The work of our peers

Nearly every blog I read is about these professionals who produce movies, games and shows in similar programs as us. I wanted to blog about something different this week but I wasn't sure what....I signed on Facebook today and scrolled through my newsfeed. I saw that Will Gelder posted a video of some rotoscoping work that he has produced.
It is important to acknowledge the people around us and also learn from them. We all have a lot of talented friends and forget that they are easily accessible and may be willing to help us. (which is better than watching a tutorial.)
Below is Will Gelders work:




Our professor Arturo Sinclair also has some work published on the internet that is pretty neat.
Below is his work:

Fibonacci's Sequence and The Golden Ratio

95% of the time, I hate anything involved with math. Like most TVR majors, it's never really been my thing; and that's perfectly ok. I realize that almost everything I use in my day-to-day life involves math in one form or another, but I kind of just don't care.  However, every once in a great while, I have to admit that math does something that really, truly impresses me. This is one of those moments.

A few weeks ago, Arturo talked about something called the Golden Ratio. I'd heard of it before, maybe in a middle school math class or something, but I decided to a little more research on it to see what I could find. I wasn't disappointed. In a nutshell, the ratio is based off of the Fibonacci Sequence (each number being the sum of the two numbers that come before it) where any two adjacent numbers in the sequence, if divided, form a ratio of 1.618. This ratio had been proven to be the most pleasing ration to the human eye. TVs used to come in a ratio of 16:10 (now they're most common in 16:9, which is still pretty close), as do credit cards, and even older iPhones and Ipod Touches. This isn't a coincidence.

What I find to be really strange, however, is how often this seemingly random pattern appears in nature. A great article on io9 points out how the Fibonacci sequence shows up on everything from flower petals to seashells to hurricane formations: even spiral galaxies, an unfathomable amount of distance away from Earth, have this shape, this ratio. It's unexplainable. If you search for this on YouTube, there'll be plenty of scientists and mathematicians trying to explain what's going here, but there will also be lots of crazy people trying to make some connections that just aren't there. It's crazy, and I just think it's so so cool.

So there you go. It doesn't have a whole lot to do with animation or motion graphics, and I understand it about as much as I understand how to use After Effects, but it's something to always keep in mind. If you want to make something look good; like, really good; use the magic, golden ratio. Everything else in the world does, so why shouldn't you.

Here's the link to one last article from the Guardian.

Ben Radatz making the king of cool cool again

Who is the coolest smooth operator of all film history well in my opinion it's james bond. But even though the emotional nostalgia that keeps me re watching Dr. No will have me eternally faithful to Sean Connery. Bond was reborn and he had to be cool again. One of the things i expect to see in every bond movie is an Awesome opening sequence. Designer Ben Radatz co founder of  MK12 a motion graphics and design collective produce my favorite bond sequence to date. Its a modern twist on the classic bond imagery silhouettes of  the secret agent poised ready to shoot. of course it has tons of sex appeal and is fluent with the background track  by alicia keys and jack white titled another way to die.


I love how the camera transitions to different scenes so seamlessly nd the combination of live action images and cgi is fabulous.

to get better at something do that some thing.

If you ever take a moment to think about what you are best at you would probably realize it is what you spend the most time doing. weather thats writing, drawing, building, playing a sport, or even a particular video game. Its a fairly simple equation in my opinion the more time you put into something the more adept you are at it. I was talking with a friend of mine comparing different software and talking about how we learn them. I was honestly surprised when he said that he didn't like using tutorials from youtube. to me almost every software i've become proficient in is because of direct use of tutorials. I found this one earlier this week and have been playing around in after effects. just to get my time in the program up. i feel that if you are not taking advantage of the thousands of tutorials online you are really missing out.

I have always been in love with stop animation. it was actually the first projects I made as a young lad. but a few months ago a co worker told me to watch this short animation by James Davenhill from bad apple media. i find it really beautiful and sad in that good way. I hope you enjoy it as much as i do.

I may be super late to this party but over the summer for the first time I watch the Movie Avatar by written an directed by james cameron I originally wrote the film off as a block buster that i wouldn't be interested with too much cgi. but when i watched it i found my self happily surprised with the movie and even got a little teary eyed at certain points it was only after i was done watching the film that i realized i forgot that so much of the movie was basicly a cgi cartoon that really blew my mind because normally i can pick up on things like that. that movie came out almost 5 years ago its exciting to know that motion capture and animation technology has advanced beyond even that.

Let's Get Smokey

So I've spent the past couple days devoting all my time and energy to my Fiction Field final project, a film called Dog House. It's awesome, and it looks GREAT. I can safely say that despite the sleep deprivation, I loved working on this film. I'm so happy I got to spend so much extra time on After Effects, because I can definitely say I feel a lot more comfortable using it, as well as more confident in my color correcting capabilities.

Apart from coloring the film, I also did most of the graphics for it, including the intro sequence, which required a smoke .mov file I downloaded for free from a free stock-footage website courtesy of videocopilot.net. By following this tutorial, I was able to quickly and effectively adapt the smoke title lesson into a great title sequence for the film.

I've looked at a few other videos by this guy, HPnoticTutorial, and he's pretty good. His accent can be a little hard to understand at times, but so long as you increase the player quality to 360p you're good to go. 

So yea, that's it for this post for me! I'll see you all tomorrow!

(Also, the Fiction Field Production 1 screening is from 10-12 this Saturday, December 15th, so be sure to stop by if you're free! It'll be a great time!)

Blog Post 1: Interest in Animation

In high school I took a computer class where we learned about tons of different adobe programs. We mostly learned about Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash.  Messing around and learning to use Adobe Flash was the coolest thing to me. Getting to make a stick figure come to life, or a car drive off the screen was awesome to 15 year old me.  I convinced my teacher to let me have a copy for home so I could work on school projects and teach myself how to use the program better.

That was my first experience with animation, and even though they were very short and rough around the edges, I was very happy that I found something that I actually really liked to do.  Last semester I took a Flash Animation class and found that I still loved doing homework in that class and would spend much longer than I had to perfecting my animations.  While other people had stick figures that would glide across the screen, mine would walk.  If I cut corners and did the bare minimum, I could have still gotten an A. But I would know that I could have done better.  I wouldn't be proud to show it to anyone if it wasn't the best I could do. That led to a lot of late nights and extra effort that I tended to not put into  my other classes.

I'm not sure if I really like doing animation, or if I just can't stand when it looks bad.  Either way, there is a passion there that I don't have with a lot of other things that I do, and the way I look at it, that is something I need to pursue further. The first day of class I said that I didn't know what I wanted to do yet for my career.  This Motion Graphics and Animation class is the next step for me in narrowing down what I want to do. Since I am a TVR major, I am hoping that one way or another, I will be closer to figuring out what I want be when I grow up.