Space Jam

Last week I was wandering around Walmart when I stumbled into one of their big baskets full of movies on sale. After a little bit of rummaging, I found a childhood favorite of mine, Space Jam. This classic was about Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes playing basketball along side Michael Jordan against a group of evil aliens.

As a kid this movie stood out to me because it was one of the first movies I had seen that mixed cartoons and live action. Now, nearly 20 years later, animation has advanced significantly. Yet watching the movie is still impressive. While it may not look as realistic most of the other CG movies today, that is part of the point of Looney Tunes. They are cartoons and live in an animated world where anything is possible. That being said, when looking at Space Jam compared to any of the classic Looney Tunes cartoons preceding it, you can't help but see a drastic difference in quality. In Space Jam, the characters do look more realistic, and a lot more 3D. I think most of this can be attributed to the use of lighting and shadows used in the animation. The background also looks fairly realistic. While you can tell it is animated, it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.

While this movie may be fairly old at this point, I still think we can learn from it. While it may not be the most technologically advanced, it definitely shows the progression of the Looney Tunes since 1930.

NBA 2K15 and Face Scan Technology

The new iteration of the NBA 2K series just came out, and although it's mostly the same as every other version of the game (except better graphics), one new feature they added this year is the ability to scan your face into the game using the Xbox One Kinect or Playstation 4 motion sensor. This way, when you play through the game as your own personal character, you can actually look like a video game version of yourself, which is simultaneously incredibly creepy and really cool. This has been done in video games before; I can remember in other sports games the game would use a camera connected to the system to take a picture and create an in-game model similar to your real life appearance. However, the result always looked horrible. Nowadays, video game characters look alarmingly realistic, and the motion sensing technology of things like the Kinect make face scanning pretty simple:

Of course, this is the 2K sponsored YouTube video promoting the technology, so of course it's gonna work flawlessly in this video. Still the scanning looks pretty realistic, which is scary considering this kind of technology is only going to get better and better.

Still, the face scanning is nowhere near perfect, as illustrated by this fairly hilarious video:

My god that's terrifying. So the potential for face scanning is not quite reached yet, but it's getting there. This made me imagine a future where you can put yourself in almost any video game, which is pretty cool to me. I'd definitely like to run around in Call of Duty or Battlefield as myself killing terrorists and whatnot, but that's just me.

How about some 3D

So I was scrolling through Facebook and I came across something that we were discussing in class. The basketball team, the Cavaliers, had taken the 3D effect idea that is usually used on buildings.

The effect was actually really cool. Now don't get me wrong I have always liked this kind of stuff. Making an immovable object look like it's moving and being morphed into something else. The effects that they had used truly blew my mind.

I have always wanted to learn how to do something like this. Even if it is just super simple, I have always wanted to do it. It would make for a cool party or concert intro.

This use of 3D effect you see in a lot of movies today. For example, a movie that I saw recently had used this: Now You See Me. It fit nicely into the movie because the movie was about Magicians and to make a scene like that, just fits well.

It takes a lot of work to create something like this. It requires projectors as and a lot of graphic movements in order to make the building actually look like it is being moved around and transformed. In this case, the basketball court was the object that was being transformed on. The breaking effect, the cubing effect, all of this is done with projectors and just calibration onto the basketball court. Absolutely amazing.

Since the video is on Vimeo I can't post the video like a normal YouTube video but if you click HERE, you can watch it.

NBA Jingle Hoops

This is a commercial for the upcoming release of the new Xmas day NBA jersey's and NBA Xmas day schedule. The reason I am posting this is because if you watch the original video and the behind the scenes video, you'll see how the crew used a bunch of green screening and computer effects to put this together. This relates perfectly to what we've been doing in class, as they took a few real objects and seamlessly merged them together to make the entire video, the wood floor is generated, the area is computer generated and the shots themselves are actually generated as they used the actual footage as more of a reference and then tweaked them to the beat of song jingle bells. I thought it was interesting how they shot each person separately and then merged them into one single scene to make the video. I recommend watching the finished project first before watching the behind the scenes clip, both are great and very interesting.

Nice Job Andy

A few days ago, I went down to WENY-TV to talk with them about interning there next semester. I met up with Andy, a former IC grad, and he showed me some of the stuff that they do there. He told me that when I'm there next semester, we'll be covering a lot of high school basketball. He wanted me to get a glimpse at what it will be like so he showed me a reel of high school football from a few months ago. He bragged about how he made the opening in after effects before he showed me the video. I was ready to be blown away with what a TV "professional" could make. Then he showed me the video. Needless to say it was pretty cheesy. You can observe the cheesiness yourselves. Let's just hope I get better with after effects so I can make them a better opening next semester.