It feels just like yesterday when I went to see WALL-E in theaters. The favorited animated movie originally came out in 2008, as a production by Pixar Animation Studios. Even though the film was released six years ago, it's message still holds true: we must take care of the Earth if we want to live there in the future. The story follows a robot named, WALL-E who's sole purpose is to scour the Earth and clean up the remaining waste.
The existence of humans is referenced for a brief amount of time, but the main focus is on the journey of robots within a new universe stemming from environmental unconsciousness. Ironically, it seems as though humans have gravitated to a seemingly "robotic" and repetitive lifestyle: lack of exercise, processed foods, and constant media consumption. While on the other hand, robots have been tasked with the daunting goal of cleansing the world while humanity lives in a starship planet. What makes this animated film standout from all of the rest, is that the robots are designed to model physical human traits (eyes, hands, feet, etc.) and display emotions, rather than words to express themselves. As the movie progresses, it becomes evident that the robots understand the full meaning of free will.
It would behoove us to take a page out of WALL-E's book and do our part to preserve our home: the planet Earth.
One of the things I'm most excited to play with more in After Effects is animation based on music. I (like most people) am a huge music lover and transitively a big fan of music videos when they're done well. I think for certain albums, more artists should consider creating visuals to go along with entire albums as opposed to just certain singles. I saw a lot of potential for this in a video released by producer Flying Lotus a few weeks ago, which was essentially a preview for his upcoming album "You're Dead!". The video basically shows snippets of every song on the album with a little trippy visual for each one. The animation is all based on the music and fits the album very well. The video is not on YouTube but you can watch it at this link:
(WARNING: Lots of flashing lights do not watch if susceptible to seizures)
Flying Lotus is no stranger to setting his music to animation. Here are a couple other examples:
These are more quirky little videos. Each tell a story and each have an art style that is truly unique and fitting of the music it's made for. It's a ton of work, but this is the type of stuff I'd have a lot of fun making.
By the way, the new album "You're Dead!" releases October 7th, but it leaked over the weekend. It's absolutely amazing, and I definitely recommend checking it out (and buying it when it releases). My roommates and I have been each listening to it and promptly getting our minds blown.
The Transformers trilogy is absolutely awful. Like most of Michael Bay's 'films' they are one-dimensional action flicks trying to disguise themselves as something more meaningful. Sorry Bay, but you're not fooling anyone. There's not a single Bay film that I have found cinematically pleasing, nor have I ever found a reason to commend the director, except for one exception.
While I do not necessarily agree with Bay's style of filming or directing, there is at least one thing he's done right all these years (besides managing to perfectly resemble Michael Bolton): hiring an excellent team of visual effects specialists. More specifically, I'm talking about the Transformers movies. While I find them to be terribly painful to watch, there is certainly something to admire about the films. The visual effects behind the absurdly complicated alien robots is simply breathtaking.
To start off, Destroyer, an enormously impressive creation found in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, took 72 hours to render...per frame! Pretty crazy, huh? Let's be honest, though. Anyone can make something that takes weeks to render. That's not the impressive part. The impressive part is that the single Transformer was put together by 6-8 individually created, incredibly detailed vehicles. Imagine how long that would take you to create. Now, imagine how long that would take you to create a second time once your director told you it wasn't good enough. I can only assume you'd be pretty upset with that news. Essentially, the animators were instructed to go back and make the machines twice as detailed as it already was, and THEN to reconstruct the final robot with all 6-8 individual pieces.
Another kudos for Bay goes to his ability to bring in practical visual effects. On the set of Transformers 2, Bay was able to bring in a sizable number of military vehicles (tanks, bombers, F16s, you name it) to fly over set, drop flares, and just add some level of believability to his otherwise ludicrous film. Bay is also a fan of on-set explosions. They're dangerous, yes, but they make for one hell of an effect. It also saves quite a bit of postproduction time and effort. Speaking for anyone who's ever worked postproduction on a film, we all greatly appreciate it.
Bringing it back to postproduction visual effects, the aircraft carrier scene of Transformers 2 is also quite an impressive feat. I never really gave it much thought, but much more than most people would ever expect went into this scene. The team shot actual burning miniatures and debris with blue screens that were later composited into the completed animations. The people on the carriers were a mix of animations and people who were shot tumbling and falling. The aircraft were created by the animators as well. Basically, thousands of pieces were created for this scene simply to be destroyed over the course of a minute. It's like being a kid again after taking hours to build a LEGO model just to have your younger brother completely and utterly demolish it.
Animation is a crazy field to go into. It's often the defining point between a film's success and it's downfall. In Michael Bay's case, it's really the only thing he was able to do correctly.
