Ben's Blog

DIS3904 | DIGITAL IMAGING STUDIO

MAJOR SELF DIRECTED PROJECT OPTION

Aims:

My aims for this assignment are to create a 30 – 40 second animation for my company logo, The Pixel Market. I hope to use a combination of 3D elements and 2D elements to produce a nice clean, smooth motion graphic piece. The theme of the animation is to create 3D “squares” which grow and move around the piece. The idea is that they are the colours of the logo and they are what make the logo.

The motion graphic animation would be mostly used for in house demonstrations or intros for showreels.

The programs I will be using to create this piece will be Autodesk Maya, Adobe After Effects and Audacity (Sound). I will output the end product in .mov and .flv formats.

Reference Material - Flower Maschine

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-wZUqj3Oek

Week 10

After consultation with the other members of The Pixel Market we have decided to choose The Chemical Brothers – Midnight Madness as the music to play along to the animation.

Midnight Madness

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoaeEAdDv-c

Some initial Production Tests

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/test3_2Mb.mov

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/playblast_2Mb.mov

Week11

The Pixel Market team and I decided to change the track for the animation due to us using the new song in our in-house showreel. We will incorporate this final growth animation into that reel.

After some more production tests trying to figure out the best way of creating the animation I have stumbled on a few problems. It doesn’t seem to be as easy as first thought due to Maya not being set up for this type of animation.

Production Test with New Song

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeBetter2_2Mb.mov

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeTest_2Mb.mov

I've tried just normal nurbs surface extruding along a path, however the shape of the cube changes and it distorts instead of just being the one size and rotation following the path. See below

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/surfaceExtrude1.jpg

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/surfaceExtrude2.jpg

I've tried making a path with a CV curve and then adding a nurbs circle (shaped like a square) to the curve via the motion path option. Then I create the animated sweep. However this is what happens. It adds twists in the extruded path. See below.

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath1.jpg

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath2.jpg

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath3.jpg

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath4.jpg

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/motionPath5.jpg

Here is another example of the animated sweep not working. The motion path seems to work initally however you can see that it gets random rotation values from somewhere when you attatch the motion path. So then when you use the animated sweep it it looks weird. If it wasn't for those random rotation values being added into the path it would be fine.

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/example.jpg

A view of the paths and the attached Nurbs Shapes

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/example02.jpg

Week12

Another whole week was devoted to trying to find an easy way of animating the growing cubes. I have found out that Maya is just not set up to animate this sort of thing which is frustrating as it almost works. I posted threads on digitaltutors.com and thearea.com asking for help but the only answers I got was that it is just something in Maya that they should fix.

I have decided to animate the cubes in a more manual way however it is very time consuming and I will have to limit my overall animation to all that I can do.

As you can see this seems to work.

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeAnimation2_2Mb.mov

Week13 – Part 1

The manual way of creating the animation is very time consuming but with a few days totally devoted to creating the piece I have come up with some work I can present.

It seems to be going nicely.

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeTest2_2Mb.mov

Week13 – Part2

Well after a complete stuff up by me I have had to restart from scratch all of the animation that I had done. I was almost to post production stage when I realized that, the way that I had been animating the piece wasn’t letting me go back to make changes. I had been accidently deleting the history of the animations so I couldn’t make any changes. I only realized this when, of course, I needed to make changes. I came to the conclusion that it would be easier to start over than try and edit the animations.

Animation before I restarted

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/extrudeTest_9_2Mb.mov

Once I animated all the cubes again this is what I came up with.

Initial Production Test

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/pixelAnimation_2Mb.mov

Once I finished animating the cubes I played around with the camera work. I couldn’t decide if I wanted one long flowing animation or an animation that is cut up with different angles.

Here is the animation with different camera angles.

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/pixelAnimation7_2Mb.mov

After seeing how they looked side by side I decided that the long flowing animation worked better. This is what the final animation looks like. I added some fades and blurs and other post production effects to make it look more polished.

http://www.users.on.net/~brimington/Uni/digitalImaging/pixelAnimation9_2Mb.mov

Conclusion

Whilst I am happy with the end product I know there is so much more I could have done with the animation. It was setback after setback and I ended up basically doing the whole assignment in 1 week. There were a lot of little things I wanted to add to the animation including a smaller 2-5 second animated logo that could be used either separately or inclusive of the main animation. Maybe that could be a future project.

However, given the problems I faced with this assignment and the altered timeframe I had to work with, I am happy with the end result of my animation.

Here you go.. At 18 minutes it is looking good.

Well after yesterdays session modeling the bedroom I was tired. But now I am quite buggered... Spent most of today modeling the kitchen. Haven't finish but I will do the rest before when I start rendering it.

Well I spent about 12 hours yesterday modeling the bedroom. It has come out quite well..

This one came in at 13 minutes. Obviously the light in the corner needs to be fixed and the "sunlight" needs to be altered but it is getting there.


This one took 12 minutes and the lighting is a little better in it.

Well I wanted to try a higher quality render to see the difference in quality and in render times. This one was at 44 minutes for one frame. It looks like I will have quite a large problem.


This frame was completed in 28 minutes. Quite a bit faster but the quality difference is noticeable.

After a long 10 minute render I can show you the almost complete render of the hallway. The only problem I am seeing is that at 10 mintues per frame. 10 - 15 seconds of that will take quite a long time. I will have to talk this over with my teachers..

Well after a long day watching tutorials I have finished some test renders of the living room scene. At this stage it took just under 8 minutes to do one frame so that could mean a bit of trouble when it comes to final rendering.. But at this stage I will push on and if it does become a problem I will just have to render at a lower quality.

Well after a bit more modeling today i've started the living room scene. This is one of the more complex scenes as there will be alot inside it. However the initial models and shape seems pretty good. The scale is correct as I measured each wall myself to make sure.

Well I've been doing some 3d modeling to try and get some of the scenes out of the way..

This is the reference image I used for the hallway scene.



These images are an inital test but as you might be able to see the scale and proportion is a little wrong.




These next images are from the re modeled hallway scene with the correct scale and measurements. I will be leaving the texturing and rendering for a few weeks as I still have to learn some new techniques.

Research

North Kingdom

• This is where I got most of my inspiration from. North Kingdom make seemingly boring topics into interesting and fun projects. This way it keeps people interested and remembers their product. They used a milk awareness campaign and turned it into a fun 3D animated board game. This is the same thing I’m trying to do with my project. I would like to turn the boring topic of construction commercials into something fun and interesting.

Wild Therapy

• Wild Therapy is a weird website promoting a travel and holiday planner. They specialize in wild safaris and can plan your trips for you. But it isn’t the organization that interests me. It’s the way the website is set out. It’s similar to the way I would like to make mine. Simple and dark but effective.

Construction Websites

• The construction websites research is all websites on construction or real estate. The examples I’ve included show their layout when they deal with plans and video embedding. As the main website behind the www.dontliveintheshadows.com is a construction website I thought it would be a good idea to look into how it is done in reality.

Wikipedia

• “An advertising campaign is a series of advertisement messages that share a single idea and theme which make up an integrated marketing communication (IMC). Advertising campaigns appear in different media across a specific time frame.

The critical part of making an advertising campaign is determining a campaign theme, as it sets the tone for the individual advertisements and other forms of marketing communications that will be used. The campaign theme is the central message that will be communicated in the promotional activities. The campaign themes are usually developed with the intention of being used for a substantial period but many of them are short lived due to factors such as being ineffective or market conditions and/or competition in the marketplace and marketing mix.”

Hide and seek style flash games or games where you have to find things.

• http://www.donpixel.com/play/en/061016055711/

• http://www.gamesforwork.com/games/play-9077-Seascape-Flash_Game

Project 2 Synopsis

Imagine you’re on the train home from work and you spot this weird billboard. All it says is “Don’t live in the shadows” and has a website down the bottom. It crosses your mind that it is weird but you don’t think too much on it. The next day while you board the train to work you notice a poster. It has a black featureless character in front of a lounge room and it says “Find all the shadowmen, get 20% off”. It doesn’t say what the discount is on but it you do realize that it might have something to do with the billboard you saw the previous day. Again you find the lack of information interesting.

Later that night you are watching TV when you spot the television commercial. It seems to be advertising an apartment construction company but there are weird little black featureless men running around and hiding under furniture as the camera comes into the room. While you’re watching, you piece together that this must be another one of those shadow adverts. And sure enough at the end of the commercial it links the same website. www.dontliveintheshadows.com. You realized that if you put all the advertising mediums together they are suggesting that you can get 20% off a new apartment, but only if you can find all the shadowmen. But how do you find the shadowmen?

Intrigued you jump online and go to the website. You arrive to a mostly black site with little detail that says “enter”. You hit enter and you are taken to a game. There is a small description on what the controls are but it doesn’t explain what you’re looking for. But because you’ve seen the billboards and posters you know you must be searching for those shadowmen. You also realize that the game levels match the scenes you saw in the TV commercial. After some time playing you realize that the game is very difficult if you don’t know where the characters are. So you think to yourself that next time you see the posters and TV commercial you will remember or write down where the characters are hiding. Using the information you have seen in the various posters and the TV commercial you know enough to find all the shadowmen.

Eventually you finish the game and are given the discount code and the link to the main website. So you can now purchase your new apartment with a massive 20% off discount.

Project 2 Proposal:

What I aim to produce for this project:

• · 30 second – 1 minute animated TV commercial made in Autodesk Maya. I will use Adobe After Effects for some final touches and special effects.

• · Examples of Poster Advertising

• · Examples of Billboard Advertising

• · Examples of the website and online flash game.

The TV Commercial will include a slow motion fly through of one of the apartments for sale. While the viewer watches the TV commercial they may notice little black “shadowmen” running and hiding just as the camera spots them. The TV commercial will also have music and text effects added in After Effects.

The poster advertising will include images of what the character looks like. They will be displayed in some of the scenes from the TV commercial. They will be displayed along with the message “Find all the shadow men. Get 20% off”.

The billboard advertising will be mostly blank except for the slogan “Don’t live in the shadows”. The website www.donthideintheshadows.com will also be displayed on the abstract billboard. I will also show how the billboards will be displayed in public spaces (e.g. Train stations).

The website example will be made to show how the over end campaign would work. Unless I get a lot of time It will not be a working website. The site will show how the game works and how the users play through the levels. It will include screens from the TV commercial as levels.

------------------------------------

The idea is to produce a campaign that’s abstract but also interesting. People can’t just get this 20% discount on the apartment they want to buy. To do it they have to figure out where the hidden characters are and to do that they need the information from the other advertising mediums.

Well. Back uni.. [sarcasm]Wooooo!![/sarcasm]

We have received the first brief for this semester and it is the follow up assignment after the second assignment last semester.

I am aiming to create a online/television commercial for a company who make 3D models of buildings to promote to clients. It is meant to showcase the companies work so the commercial will include 3D renderings.

As a twist the commercial is part of an advertising campaign labeled "Don't live in the shadows". The commercial will include little characters which hide from the camera. They are meant to represent people hiding/living in the shadows.

That is it for now but watch this space for more information..

EH?!

Treatment document? haha.. No idea.

Now to just to recap my research over this assignment.

Research
" What does "posthuman" mean?
It describes a sentient being that started out as a human or as a mind with a human way of thinking - and then by use of technology changes into someone who is no longer human. Such posthuman beings do not exist currently, therefore any more detailed description of what they would look like or how they would think and behave is pure speculation."
www.posthuman.com

"The difference between the posthuman and other hypothetical sophisticated non-humans is that a posthuman was once a human, either in its lifetime or in the lifetimes of some or all of its direct ancestors. As such, a prerequisite for a posthuman is a transhuman, the point at which the human being begins surpassing his own limitations, but is still recognisable as a human person or similar."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthuman_%28human_evolution%29

I also got my idea for the Federal Bureau of Human Duplication from the Department of Justice's FBI in the US. You can see evidence of my inspiration in my logo design.
http://www.fbi.gov/

"The overwhelming scientific consensus is that genetic determinism is false. In coming to understand the ways in which genes operate, biologists have also become aware of the myriad ways in which the environment affects their "expression." The genetic contribution to the simplest physical traits, such as height and hair color, is significantly mediated by environmental factors (and possibly by stochastic events as well). And the genetic contribution to the traits we value most deeply, from intelligence to compassion, is conceded by even the most enthusiastic genetic researchers to be limited and indirect."
http://www.puaf.umd.edu/IPPP/Fall97Report/cloning.htm

Kris Moyes, the director of the Presets' My People video clip also created clips for architecture in helsinki (heart it races), Wolf Mother (White unicorn) and Cut/Copy (Going nowhere). I like his work and the clonelike technique used in the presets video was my favourite. It's partly where I got the idea for this project.
http://www.kmoyes.com/

Dark Angel was one of my favourite TV shows a few years back in the year 2000. It is another reason I liked the idea of post human and the exploration into cloneing and experimentation on human nature.
"Max was bio-engineered in a government lab, at a facility called Manticore, sometime around the turn of the 21st century located in Gillette, Wyoming. As with all of their creations (exception of Joshua), Max has a barcode on the back of her neck, with her identifying number sequence (332960013452). She is an X-5 model and is thus referred to as X5-452. Max and her unit, her "brothers and sisters," named themselves back at Manticore, and sometime after she escapes, she assumes the surname Guevara."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Angel_(TV_series)

Stills
And finally, here are some still images from my final edit.

Submitted my assignment and it came out pretty good. Pretty happy overall.


Logo Design
This is my logo I created for the "Federal Bureau of Human Duplication". As you can see its roughly designed around the American FBI logo.

These are the Main menu and the Submenu for the DVD. As you can see it's keeping in theme with the rest of the project.

Well Another post today.. That must mean I've done some work! :P Anyway, here I'm showing off my proper storyboards and the animatic. Click on the storyboard images to inlarge them. Leave a comment if you can and let me know what you think.. :)

- Ben ;)

Hi again.

This time i've finally gotten around to posting the youtube videos that I said I was going to :P

I've used these videos as inspiration into my cloning idea and the way I want to film it.

Anz Bank Add


The Presets - My People


Rubber Johnny - Chris Cunningham (I like this because it is very dark and creepy. I'm planning on making my footage dark and jittery but obviously not this intense).


The style of secruity footage I want to show.. Bad quality but still viewable.

Research
" What does "posthuman" mean?
It describes a sentient being that started out as a human or as a mind with a human way of thinking - and then by use of technology changes into someone who is no longer human. Such posthuman beings do not exist currently, therefore any more detailed description of what they would look like or how they would think and behave is pure speculation."
- www.posthuman.com

"The difference between the posthuman and other hypothetical sophisticated non-humans is that a posthuman was once a human, either in its lifetime or in the lifetimes of some or all of its direct ancestors. As such, a prerequisite for a posthuman is a transhuman, the point at which the human being begins surpassing his own limitations, but is still recognisable as a human person or similar."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthuman_%28human_evolution%29

Possible Project Styles
- Video
- Stop Motion
- Flash / 2D animation
- 3D animation
- Drawing / Sketches

Ideas
- Cloning: Static background with one main person who over the course of 60 seconds multiplies into many. . .

- Robot: Human person goes about normal life and slowly morphs into a robot. . .

- Primitive: -Comedy- Human with all electronic devices and toys removed from his person goes into withdrawal and turns primitive. . .

- Extension: A human with technology as extensions of himself. Arms with built in Televisions and fingers with mp3 players. . .

Exploring Cloning
Is a human clone.. a human? Yes their DNA and genetics are all the same but it is something created with the use of technology. Does this remove them from the human category and place them somewhere else?

"Human cloning is the creation of a genitically identical copy of an existing or previously existing human. The term is generally used to refer to artificial human cloning; human clones in the form of identical twins are commonplace, with their cloning occurring during the natural process of reproduction. There are two commonly discussed types of human cloning: therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning. Therapeutic cloning involves cloning cells from an adult for use in medicine and is an active area of research: while reproductive cloning would involve making cloned human beings. Such reproductive cloning has not been performed and is illegal in many countries."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloning

The artificial side of human cloning is the area I am interested in. In the future it may be possible for people to be cloned (mindlessly or not) for the sole purpose of being an organ donor. People would be able to keep a copy of themselves for spare parts. In my opinion those clones would be classified as posthuman.

Storyboard Example


As you can see from the example there, I am exploring the relationship between humans and cloning in an response to posthuman.

Didn't get to upload the youtube videos. Ill do that next post. I think there is enough in this one for today anyway :)

- Ben

Well.... The brief was delivered last week and my first impression is that it's going to be difficult to make something original, yet interesting at the same time. I am looking forward to getting deeper into this topic and really researching the relationship between humans and technology.

My initial idea was to create something in a 3D design program which would give me the freedom to create almost anything in any environment, with no restrictions. However with a 4 week timeframe I don't believe it is possible to create something "polished" with proper audio. I've settled on a Video project and I am keen to explore Stop Motion. However stop motion will only be the result of a thorough story, which I've yet to complete. I'll finalise that later tonight.

My next post will include some of the research I've completed, including some videos I've found on youtube which are relevent to my project. I will also try and include my storyboards.

- Ben ;)

Woooo!

You heard right folks. I'm up and running!

There will be more to come.... That's the idea anyway.



Keep an eye on this space.