The Sims 4

....I mean.... I don't have any idea how they do the animation in The Sims franchise, but I do know that it has developed a lot over the years, making Sims and their environment look more and more realistic in my opinion. One thing I don't seem to like as The Sims develops, though, is the amount of "stuff" we get without actually buying Stuff Packs and Expansion Packs (and new to Sims 4: Game Packs). It seems there's less and less stuff with just the original game. Unfortunately, I won't be stopping anytime soon and they'll probably get more of my money....my Sims are more successful than I am and somehow that makes me feel somewhat accomplished, too. Not to mention, I like making sims of all different types and exploring the options with each of their aspirations, careers and family.

In my opinion, the best things about The Sims 4 are:

• The ability to manipulate their body types by clicking and dragging on their actual bodies, 
• Emotions. Though it angers me that when there is one dirty dish in the room, my sim is suddenly disgusted, there is so much good about this feature. You get different actions depending on your sims mood, and they can be Sad, Happy, Tense, Focused, Inspired, Confident, Energized, Fine, Flirty, Playful, Angry, Bored, Dazed, Embarrassed and Uncomfortable. The the funny facial expressions and the ways the sims walk that come from each emotion is pretty cool too. 
• The Get to Work expansion pack. Never have you been able to actually go to work with your sim, and getting promoted is part of game play. So it's pretty damn cool to finally be able to do that. 
• All of the different skills you can gain. Things like guitar, piano, violin, rocket science, gardening and a TON of others. It definitely adds to the game play, 

Anyhow... I think I'm going to go play Sims for a number of hours now, WOO.

Real Life FIFA Game

I'm a very big soccer fan and I follow MLS (Major League Soccer) religiously. A few days ago the new FIFA video game came out called EA FIFA 16. I don't know if any of you guys play any sports video games but the animations and movements that are involved in making the game is incredible. One of the improvements to the new FIFA game is that they had Lionel Messi come into the studio and they animated him while he did some tricks around the studio. They then took his movements and put into the game so while playing, his movements would be more real towards what he does in real life. It's explained more in this video:

I'm also a huge FC Dallas fan and to help advertise for the new game, the MLS channel decided to put head to head an FC Dallas player vs. a Vancouver Whitecaps player and have them do the games in the FIFA video game in real life. So in the video, they made it look as if they were in the video game but instead it's real life. I honestly thought for the first minute that I was watching a video game. I think it's a pretty cool video. You can watch that here:

The New Old Video Game

As someone who plays video games (when I have the time) I find it embarrassing that I haven't thought of this sooner. Animation has always been the most important aspect of gaming. The visual components that make up games are what initially attracts us to them. Nowadays it's all about realism. How much more realistic can we get? Releases like Square Enix's "Final Fantasy VII" are (and always have been) pushing for hyper realistic settings and characters. The attention to detail such as the aged look of the armor, individual strands of hair, and amazing world building are what draws people to such games as this.

And for many players this is a practical escape from reality (not so much in the fact that you have super human abilities but rather it's easier to lose yourself to someone who looks more human). However new indie games are popping up with interesting takes on old classics. This year at E3 Studio MDHR released a trailer for their new 2D platform game "Cuphead". With advances in 3D animation it's rare to see 2D work being as widely received (like how Disney shut down their entire 2D department), however "Cuphead" beautifully marries old 1930's styled animated cartoon characters with the fluidity of current animated shows for what looks like a visually pleasing anomaly for a "Old Meets New" video game experience.

                                    

Machinima

Last week I mentioned the production company RoosterTeeth, a company responsible for a number of popular web series over the last several years. One of their most popular and well known series, Red vs. Blue, makes use of a technique known as machinima. Machinima refers to the use of real-time graphic engines to create cinematic productions. Most often, the engines used come from video games, effectively connecting machinima to video gaming culture. Many people consider this kind of production as animation because the creators are essentially using computer graphics. What makes machinima different from more traditional animation is that the animators are controlling each character and acting out the necessary movements in real-time. To get an idea of what that might look like, check this episode of Red vs. Blue that RoosterTeeth made using the game Halo: Reach.  

The Halo series is very popular among machinima makers, given their numerous multiplayer maps and the Forge Mode, a game mode that allows players to create their own structures within maps. Other popular video games for machinima include World of Warcraft, The Sims, as well as Half Life 2 with its numerous third party generated mods. Machinma is a cool way for video game fans to make exciting ideas and bring their fan fiction to life.

Thank You For Playing

During my time interning for POV Films, Thank You For Playing was easily one of the most beautiful films I had the opportunity to watch. This film follows an incredibly loving family in which the father, Ryan Green is creating a video game called That Dragon, Cancer. The game incorporates their day to day struggles with their son, Joel, who is battling a cancerous tumor in his brain. The film follows the family's life and how they are coping and celebrating Joel's life through the game. A  large part of the film is watching Ryan translate the intense and harsh reality they live in, to an interactive animated 3D universe. The process is tedious but the fruit of their work will leave you in tears. It is revolutionizing the way stories are told in video games and the kinds of games being told through video games. One if Ryan's missions through this game is to get people talking about cancer and show that people effected by it directly or indirectly are not alone. Below is the link to the website for the game.

 http://thatdragoncancer.com/

 As for the film, it's not another hopeless film about a kid with cancer that is just terribly depressing the whole time. It's a story portraying what an unconditionally loving mother and father will do for their beautiful child and how you can turn something so awful and unthinkable into a beautiful work of art. I have watched this film twice and ended up crying more the second time in addition to an hour after I turned it off. It really is a powerful film to the point where you feel like you know Ryan and Joel personally and you just want to give them a hug.

http://www.thankyouforplayingfilm.com/teaser/

Inserting Actors into Video Games

I recently posted about the improving technology video games have been using to transport the player's face into the game, as with NBA 2K15. Probably an even more exciting development in recent years is the alarming accuracy with which video games are using real life actors. Graphics are getting so good nowadays that we can accurately put an actor's face and performance into a game and have it look realistic using motion capture. The most recent and probably best example of this is Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's use of Kevin Spacey during it's campaign. This is the first time I believe a real life actor has played a main character in an action video game where they played the character the same way they would in a movie. This is definitely the first time graphics have been good enough to translate their facial performance this accurately, and Kevin Spacey seems to have taken his role more seriously because of that. Here's a spoiler-free trailer:

Another recent example of this was in last year's Battlefield 4. This example was much less high-profile than Call of Duty's but it featured one of my favorite actors, Michael Kenneth Williams. This one was almost cooler for me because he played one of the player's squad-mates through the campaign, as opposed to Kevin Spacey's mostly cut-scene role. Here's some scenes with Michael Kenneth Williams in Battlefield 4:

This stuff excites me. I can definitely see a future where using the likeness of real life actors as characters becomes a common thing in video games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. These two examples are only the beginning. 

Video Games and Motion Capture

When you think of motion graphics and animation, I bet your first thought isn’t video games.  But they use a technique that is seen in many other areas of media, even film. A technique seen in a movie such as Avatar, is motion capture. Motion capture, to put it at it’s most basic form, is aligning the movement of physical people to a character. This means a person’s movements can be recorded and rendered into a virtual character’s.

   It’s an extremely fascinating technique that has proven to produce a new form of content creation. For video game makers, animators, and filmmakers alike.

A Look at the New Super Smash Bros

Hey everybody!

It’s me again. This week, I won’t be talking about a show, but this time rather, a video game. I’m pretty sure everybody who grew up with a Nintendo 64 will know what I’m talking about when I mention the new Super Smash Bros game. This is a game that I grew up with and my childhood, and back when this game was new, the graphics weren’t very sophisticated. Now with this fourth sequel, the scenery looks like something out of a storybook, and the characters look even more real; You can see Charizard’s arm flexing as it prepares to attack, you can see the stitching on Mario’s overalls as he runs, and you can see the newcomer, which is the new Pokemon, Greninja (who is awesome and is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle that I always wanted) move it’s body like an acrobat and so fluidly. The camera angles makes the action seem so much more intense and almost 15 years ago, graphics like these were a complete pipe dream (pun sort of intended because Mario used to be a plumber). The graphics for this entire commercial is absolutely incredible and this is definitely something I would love to do for a living. If you’re a video game kind of person, it would be a sin for you to not give this game a look.

Freddiew/RocketJump

Im sure he's been posted on this blog a million times, but one of the most impressive and most popular displays of animation excellence on YouTube has to be Freddie Wong. His newer YouTube channel is called Rocket Jump, but all of his older stuff is still on the "freddiew" channel. If you're a fan of video games or action movies, his videos are sure to entertain you, and the effects he uses in his videos always look great. His videos get millions of views each, so he's no secret, but here's some of my favorites:

These are all really well done and show some creative and funny uses of After Effects. The Epic VFX Time video in particular was great to watch again after a couple classes, knowing now how I might approach creating those effects. The rain of guns looked exactly like the particle effect we were playing with Tuesday. I could be wrong, but I'd guess you could turn those particles into almost anything. That idea alone gets me excited to keep playing around with AE.

Retro 8 bit video game title screens

Came across this video and I think it would be pretty simple to recreate some of these ideas.
From what I've learned thus far I can see that TheStrangermedia on YouTube uses 3D texts shadows/reflections. The moving sky with clouds at 0:22 seconds could've been done with loops. The final game title shown looks like it was a still image first and with some masking it was manipulated to move in a simple fashion.




This is another cool video with some finger tracking/tracing done in after effects. I have an idea of how this can be done but I'm not 100% confident that I can recreate this. All the different shapes, particles and beams would probably need their own layer, thus making this a huge file with a long list of layers. This commercial is very smooth and visually appealing. The cool thing is that with the raw footage of the finger movements, so many different effects can be thrown on to this.

Design in Mind - Concept artist Feng Zhu interview

The concept artist that I hold in highest regards, Feng Zhu talks a little about his design influences and where he draws inspiration from when producing his own work. What most people don't realize is that it is easy to make drawings look unbelievable and fantastical. It's much more difficult to make the audience believe what they're seeing could be real. In order to achieve this believability, you have to refer to resource materials with images meant to inform. Using these visual libraries, one can pick and choose elements from these direct sources to manipulate and combine in ways that are creative, innovative, and yet, familiar to the eye.

What fascinates me the most is his ending statements about becoming a better artist. The more you do something, the better you'll get at that something. In an age of convenience and speed, people look for shortcuts or tricks to become better as an artist. Yet, a fundamental element remains the same: time and practice are the only means to getting to a high level of expertise. Feng Zhu states this bluntly, yet beautifully.

Video Game High School - RPG & Opening

(NOTE: For the purposes of this post, only watch the first 2 minutes and 30 seconds of this video.)

Video Game High School, a fantastic Kickstarter-funded series by Freddie Wong, depicts a world where there is a high school... where you play video games. That is legitimately all you do. A whole world was created for this purpose, with the high school's classes ranging from "Sniping 101" to "Advanced Kart Racing". All-in-all, the world is pretty believable, all the way down to the pizza-in-a-can-from-a-vending-machine.

In this first episode from the second season, the show opens to the main characters having a bit of an adventure in an RPG, "questing". A couple of the characters fire off their own versions of attacks, all of which have a bit of After Effecting done to them. One character pulls out a lute, playing a melody which travels all the way to the girl, who is an archer. She then looses her arrow, the camera following it in slow motion all the way to the attacking brute, freezing him and allowing him to be shattered into hundreds of block-like pieces.

As for the opening, it's all quick titles and transitions set to music, but it's all very smooth and pleasant, both to look at and listen to. Freddie Wong and his colleagues did a fantastic job on this series, and it shows.

EXIT 73 Studios: Coin

     Recently I was scrolling along our blog page and stumbled upon the link to the site Motionographer. I found a short little animation called "Coin" created by a small animation and motion graphics company in James-port, NY that specializes in animation production and graphic design. "Coin" was directed and animated by Chris Burns with music, sound design and composition by Bob Fox. "Coin" is a 2D 8-bit animation that plays homage to games from the past. The animation takes the viewer on  a nostalgic journey through many environments such as underwater and outer space that include references to many of the games in our early childhood which inevitably faded out due to better technology. While only a team of two EXIT 73 Studios stands tall among its peers with its precise animation, overwhelming creativity and lastly experience to keep the company moving in the right direction. Chris Burns has been an animator for over 10 years working for prestigious clients such as Disney, Fox, Adult Swim, Comedy Central, MTV and Nickelodeon. Additionally Bob Fox partner of Burns has worked for such clients as Disney, Nickelodeon, MTV and IFC. Enjoy as "Coin" takes you through some of the most memorable video games of all time.

Exit 73 Studios

                 


A few other examples of EXIT 73 Studios notable works:

                  

                    

Game Grumps

First of all, let me explain about Game Grumps. Game Grumps is a channel on YouTube with two well-known internet celebrities, Egoraptor and JonTron. These two play video games and talk about random stuff that happens during their day. Egoraptor and JonTron are fans of many video games and decided to play them together to their combined fanbase.
These two play without a camera to show their faces, so all their fans hears them playing, but not see what they're doing. That is where this video comes in. This video is one of many that drew or animated spoofs of the Game Grumps, using various voice clips from their videos. This one is one of my favorites, since it's a dramatic movie trailer spoof, while in reality, they're just playing video games.

nope.avi

This video is called nope.avi, created by the YouTube user, Jimbomcb. It is a parody animation from the video game, Team Fortress 2. This video was made in 2010, yet it has gained over 7 million views to this date. Throughout the internet, this video was used as a response to many things instead of just saying "nope". This is a random video in my opinion, but watching it for the first time made me chuckle a bit. It's short, it's simple, it's just weird.

HelixSnake - Game Glitches/Mods

This video features a mod from the video game, Grand Theft Auto IV, by the YouTube user, HelixSnake. The mod is that the player throws a cigarette, yet it functions like a grenade, blowing things up around it when thrown. HelixSnake also produces videos that exploit game glitches from games like Skate 3, Saints Row, and more. The first time I watched this, I laughed for a few minutes. I know silly videos exist on the internet, but this is ridiculous. I guess it's because I play too many video games. The games he modded are from the PC version, as they are easy to edit than their console counterparts. Check them out if you like!

Dorkly Animations

This sprite-animated video is one of many from the site, Dorkly.com. The site also features articles, pictures, and more. They are mostly known for their sprite-animated spoofs from popular video game series, such as Mario, Legend of Zelda, Banjo & Kazooie, and more. Dorkly also has a YouTube page featuring their videos. The sprite-animated videos are quite funny as they show usual ideas that happens in the video game universe. I enjoy their videos, except that some are quite vulgar, so beware of that before watching their videos.

Machinima - Sonic For Hire

This video is the first of many from the series, Sonic For Hire, made by Machinima. Sonic For Hire is a sprite-animated series that follows Sonic and Tails, the hero and sidekick from the series, Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic is in a rut after being fired from the game company, SEGA, and will have to find some odd-jobs to pay his monthly rent. Throughout these odd-jobs, he meets game characters from other video games, such as Mario, Pac-Man, Dig-Dug, and more. It is currently one of Machinima's popular series, as it reached up to 6 seasons and is currently continuing. This is one series to check out if you enjoy loads of video game references.  

Mega64: TODD & AARON'S GAME AWARDS 2012!!!!!!!!!

While the title of the video may seem a bit... insane, this video shows a lot of what we did in class on Thursday.

This video was made by Todd and Aaron of Mega64, a series of videos that would combine video games and the real world together.

As you watch the video, you can easily see that the guys are using a Green Screen. It's possible that this video was edited with color keying in After Effect or any other editing software. In some parts of the video, there has been a "Track Camera" motion used as the background would move with the characters (mostly in the end of the video).

This video is about two guys yelling and over-exaggerating about what's the best game, characters and more hilarious things.

I suggest you check this video out, but beware, there is some colorful language!

The Glitch

So this may or may not be my last post on this site and I wanted it to go off with a bang. Attached are two videos by a YouTube group called Corridor Digital (and their secondary YouTube account all about how they make their videos). The VFX in their videos are great and they even show off the stuff they do for us viewers so we get more of a personal connection with the group. They're located out in California and they post a lot of videos. Happy Hollandaise Sauce and a Merry Candlenights to all!