The Don't Hug Me I'm Scared series, created by Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling, started in 2011 with the first episode. It just came out with the fourth episode on Tuesday and will be coming out with more soon. It starts off imitating a children's show through the use of singing and talking puppets, but the themes quickly become dark and absurd through psychedelic content and disturbing images.
I love the juxtaposition of the simple, seemingly innocent intros with puppets and song with the uncomfortable and scary ending that makes you question pretty much everything in life.
(These videos are not for the faint of heart.)
The first episode focuses on creativity and prepares you for feelings you will be getting for the next ones:
The second episode focuses on time and is my personal favorite:
The third episode is about love:
And here is the newest one, centering about technology/computers:
Becky and Joseph have won three awards, attended 12 festivals, and many talks for their great work and impact they've had on viewers.
You guessed it! Rendering yet again. I don't know what it is about it, but I find it so fascinating. I think it's because of all of the computing power that goes into things like this. ANYWAY. I decided to make this post about the rendering related to James Cameron's Avatar.
Now I was looking through some articles and though I wasn't able to find how many frames were in the film, I was able to find how much storage was used to store the movie. While looking at the article, I found that it took 1 PETABYTE of storage. To put this into perspective, take 500 2 Terabyte drives and put them in a room... That's a Petabyte. Talk about huge. The place that rendered this is the same place that rendered King Kong and Lord of the Rings. You KNOW that this is a high class place when you hear those two movies in the same sentence.
Onto my favorite part of these articles: The computing power of these facilities. In the article it states that there are 34 racks of 32 machines. Doing some math that equates to 1088 machines. But going even deeper, there are about 40,000 processors and 104 Terabytes of RAM. TERABYTES OF RAM. That amount of ram is so much RAM, I can run 15 different video games, most likely 3 times over. Needless to say I couldn't even dream of that much RAM in a machine, let alone under one roof.
A small tid bit about this too: Cameron had a 300 million dollar budget according to this article. The storage alone for this movie would have been in the millions. That's just plain ridiculous.
If you want to read the article I got this info from, it's right here.
While I have
very little experience working with animation, I have come appreciate the
immense amount of time an effort that goes into making the various title
sequences that help films and television shows standout. For instance in
the Bond franchise each film has its own unique opening sequence
style and theme that helps set it apart from its predecessors.
One of my
favorite pieces of animation growing up were the various guide entries of BBC's
1981 adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. One
of things that stood out to me in researching these animation sequences was the
fact that they were hand drawn rather than created on the computers of the day.
Today everything is animated via computers.
Today with programs like after effects and maya we are capable of creating entire three dimensional life-like worlds. After seeing Alex Roman's Third and SeventhI was truly astonished to learn that the entire video we watched was one hundred percent animation. This realization both shocked and amazed me for two reasons. One, the fact that this one man was able to accomplish this by himself in the course of one year. Secondly, the thing that slightly scares me about this is the potential that if someone had a large enough team and equipment, they could easily fool the untrained eyes and blur the lines of reality and illusion. While this may sound like something out of a dystopian science fiction story, we're probably not too far off with all the technology currently available.
While this I don't think I have that level of dedication to create the same quality of work as Roman, I am looking forward to working this semester. Seeing the work of Roman as well as some the videos of the previous versions of this class has given me something to shoot for. Although motion graphics and animation are not my primary areas study, I hope to continue dabbling in this field after the semester is over.
For those of you who like to go back and look at past posts on this site, here's a video I found a while ago of an interview with Rod Lord.
So I decided to make this post about something that Arturo mentioned towards the end of the class that really sparked my attention: Render-farms. It peaked my interest because I LOVE computer stuff and hearing it made me think about it and want to look more into it. So away we go.
Doing some research online about what a Render-farm is, I come across a slew of images.Taking a look at these, clearly the range in size from small enough to fit into filing drawers or large enough to blow your mind. That's what they would look like. However, when you hear the words "render-farm," I'm sure you're curious to know what it actually is. The simple definition is a large number of computers all wired together in order to render large videos. A more technical definition, according to Wikipedia, the higher the quality of the images and videos, the more processing they would need to keep that quality. When an image needs more processing, clearly more time is going to be needed. So in order to shorten that time, having more computing power does just that. The more computers you have and the more power you have in each of said computers, the faster the rendering will be completed WHILE keeping the quality that you want.
So in retrospect, if you want a feature length film that is shot in 1080p to be finished by a deadline in a week, a Render-farm is most definitely going to be in need.
