Why James Cameron waited to create Avatar

James Cameron's 2009 blockbuster hit, Avatar stepped over boundaries that had not been crossed in the cinema and CGI world ever before. Nominated for 9 Academy Awards, and winning 3, Avatar is also the #1 All Time Domestic movie ever, and the #1 All Time Worldwide movie. But what made this movie so different than any other, and why was it not done sooner? As a matter of fact, James Cameron wanted to release the movie in 1999 because he had the story complete, but did not have the proper technology to complete it until it was released in 2009. What convinced him that CGI effects had progressed enough is when he saw the motion-capture CGI animation that was done to Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. The movie is more than half CGI, and each frame of the CHI scenes took an average of 47 hours to render. When I was in London this past fall semester, I worked on a Sci-Fi list documentary where I was able to help find extensive facts about the movies that we were given and able to contact people to interview for the documentary. I researched Avatar extensively and was able to find out this amazing information plus so much more, and was astonished by the achievements and advancements that were made throughout the process and production of this movie. Here's a few of the videos I watched to learn more about Avatar. 

My internship last spring was with a music promotion company and Rose Betts was one of the artist that we worked with. I worked and promoted the launch of her new EP, where they did a first sneak-peak of this video of her stand out song. She was describing the amount of time she poured in this doing stop motion and thought to myself different ways she could use the after effects program to her advantage in this situation.

Its strange to think about the different perspective I've had watching this from a year ago to now. I hope to maybe do a project to a song of maybe a poem instead of a typical title sequence. I have learned this week how important movement and audio are when working together. I want to learn more and work with audio more to express visually the feeling the song or sound is conveying.

Animation is impressive

Coming into this Motion Graphics and Animation class, I can confidently say I know nothing about animating. I've never used After Effects or Maya before, but I plan on being able to improve my skills throughout the next few months of the year. Animated movies have always been a very important part of my life, especially Pixar and Disney movies, and I have always found animators to be some of the most talented people. When I was in London, I had an internship at Objective Productions, where one part of it was finding facts about different animated movies, including Shrek, Frozen and Bambi. It was interesting to view the commentary on how they created Frozen, a very recent Disney film to how they animated Bambi, the first Disney film ever created. The content that I viewed showed me the evolution of cartoon animation and how everything used to be drawn by hand while now everything is digitally animated and it can take days just to animate a characters hair! Overall, animation is something that I really admire, and I am excited to become more knowledgeable on how to create certain things for all of the projects that we are going to do in class.

Here is the link to the Frozen documentary I watched: 

https://vimeo.com/105934014

And here is the documentary on Bambi I watched: 

Tilt Shift

Christopher Schaarschmidt took 12000 pictures with his camera in a national Park in Saxon, Switzerland and created a miniature story of the area and set it to music, manipulating the depth of field.

Small Life in Saxon Switzerland from Christoph Schaarschmidt on Vimeo.

Christopher collected the photos throughout five days and compiled them to make a stop-motion type video that shows scenes from the town. These videos are very popular and I found it here, a site that shows some really amazing examples of this. The tilt-shift technique can be done with a special lens, but it can also be created on your computer. It mostly involves creating a focus point, usually in the center of the footage, and blurring everything around it.

Below is a simple tutorial on one way to create tilt shift (a more simplified version then some of the others I found)

This is another amazing one I found that takes place in London using 25850 images! The site also included instructions from the creator of the video.

Poetry Fuses with Motion Graphics Underground

As a way to repay the London commuters for putting up with all the delays and repairs as they prepare for the Olympics this summer, the London Underground tube system has developed short videos that will be playing in their stations. The videos all contain a poem that is aided by a short motion graphics animation. The project is called "Words in Motion" and will be playing for two weeks, it's being sponsored by Smile for London. They are hoping to renew an interest in poetry and writing through interesting visual cues; the animations also act as a way to catch commuters attention. The writings are by famous writers and a few have come through amateur submissions while the animations were done by some of the leading English animation companies. These top animators transformed them into 20 second typographic films.

An article in Stash Magazine noted that the artists were given no information about the prose when they selected which one to animation. This blind form of art ensured a more emotional engagement, as well as more democracy, for the artist about the animation. The aim is to produce inspiring and surprising work.

The sampling of the videos that they've put online have aspects of some of the things we have looked at for class. The second one (containing the alliteration) is one of the typography videos that mixes a word starting with c (shown in the middle) with a background pertaining to that word that seems to spread out of the word itself. All the videos will have a different style that mirrors the mood of the poem or literary piece.

SfL: Word In Motion Teaser from Smile for London on Vimeo.

Smile for London is also responsible for other art movements and projects that include visual animations. Here is a video that aired around last year as part of one of their campaigns.

Liam Brazier from Smile for London on Vimeo.

A video on vimeo that contains all of the animations (running about 18 minutes) can be found here.

Projects, Life, and Motion Graphics

Hey All,

I just wanted to use this last blog post to reflect upon the things in class. When thinking back to how much a didn't know before I took this class, I finally realize how much I've learned during this class. I came in with no knowledge of motion graphics and now I feel like I can basically get things done, on my own, with no assistance from google or other people. For me, that feels like an accomplishment. As a video production concentration, I feel like a more well-rounded student. This class has also inspired me to take on a few project on my own and in my own time. I'm going to be studying in London soon and what I hope to do is take my Nikon N80 film camera, a couple rolls of film, and just take photos. After I come back though, I want to develop the rolls of film myself and upload them online. I think it's kind of a personal/adventure/nostalgic project. I wish everyone luck in their future endeavors and projects!