps/Wix (when they have it)

Screen Arts 11/5

Tarantino and Scorsese

Quentin Tarantino was born in 1963 and is know for his pop culture references, speedy dialogue and violent scenes. He used to work at a rental store called Video Archives, watching movies and writing scripts. 1990 was when he worked for Cinetel production company where one of the producers gave his True Romance script to Tony Scott. 

He self funded Reservoir Dogs(1992) when working with Lawrence Bender(producer). His film Pulp Fiction(1994) was a major success commercially and critically, earning $108 million at the box office - the first independent film to achieve this.

Notable films:

Reservoir Dogs(1992)

Pulp Fiction(1994)

Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2(2003-04)

Grindhouse(2007)

Inglorious Basterds(2009)

Django Unchained(2012)

Martin Scorsese is famous for his dark themes, unsympathetic lead characters, religion, the mafia, unusual camera techniques and contemporary music. He spent a lot of his childhood inside watching tv and movies due to asthma. He also started drawing storyboards for fun. He completed his first film when he was 26yrs old. He has a long history of collaborating with actor Harvey Keitel and editor Thelma Schoonmaker. He was hailed as a living movie legend early on in his career. He justifies the violence in is work with "Deep down you want to think that people are really good - but the reality outweighs that."

Notable Films:

Mean Streets(1973)

Taxi Driver(1976)

Raging Bull(1980)

Goodfellas(1990)

The Age of Innocence(1993)

Casino(1993)

Gangs of New York(2002)

The Departed(2006)

The Wolf of Wall Street(2013)

The Irishman(2019)

3D Animation 11/5

Dynamics - controlled by physics not keyframes.

Start with the FX option to change the menus.

Bouncing ball animation. Start with a sphere and a ground plane. To make the floor stay where it is go into the fields/solvers tab.

For the floor select create passive rigid body and for the ball select create active rigid body. Select the ball, and click on gravity. Normal gravity is 9.8.

Under Attribute Editor for the ball, you can adjust the rigid body attributes to change how the ball drops. You can reduce the bounciness of the floor in the rigid body attributes while the floor plane is selected. Consider how shiny the surfaces are when working out how much friction to apply. You can apply more than one field to an object to change how its movement is calculated.

To make a pendulum swing out of the ball, add a rigidnailconstraint and adjust the arrows to where you want the swing point to be.

Make sure to turn all the bricks into activerigidbodies after clearing any history to create the collision. Make sure to add gravity to the bricks as well.

with no gravity added

once gravity is added

 Intro to nCloth

Turn the object into cloth using the ncloth button

The nucleus contains the attributes, gravity and wind adjustments. turn the use plane on and make sure its lined up with the floor plane. Dont forget double sided lighting for the cloth object. the ncloth node has the collisions options for the object. Dynamic properties contains the stretch bend and rigidity sliders. Shear is the diagonal tension on the object.

To attach the flag to the pole select point to surface in the constraint menu after selecting the vertexes you want to attach.

Assign a passive collider to the cloth object to tell maya that the object will collide but not rigid. Keep adjusting the wind and gravity until the flag is moving the way you want, you might have to reduce the friction and stickiness to stop it folding on itself and staying folded. You can use keyframes on some of the settings to only affect the object in certain parts of the animation cycle.(Right click on the setting and Set Key when the bar is on the desired keyframe down below in the animation bar)

Research 8/5

Critique session. Edwin and Ben suggested some photoshop tools to try in terms of tinting each panel without losing the realistic colouring of objects/making it look like just a colour layer over everything. Composition was pointed out in that the left hand side has the large tree focal point whereas the right hand side doesnt really have one if they are split. Really need to figure out a way to add to the right without ruining the overall diptych balance. Gradient layering and playing with levels was also suggested. Making the photos less sharp and keeping the black outlines to help blend the digital additions into the photo. Edwin kindly streamed to me how to do some of these things in photoshop so woohoo!

Audio 8/5

Export two versions of the class video, 1 with new music, 1 with new foley sounds. Use royalty free sounds/music with Premiere and upload both to youtube as unlisted for next friday. Fingers crossed we are back in class soon.

Drawing 7/5

Concept creature, what an animal would look like if it swapped diets. I went for carnivorous sheep, cos why not! The skull ref I used was a sheep skull, but i also looked up a carnivore skull to change some of the features like where the lower jaw intersects the upper jaw and brought the eye forward more. Naturally the teeth are now pointed, and I elongated the incisors just for fun. The body I wanted a cross between sheep and large cat but it still needs some work, particularly in the legs/feet area as Im not happy with them at all.

3D Animation 6/5

 Working on rounding her out now. Lots of extra edge loops to help with the shaping and stop the mesh vertices jumping around so much inbetween modes. The head needs a LOT of work still, but the body is getting there, although there is one line of edges that just stick out in the material for some reason and I havent managed to smooth them out yet. Normally wouldnt be an issue but I want to take the new modelled legs and turn them into the trousers, instead of the quick and dirty ones I currently have from weeks ago. Need to make some ears and hair as separate objects as well, to float over the head

Research 4/5

Work in progress. Atm its still mostly a photographic composite but the outlines are starting to come together which means so far im on track for this weeks goal of a final image ready to colour.

I do wonder whether instead of splitting the image in half for each diptych, I change the orientation to portrait and have 6 versions so that each colour can be a direct comparison instead of one half vs the other.

Screen Arts 4/5

1980's Computer Animation & Motion Capture

Yoichiro Kawaguchi

A programmer and animator, he was a pioneer of computer software that grows images in an organic way, called Growth Model. His program uses algorithms to generate brightly coloured worlds. 

Dragons Lair(1983) was a video game that was created by ex-disney animator Don Bluth. It caused a stir in arcades due to its full quality animation sequences.

Commodore 64(1983)

. The commodore 64 was one of the first affordable home pcs to be released. This opened up access to everyone and created a generation of computer artists and programmers.

Autodesk Maya

Wavefront Technologies was formed in 1984 by Bill Kovacs, one of the software developers for Tron. His partner Roy Hall developed video manipulation and animation software after Kovacs left the company. In 1995 Silicon Graphics bought Wavefront Technologies and Alias Research to merge them into a new company, that produced Alias/Wavefront advanced computer animation software. After a collaboration with Walt Disney, Alias/Wavefront was turned into Maya in 1998.

Softimage released in 1988 became the industry standard for animation and preferred choice for character animation. The first version of 3DS Max was released in 1990 by Autodesk. Autodesk later purchased Maya and Softimage to become the market leaders in 3D animation software. Maya won the oscar for technical achievements in 2003.

John Lasseter worked for Disney, creating the CGI test version of Where the Wild Things Are however since Tron wasnt that well received Disney decided to can the animation project. Spike Jonze eventually made it in 2008 using facial CGI. After he left Disney he worked at the Graphics Group unit of Lucasfilm. He helped create the first photo realistic CGI animated character in Young Sherlock Holmes(1985). In 1986, his division of Lucasfilm was sold by George Lucas to Steve Jobs as he needed the money. Lasseter worke don short films for the newly formed company - Pixar Animation Studios.

Motion Capture

Rotoscoping was used for the main character in Gullivers Travels(1939) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs(1937).

Jim Henson's Creature Shop worked with Pacific Images to create a digital version of Waldo from The Muppets that could be controlled in real time. Robert Abel and Associates created a motion capture sequence in 1984 called Sexy Robot. In 1990 Jeff Klesiser and Diana Walczak worked on a motion capture music video for Perla Batalla. 1990 was also the year that the first failed attempt at motion capture in a feature film occurred - Total Recall. The Lawnmower Man in 1991 contained short mo-cap shots, just like Peter Gabriel's music videos.

Video games were the first industry to extensively use mo-cap, the first one being Atari's Highlander: The Last of the McLeods in 1995. GTA3(2001) was another milestone for gameplay and mo-cap

The first fully animated film with mo-cap was Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists(2000), Final fantasy: The Spirits Within was the first attempt at photo realistic worlds with mo-cap in 2001. Lord of the RingsL The Two Towers(2002) had Andy Serkis as Gollum  and again as Kong in King Kong(2005). 

Uncanny Valley - Theorised by Masahiro Mori

The uncanny valley is the theory that when AI humans(robots/cgi) get to the point that they are looking and acting like humans, it causes revulsion or and uneasy feeling in the human observers. The valley is the dip in the positive reaction to the robots human appearance when it gets too close. The theory also says that if the robot becomes completely identical to a human, that uneasy feeling disappears and the observer response becomes positive again. David Hanson has done further research into the uncanny and  has discovered that making the robots face look slightly cartoony or stylised makes the observer response positive again.

Uncanny Example

3D Animation 4/5

Bring a synopsis of where Im at for my 3D character for wednesdays live chat.

Plan of attack

• get animatic done before next week so I can get feedback and change some things before its due on the 15th.
• get character modelled/textured/coloured ready for rigging
• restore my old sleep/work schedule to try and help with the crap motivation I currently have
• consume copious amounts of alcohol, turn into a blubbering mess and somehow pull a completed assessment out of my butt to hand in on time (or is that third yr??? 😆)

http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd030718s.gif

Drawing 30/4

Realism drawing of the statue of david

This is after I took Chris's recommendation and shrunk his head as I had drawn it too large originally. Still a snail when it comes to drawing but at least Im happy with how it turned out. I think his legs might be a lil too big as well but its hard to tell due to the viewing angle of the statue.

Research 1/5

Confession time. Due to a "well timed" existential crisis, enforced lockdown and crap self motivational skills I have completely disconnected from my project. This week has been spent attempting to get into a new sleep schedule, routine with online classes and give myself a mental kick up the ass so to speak. I have 3 weeks to get my research done but I think with a lot of  time invested that I can still pull it off.

Today I spent researching frames for my final piece, although due to the lockdown I am pretty sure I will have to submit the images digitally due to lack of printing access.

Ideally I need the frames to have a flat edge so that when they are hinged together, it sits nicely when folded or open.

The Warehouse - $7.00 for two Living & Co Certificate Frames. (10-14day delivery, black or white)

https://www.thewarehouse.co.nz/p/living-co-value-certificate-frame-a4/R2458489.html

https://www.thewarehouse.co.nz/p/living-co-value-certificate-frame-a4/R2458491.html

Kmart - $2.00 per Norway Certificate Frame. (10 business day delivery, only comes in black)

https://www.kmart.co.nz/product/norway-certificate-frame---a4,-black/804513

Harvey Norman - $6.99 per frame. (No delivery estimate, black only)

https://www.harveynorman.co.nz/cameras/frames-and-photo-prints/photo-frames/ur1-a4-certificate-frame-black.html

Briscoes - $5.99 per Brooklyn Cambridge frame. (7d delivery time, only in black. Has bevelling on front so not sure if it would work)

https://www.briscoes.co.nz/product/1084362/brooklyn-cambridge-photo-frame-a4/

Spotlight - $9.00 per Frame Depot twin pack. (no delivery estimate, only extended wait time. black or white)

https://www.spotlightstores.com/nz/home/photo-frames/single-photo-frames/frame-depot-twin-pack-element-frame/BP80404380

Alternatively use foamcore? $7-$10 at Spotlight for 5 A4 sheets. (not as sturdy though, needs to be self-adhesive)

https://www.spotlightstores.com/nz/craft-hobbies/basic-craft-supplies/felt-eva-foam/foam/jasart-5-mm-foam-board/BP80513441

Tonights task is find some of my old camping photos of the canterbury plains/tasman valley and nail down the final base photo. I am aiming to have the image ready for colouring by next friday, leaving me two weeks to play with colours.

Audio 1/5

1st class back.

Cleaning up audio.

First step is removing any unwanted audio then consolidate clips to a single track per person. Holding shift stops the clips moving to either side when shifting tracks. Alt is to select single parts of a clip instead of the entire clip.

Ideal sound should be sitting around -12dB.

My group is: Zeta-Rose, David, Me, Jordyn

Audio Spotting

Spotting, or sound mapping, is watching footage(or reading a script) and writing down what sounds are needed and when.

The Big Five:

1. Dialogue
2. Ambience
3. Sound Effects
4. Foley
5. Music

also Room tone.