Finding Out How To Render

Today I found out that I have been rendering wrong for a while. It may possibly be because I did not take notes that were extensive enough, but Arturo informed me today that I cannot render with the Animation setting and that H264 was a better option. I also found out that closing applications makes rendering go faster. These may seem like simple things to most people, but it was a great revelation for me and makes it easier on my part. I also learned just how long it takes to render an animation. For my name project only being 8 seconds long, it is incomprehensible to me how long a full length animated movie must take to render. For Pixar films, I found out that it can take anywhere up to 8 hours to render just one shot of the film. The time it takes to create animated films and the patience needed to render is impressive and admirable.

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared... But Actually

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. 

Our Current Projects

So clearly working on these projects have been a lot of work and taken a lot of time. But after all of the work that we have put in, it has most definitely come a long way. The insert yourself into a movie project has honestly been the most difficult one. I feel as though it required the most amount of work just to be able to find a scene that it was even possible to insert yourself into.

Me doing Ferris Bueller, I thought that it wouldn't be too difficult. Clearly I was wrong when I chose a scene that was just about 5 minutes long. But that's not the point. The point is that learning to roto-scope yourself into a project will be able to help me out much later in life. Especially if I am able to possibly get a job working in post.

The name project and the intro project are also very time consuming, however, I felt as though we would be able to be much more creative and show our style and show what we can actually do and what we have actually learned in this class. The name project that I did was difficult and time consuming, but I feel as though it came out really good for the amount of information that I know.

The Dexter project that I'm doing is taking me the longest because I have my own footage that I am trying to adjust to make it fit into the intro. Being able to put cool effects into it also is time consuming because putting an effect that doesn't exactly fit can really hurt you and throw off the whole aura of your project.

Anyway, the point of this post was to talk about the projects that we are working on in class. Once they are done, I can't wait to show all of my friends that I was able to accomplish such a thing.

Green Is Not A Creative Color

After a week of vomit and emergency room visits, I fear that this week's blog post is going to be a little shorter than usual.


I thought it would be neat to look at the practical and post effects in "Don't Hug me I'm Scared"

The use of puppets is really fun. No little to no effort is made to hide the rods and sometimes even the puppeteer's hand is visible. The mixed visual media is great too. The animation and even live actors in puppet costumes dispersed throughout makes for a rather twisted viewing experience.

The post effects are mostly limited to animation, but in the sequel there are a lot more.

Green screen and tracking are used a lot in this one, most notably on the clock. His mouth is done in post, and the rods making his arms moved are edited out. Art wise, I adore how everything is made of felt and the fully animated  bits.

Both videos are very popular, and we might see another one in the works. I think if Becky and Joe want to surprise people though, they're going to need to make a video where everything is completely normal and nothing out of the ordinary or disturbing happens.

Symphonie Diagonale

The film begins with: "Made in 1924 by Viking Eggeling, SYMPHONIE DIAGONALE is the best abstract film yet conceived. It is an experiment to discover the basic principles of the organization of time intervals in the film medium."

Symphonie Diagonale is widely considered to be a one of the best early short animation films, leaving an imprint of the history of film. Done in the the style of art deco, Swedish director and famous Dadaist, Viking Eggeling explored motion using scroll drawings.

Since animation at the time was not in the mainstream of art, Eggeling originally framed his idea for the film on long scrolls of paper. He would paint sequential images on the scrolls as if he were painting the film itself. This abstract way of making film was closely tied to music, in new form that Eggeling called "Visual Music."

Visual music was borrowed from numerous times, especially from Bauhaus design students who embraced it as a new temporal design method. Often using jazz, this new form changed the minds of many well known German animators.

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. 

The Basics of Motion Design

Motion design is the most intricate and dynamic field of design. This video from the Hochschute für Künste (University of the Arts) Bremen introduces viewers to the many different aspects of motion design.

Ranging from color to sound, timing to physics, the video gives a vocabulary for discussing the art of motion. Taken by itself, the video covers so much in 23 minutes that it is worth taking notes on.

Freezing Time

I like this video not only because of the effects, but also because it talks about more than just that.  It talks about so really cool systems that can be used to control the camera.  With these systems shots can be perfectly duplicated and thus allows an editor countless more options with video effects and essentially giving him a free reign.  The coolest part of the video tough is at the end.  What they do is basically freeze time and move the camera around in it.  From what I have been through in animation from this class, I can really appreciate the amount of time, money and effort that must have gone into making this scene.  I currently don’t know how they did it, but trying to figure it out is half the fun!