weekly

As the week trucks forward things continue to be at a standstill. Im starting to get impatient with myself because after 6 months of minimum wage b***s*!* I finally managed to get close enough to my financial goal to build my own computer. My first two parts arrived on Tuesday,a GeForce GTX970 graphics card and an intel i7 6 core processor. Needless to say im excited to buy the rest of the parts. Im all caught up on my video projects this year to my surprise, most of these tutorials are easy enough to breeze through in 30-40 min. Though I am a bit frustrated with my layering in After Effects, I did learn to mind placement in 3d space next time. Im looking forward to some work time to work on the documentary with President Nathan.

To wrap things up I thought I'd start by stating the obvious, almost all of us like video games. However would you like them as much if you had to experience them irl?

Gaming irl

Mythic storytelling structure

        This article was quick to dismiss the possible confusion of giant floating castles with the kind of "mythic" actually mentioned. The first of which being "The World is Full of Patterns", after reading that my initial reaction was to assume that instead of grandiose flying castles, I would be dealing with concepts in human nature. And right I was. Patterns in this case, implied; induced moments of "deja vu" through visual or situational similarities.

The next portion of the reading covers the impact of shock value or over the top concepts.To a viewer or just plane human being, pushing someone to heir limit and possibly beyond is more than fascinating. Throw in some other aspects to make the senario unfamiliar and you have the audiences undivided attention. The example provided for this in the reading was the I Am Legend trailer.

The third concept is wants/ desires. Most of the time in movies these are obviously unobtainable to the character, but this doesn't stop them from wanting it. Desire is a very relatable concept, everybody wants something.

Unfortunately Loosing is also a very relatable concept. Nobody I have ever met has won everything, the feeling of loss is the worst. This feeling allows the audience to project empathy onto the character and their situation.

Lastly "the take away lesson:". This seems to be the largest commonality between films and shows today. Starts off things are good, things get bad, things get good again, what did we learn? A person learning from their mistakes is an overplayed concept at this point.  Not everybody learns, but films want to send a positive message and receive positive feedback from the general public. For me this distances me from the film due to lack of realism, but maybe thats just me.

Good Transitions

         Transitions are something a viewer might not even give a second thought to, but the editor can spend what feels like an eternity on just two shots. In the provided videos the critic mentions that a lot of the transitions and shots end up being un-intentional. It was mentioned that its better to get way more footage than you need just for the sake of a seamless transition. In other words it seems like a lot of the transitions are happy accidents.

 Though it may seem a bit redundant, I agree with the "happy accident" concept. In the short time I have been gathering footage I noticed that a lot of the shots I gathered intentionally don't or barely make the cut... literally.

 If anything this helped me to realize the importance of gathering the extra footage. As the old saying goes, Its better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

Comment (also 100th post!)

This week and the next was and shall be the busiest I have been in a while. Between work school and Marine corps shenanigans I have had no time to relax. I am happy that I managed to keep up with the demo's this week though, I am looking forward to Christmas break at this point. I just want to sleep in... This kinetic type project is going to frustrate the crap out of me I can already tell. So all I can do is focus on one thing at a time and make sure it gets done on time.

kinetic type (has a lil' bit of cussing)

The very tedious Peanuts movie

As an animator I can appreciate the amount of time and effort it takes to make something really MOVE. The peanuts however, have more extreme exaggerations than your average character. Translating this onto the big screen in 3d no less is an impressive and time consuming feat.

The process for this movie was described as simply, Pencil drawn to character creation and rigging, to posing and concept, to animation. Which on paper seems simple enough, but this process takes much longer than two frustrating weeks at BOCES. 

The amount of attention to detail and finess that is required to work on something as beloved as the Peanuts characters are some things that most people could never understand. I am not personally interested in the movie, but if it happens to be on one day im sure ill carefully analyze the animation.

Knowing the audio

as the video mentions, audio is a huge part of any film. Every room or even just space is alive in some way or form with sound. Only a few types are mentioned throughout the video such as transient, short abrupt sounds, and evolving sounds, long progressive sounds.

 I like that this video calls attention to audio, it feels like audio can be under appreciated at times. Frankly audio is the only reedeming factor in some of my work in the last two years so I agree regarding its importance.

Learning what audio to use and how to apply it correctly or even differentiate it from other types of audio is a very important part of  video production.

weekly

It has been a taxing week for me. I manage to catch up on work then immediately fall behind, there are several (extra) projects and tasks I want to take on but with all of the responsibilities I have had lately I just don't have the time or energy. I still feel a little slow with premiere, like there is more to it than I realize. I usually have to defer to my notes for every little thing I want to do which is frustrating. Regardless my big focus for the next two days is going to be my PSA, on which I have to get my ass in gear. There are still several shots I haven't had the chance to get and I still have to edit. It seems like a lot of the projects overlap this year and at times it can feel overwhelming. Any how I have been trying to refine my non existent coloring skills lately using a few friends sketches and Sai. Im not quite there but hopefully ill get better...I hope.

Did you say fake blood?