Evolution of Earth's History

I found this cool animation of the evolution of time. I'm kind of a geek and I find history to be awesome so when I found this video I thought it would be appropriate for this class. I don't think people understand truly how long humans have been around compared to Earth's history. This animation puts it into a more visual understanding. You can watch the video here

History of Pixar

Pixar Studio, originally a step child of Geourge Lucas has been popping up in conversations around me recently, so I decided I might look into the history of the creation of this animation studio.
Lucas Arts, an American film and television production company, was focused on innovative special effects since it was founded in 1971. Working on major motion pictures like Labyrinth (1986), Indiana Jones(1981), and the Star Wars Trilogy (1977-1983) Lucas film had a reputation as one of the most advanced special effects houses in all of Hollywood.

Lucas saw special effects as something to paint your films with. The technologies we had were the colors, and the effects were only the parts that added flourish to the story lines. Lucas had found himself always looking for ways to make his effects better, and cheaper.

Although Lucas was never "interested in computers" his company was one of the first to try using this new color in filmmaking.

At the time, in order to do any kind of digital image processing, you needed to find a way to get your image into the computer. Lucas was trying to solve the issue: "How do you get in and out of the Computer." digital Image processing was the promised land for filmmakers because not only would film scanned-in and manipulated in the computer be free from any generational loss (Negative Quality) but mistakes in the original photography (such as lighting on a blue-screen element that was inconsistent with its background plate) could be corrected without the costs and time delays of reshooting.

Lucas approached Ed Catmull in 1979 and asked him to head up a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital audio into the entertainment field. With funds dwindling from Dick Shoup, a millionaire in New York (The majority of his money from starting the New York Institute of Technology) Catmull was looking for a way to incorporate, and continue research in 3D modeling. Remember at the time 3D was very basic, and thinks like texture mapping, lighting, and polygon manipulation were almost nonexistent. In 1979 Catmull became the Vice President at the seminal Industrial Light & Magic computer graphics division at Lucasfilm.

A few years later (1984) John Lasseter, also joined the Pixar team at LucasFilms after working on Tron (1982). 3D is a very expensive animation style, and at the time George Lucas was in the process of splitting funds with he recently divorced wife, so he was forced to cut funding to the Pixar group.

As Lucas's assets were being disseminated, Steve Jobs stepped in. Jobs had already turned down a position with the pixar team in 1984, and seized this opportunity to acquire the division instead. With new funding, Pixar found itself back on it's feet and became it's own company.

For more information, and a more in-depth timeline see: The Pixar Story

Disneyland...the Series?

I had been planning on writing a blog post on Disneyland even before class today, and now this episode in particular is even more applicable to what we've been talking about.

Disneyland, which would eventually become The Wonderful World of Disney on ABC, aired for an impressive 54 years. In 1954 the series was created in order to help fund the creation of Disneyland park, but it wound up being so popular, that it continued to air until its finale in 2008. When it first began, the series showed the inner-workings of Disney and the animation industry/process. The episode that I linked to in this post happens to be a brief history of animation up until when Disney as an animation giant really emerged.

The best part of the episode is that you'll be able to see some of the devices we were talking about in action, as well as see a couple other people who were really instrumental in the initial development of animation. If you like this, I highly recommend you check out the rest of the series. While a lot of it is obviously very Disney-focused, it gives a really great insight into hand drawn animation. I know for me, it gave me a whole new sense of appreciation for how much work goes into these films, as well as how far the craft has come.

Walt Disney

This video was shown in another class of mine and I find it relevant to what we do in Motion Graphics.
The Story of the Animated Drawing is an episode of the Disneyland television program. Walt Disney is explaining throughout the vid the history of animation. In the 1950's, animation for a movie was much more difficult. Everything for a cartoon movie was done physically by hand. There is a person devoted to changing the scenes by using the kinetograph and other devices as well as a person devoted to music. The most interesting part is that the audience had no idea how much work was put into showing that movie.
   

I tried making a simple flip book with a stack of post-its, it wasn't impossible but it was definitely time consuming. Also you can't take the post-its apart because the adhesive wont stick the same and it wont be aligned perfectly. Fun task but imagine having to make a flip book for an entire episode of a show. Tough work! we're fortunate today to have all these programs with plugins that make our life so much easier.

An Educational Video on Faking It

As many of us know, Hollywood's latest technique for visual effects has been to green screen as much as possible. It makes it much cheaper and easier to get the exact look the director is going for. In today's world it's a generally accepted technique that is used across the board.

But how did we get here? Someone did not all of a sudden realize we can replace a green curtain with pretty much anything we want. This advanced technology has only been prominently used in the last 40 or so years, and many other techniques were used before the green screen. So how did they do in old-fashioned classics like Mary Poppins?

Watching this film today we may just assume they used a green screen to film this scene. But it was actually something much more complex. Before green screen was so popular, there was a technique called the "sodium vapor process". Basically, the background was lit with a very specific shade a yellow that a special camera could pick up and then turn into a black matte. It's best explained with this picture:

The only tragic part about this was that there was only one camera in the world that was able to pick up this shade of yellow and it was owned by Disney. How did I come to learn about all of this? A few days ago I came across an awesome video that actually taught me a lot about the history of visual effects. It was made for a program called "Filmmaker IQ" which seems like yet another online resource to learn the ins and outs of filmmaking. I highly recommend watching this video all the way through (it's only 17 min). Take some time out of your day and learn about something interesting!

Here's the link to the entire lesson the video was made for:

http://filmmakeriq.com/lessons/hollywoods-history-of-faking-it-the-evolution-of-greenscreen-compositing/

Stop-Motion: Then and Now

Stop-motion is a creative form of film making where several pictures are put together to simulate one fluid motion, similar to regular filmmaking, except stop motion usually uses inanimate objects that must be moved by hand for every single frame. Stop-motion is appreciated simply for the immense amount of time it takes to create. In the height of production for the feature film Chicken Run, it took 1 week to put together just a minute and a half of footage. The entire production took over three years.

Today I'd like to to share two stop-motion videos, one very old and one very new. The new one, made in 2012, is called Proteigon. It combines the use of stop-motion and After Effects to create a very visually stimulating piece. Not to mention the song is awesome and fits perfectly. 

Okay, so pretty cool right? Now watch this video. This one was created in 1930. It may seem pretty corny and poorly made at first... but keep in mind this is 1930 and the just the idea of stop-motion is mind-blowing to a lot of people. They also did not have After Effects or any other fancy programs to touch up their work. Just raw pictures being taped together. The most impressive part starts at 1:45 if you want to skip ahead.

It blows my mind that they were able to do this in 1930. Even though the new one looks cooler and is (in my opinion) more entertaining, the older one is by far more impressive. Because stop-motion is so much more work then regular film making, it's seen as novelty content. If you want to dress to impress, go stop-motion. 

History of Motion Graphics

I found a website with some pretty interesting stuff on Motion Graphics and what it is. It has a lot of cool videos from older movies and TV shows (including Adam West). This guy also gets into how he made a demo reel in order to find a job. So I guess Arturo was right for once (just kidding, don't fail me Arturo) that a good demo reel really does get you places. Check it out.

I'm Older than After Effects! (Just Barely)

Over the summer, After Effects turned twenty.  Given that this was a big milestone, there has been a lot of history coming out about the program, that I thought would be interesting to post here.  Development on After Effects was started in June of 1992.  It was created by the Company of Science and Art, and codenamed "Egg".  Version 1.0 was released in 1993 under the name we all know, "After Effects".  With After Effects' recent anniversary, screenshots of the original interface have been popping up.  Let's take a look:

Image Credit: Daniel Wilk via Motion League

The thing that I find most interesting about this screenshot, is that if you look past the old-school mac interface and the floating panels (which are still part of the Photoshop interface, among other Adobe products), remarkably little has changed.  Sure, the tool set has expanded dramatically, and After Effects has grown exponentially more powerful now that we are up to version 11.0, but the fundamentals are the same.  There is still the project bin with all the media, effects controls, the layers panel, properties, and timeline (now combined under the timeline panel); all the basics are there.  There are even more similarities if you take a look at the 1993 After Effects Demo Reel...

Besides being an enlightening look at the graphics and music of the '90s, you can see that all the basic tools used by graphics artists on a daily basis were all there.  There are masks, text, layer styles, keyframe animation, even 3d layers, all on display.  This is not to say that After Effects has not improved, but rather to show that the basic core functions are still used and relevant.  Just for kicks, I'll leave you with one more bit of After Effects history before wrapping this up: An unopened AE 1.0 box.

Image (and box!) by redefinery.  Check out their scripts, they're useful!

And here are some other interesting links pertaining to the After Effects anniversary or it's development (or both).

• The Ae & Me blog, celebrating 20 years of After Effects
• The Ae & Me video interviews
• Pro Video Coalition's After Effects at 20
• Screenshot and thoughts on After Effects 1.1

FOOD FIGHT!

I thought this video was pretty cool when i cam across it.  It depicts all the wars throughout history using food.  I could only tell a couple, try and see how many you can distinguish.  The artist used after effects and photoshop and after three months ended up with this.  The film looks like stop motion, but he created this in after effects by moving the food within the program.

What battles were in this film? CLICK HERE

What do the foods represent? CLICK HERE

History of the Green Screen

Since this week we're all planning to shoot on a green screen I thought I would look up things about its history. I found this cool video that briefly goes through the developments in special effects technology. It's a pretty interesting history. For example, the very first compositing was done with double exposure techniques back in the 30s.

Another cool piece of information in the video was why the industry switched from using a blue screen to green. It accompanied the switch from film to video. The clip says that blue screens work better with film and green with video. One reason is because in video cameras, there's more information in the green channel than the blue.

For any Star Wars fans, there's a section starting at 3:06 on special effects in the movies. In particular, The Empire Strikes Back used new techniques that made the final film look much more realistic.

History of Title Design

I noticed a lot of people in our class are doing projects inspired by titles they've seen in movies. Good titles are really memorable so it's a really good thing to learn how to do well. I'm also interested in titles and I came across this video that shows the history of titles in the media.

One thing that's cool about this video is that you can see how certain titles influenced others. Saul Bass' influence is noticeable as well as the Se7en titles. Towards the end the variety in titles and the creativity is  incredible.

It's worth watching if you're interested in title design.


A Brief History of Title Design from Ian Albinson on Vimeo.