Our pitch was received quite well during the last class. With a degree of trepidation, we stepped up first, expecting to be grilled. But instead we were guided through a ‘to-do’ checklist of our planned shoot.
I think our pitch went smoothly in large part because we were all aware our plan and we’ve kept it simple. I still believe that for a project with such a short turnaround time, the last thing we should attempt to take on is a documentary that requires a huge amount of character development, or multiple shoots. The Bus Museum is quite well contained, with all our shooting and interviews available to us in the one place, on the one day, allowing us to focus more on getting it right and then moving straight into post production.
After ticking all the boxes during our pitch, it was just a matter of confirming gear and dates.
Thank goodness for the helpful Resource Center lads. There’s some pretty expensive looking gear in the bowels of COFA’s C-Block and we made a good effort to book as much of it as possible. Flashy gear makes it look like you know what you’re doing, so the Bus Museum volunteers are going to think we’re pros. He’s some of what we’ll be taking along for the shoot (if you’re adverse to lists of tech gear, look away now):
I’m not totally sold on the Dedo lighting kit, but after explaining our shoot to the Resource Centre guys, I was told with conviction that it would do the job (and who am I to doubt the Keepers of The Gear). Either way, the warehouse has excellent ambient light (if the rain clouds disappear by the weekend) and the Dedo kit could give some nice highlights to the buses.
We’ve got a solid day of shooting planned, and have been assured that we’ll get to interview up to six of the volunteers, working at the museum. Potentially there are a lot of great shots in there, with some excellent characters to capture on film, so fingers crossed it all goes according to plan and we come away with a bunch of workable footage. There’s still time for one last group meeting before the shoot, so we’ll sit down to check off any last minute details, like transport arrangements and finalising questions for those we interview.
Development
I have been thinking a lot about the style of the shot composition that could work for this documentary. I’m still leaning toward the up close, almost macro style of Helvetica, although seeing some of Werner Herzog’s film, Lessons of Darkness in the lecture reminded me of one of my favourite documentary-style films, Baraka.
This is one of the better known scenes from the film and whilst it’s a bit heavy-handed with its juxtaposition of humans and battery chickens, it’s undoubtedly effective imagery in place of a spoken narrative. And all shot on beautiful 70mm film… if only!
I absolutely love tracking shots on a large scale. And within the huge bus warehouse, I think we may have scope to do just that. How it would sit alongside the closely shot interviews and cutaways of engine parts and bus badges is something that we may have to discuss after the shoot.
We moved on to dealing with the live input of a webcam this week. It’s a relatively small step within the entire spectrum of Processing functions, but it’s something that instantly offers up plenty of new possibilities when planning an interactive work.
Adding live visuals to a work is one of the clearest ways to let a participant know they are impacting on a work. The visual feedback is clear and powerful, and with the ability of Processing to store video and images as variables (hopefully soon I’ll have them sitting pretty in arrays too), there is massive potential for manipulation of input data.
So this week we were given an example sketch under the title of SlitSwipe, based on the SlitScan example by Golan Levin & Ben Fry.
Code Research
For myself, this was a tough week for getting work done. Having one of your best mates getting married can really get in the way of university studies. It’s definitely shown me that at this stage at least, coding takes a lot of time to get right. A good chunk of my study this week was spent scratching my head and trying to understand why something was not working as expected. It’s becoming a bit of a love/hate relationship now with code. The hate of not getting something to work is obvious, but when a project comes together right… the joy!
I’ve also really dug into both the Learning Processing book by Daniel Shiffman and the Processing Reference. I highly recommend Learning Processing to anyone coming to Processing without any coding experience. I bought Processing: A Programmers Handbook last year when trying to teach myself and it really discouraged me. Not because it’s not a valuable resource, but purely because I wasn’t at a level yet to fully grasp it. I think i’m now ready to take it on though!
So here is where I got to this week (I have no idea how this will work across web browsers, platforms etc – it uses your default camera input and is totally untested on anything but Firefox 3 on OS X)…
…not anywhere near as far as I would have liked, but this was one of those weeks that I just had to stop and let it be. Walking away is one of the toughest things I find with design. It’s not often that you’re ever truly content that your work is ‘finished’, particularly when you haven’t spent as much time working on it as you would have liked. If you download my sketch from this week, there is a text file included which outlines my incomplete process.
Concept Research
This video is from the Processing Exhibition page. It’s one I checked out a while ago, and my attempts at creating a type of ‘echo’ with this weeks Code Research led me to revisit it.
It’s a beautiful combination of performance, interactivity and sound. The echos of body movement are done in a quite subtle way, yet are still effective. I’d love to know how much is pre-programmed for this performance (thus relying on rehearsing the timing of the movements) and what is truly interactive, so allowing the performers to really experiment and do something unique for each show.
The word ‘echo’ has also reminded me of the first United Visual Artists’ video I ever saw (look for the Quicktime link under the image), called – appropriately enough – Echo. It’s what got me interested in the combination of spacial art and performance a couple of years back, and still sends chills down my spine today.
I’m also reading an interesting account of the history of new media in art (not surprisingly titled New Media in Art) which touches on a Dan Graham performance which may have been one of the earliest steps toward the ‘mirror image’ that is ubiquitous in much of video and interactive installation work today:
In Performance/Audience/Mirror (1975), Graham positioned himself in a performance space, his back to a mirror, facing an audience. He discussed his audience’s movements and what they might signify and then proceeded to face the mirror and discuss his and his audience’s movements as ‘filtered’ through the mirror. Issues of subjectivity/objectivity, the observer and the observed, audience and performer were engaged as varying and very subjective relationships. (Rush, Michael, New Media in Art p 63. London 2005)
The themes I started to focus on last week are clearly something that new media artists have been interested in for some time. I think this suggests that they are on a certain level ‘universal themes’ and therefore more than worthwhile approaching from what I hope can be a fresh angle.
The infernal bouncing ball, indeed. I stole that title from this excellent Idleworm page: a fantastic tutorial on how to get the bouncing ball look, through the eyes of a cell animator (warning, weird Flash errors might occur). It’s quickly becoming clear how important an understanding of basic animation techniques are before even setting foot in Maya.
Although totally out of my reach at this early stage, but something that fascinates me is the physics of modelling. It’s something I am likely to come across more and more, particularly in my work with Processing, so I had a little look behind the shades at a site that gives up some weird mathematical formulas to make you look like Tiger Woods, or something.
It doesn’t take long to see that there are a wealth of free resources out there for people interested in getting into 3D. It’s something I have noticed with most new media: it seems that there is a real culture of sharing ideas and experience with each other. Which of course, must be a good thing.
Work
I really worked hard to give my red, bouncing ball some character this week. I’m starting to get the hang of the controls within Maya (aside from the button on my Wacom pen playing up a bit – no idea if that’s Maya related, or to do with my pen), so i’m certainly started to enjoy working with the program more.
I’m starting to get a feel for both why CGI animation is so labour intensive and why there are still so many people keen to take it on as their full time job. This very, very basic ball sequence took me some time to get even remotely looking as though the ball had substance and weight, and I can only imagine how much more difficult this would be if I was dealing with a complex texture, like hair.
Having said that though, it’s like a little puzzle, that you need to unravel to get the ball bouncing properly. I’m a big fan of time consuming puzzles, so was happy to spend some time doing the homework for this week…
…yes, I still haven’t attempted to export a movie file from Maya, but fingers crossed I will have something a little less static next week, when we take on a biped character.
Inspiration
It was Disney that put together the 12 Principles of Animation and are therefore responsible for much of the style that we know as animation today. Obviously, their older, short animations are better examples of these styles, as they attempt to convey as much as possible in a brief amount of time. The more subtle uses of these principles, found in today’s feature length 3D animation films, are still indebted to their original concepts.
I don’t think there’s many better examples of our primary focus of squash and stretch, than this classic Donald Duck snowball fight (Disney characters and flying snowballs!)…
Dropping into my first Digital Video tutorial in week 2, I had to get myself up to speed, as well as finding a group to join. The first project of the semester requires us to create a short documentary, which will obviously be a team effort. Contrary to the prolific DIY culture of video sites like YouTube, creating anything with even minimal production values needs the input of multiple minds. Whilst this obviously won’t be a Bruckheimer-esque epic, the roles of filming, sound, lighting, research, editing and waterboy will be shared amongst the group.
Fortunately, I came to class with a concept, because it was something the other members of my new group seemed a little unsure about. In the footsteps of my bus and train crazy father, I suggested that Sydney Bus Museum would be an ideal subject. The guys that volunteer their time to run this museum are a perfect for a project with such a short turnaround time: they are passionate about what they do, so are usually happy to speak about it; they are constantly struggling for funding, so there’s an emotional interest in their story; and they’ve got cool old buses, which will look killer if we manage to shoot them properly.
Development
After sending through an email, enquiring about their interest, I was happily responded to immediately. The good news was that it seemed the people behind the museum would be quite happy to chat to us. The bad news being that the museum had been shut down just weeks ago due to issues with fire regulations. However, this provided an opportunity to create further interest in our documentary: telling the story of the volunteers at the museum and their struggle to keep the doors open.
Dropping in to the museum, it was even better than I had hoped. It’s one of those increasingly rare Sydney warehouses: filled with wonderful old toys and soft, beautiful light seeping through the roof. Quite perfect for staging our shoot. To give us something to work with when planning our documentary, I took a few pictures from around the museum…
The gentlemen we found working on the buses there were equally fitting. They seem only too happy to talk about their own experience with the museum, why they love these old vehicles and hopefully with some encouragement, they’ll chat about the hardships that the museum faces right now.
Reflecting on the warehouse visit, my first impulse is to film this in a similar style to the brilliant design documentaries by Gary Hustwit, Helvetica and Objectified. The latter isn’t quite due for release yet, but you can get a feel for it by watching the trailer…
Being a complete font nerd, I think Helvetica is a fantastic film. But it is also beautifully filmed, as well as spinning an utterly brilliant soundtrack. Some places are cut in a similar fashion to a music clip, but that aside, it’s generally presented with some serious flair.
I believe this style of filming would fit the documentary for several reasons: the cut-up editing will allow us to tell a story in itself, perhaps getting across more than the short duration time would otherwise allow; it will express the near-fetishism that these people have for their vehicles, much like the font and object designers have for their own work; and it will look sexy. That’s pretty much the most important point. Sexy-time. I know the macro, shallow depth of field thing has been done to death, but stuff it – I still think it’s awesome.
So myself and my ultra-talented crew booked in more gear than we could fit in the Tardis and are readying ourselves for an April 4th shooting date. It’s going to eat up some of our post-production time waiting for that day to come around, but sometimes you just have to sit back and wait for the planets to align before moving forward.
Interestingly, the examples shown to us in the lectures thus far haven’t given me any ideas on how I want my own work to function. I think the open brief entitled “Transforming Mirrors” offers such a wide range of possibilities, however, a lot of what we’ve seen so far feels a bit too literal.
I would love to be able to take the the idea of reflecting the participant and really turn it on its head. Somehow give something back to each person that is more an internal reflection, rather than simply showing them a pixelated version of themselves – no matter how processed that image may be. The obvious question is “how”, but I don’t think that’s one i’m going to be able to answer immediately.
This week we were given a basic Processing sketch that selected an area of a predetermined image and enlarged it to fill the entire window. This uses one of Processing’s inbuilt functions, copy().
One of the great strengths of Processing is the functions that are built into its library, and the ability to add to those functions, simply by downloading additional libraries offered up by many within the Processing community. I am hoping that through this course, I will get a better understanding of how to implement these functions, so I can being using features like the RWMidi library that I struggled with in the past.
Code Research
For the copy() function, I decided to keep this week’s work relatively simple: changing the square window selection into a magnifying glass shape; and reversing the mousePressed if() statement (which I thought was counter-intuitive as it was). Oh, and yes – it’s now a Java version of Where’s Wally?
There is some strange behaviour around the extremities of the image when magnifying, but this is relates to the way that the copy() function works: it needs to stretch the magnified image to keep the frame filled with pixels. I’m not a fan of this behaviour, so I wonder how hard it would be to create a new function that would work slightly differently?
I’ve also found out recently about the SVG file format, which is supported by Processing. It seems that standards compliant, vector graphics are actually a reality… amazing! So far, I haven’t been able to learn too much about SVG though: I downloaded Inkscape, but was quickly annoyed by its use of X11, so turned back to the dreaded Adobe behemoth, Illustrator. After tracing the Where’s Wally image and saving it as an SVG file, it resulted in something around 17MB – not really suitable for the web.
However, this is exactly the kind of situation that a scalable graphic could be fantastic: clear at both full size and when magnified. It’s something I’ll definitely be revisiting soon.
Concept Research
Whilst reading David Rockeby’s fantastic article entitled Transforming Mirrors, several broad thoughts came into my mind with regard to what I would like my final work to represent. These say nothing at all about how the work may function, or even how an audience could interact with it, but as an overall concept, it could help me in getting something to take shape.
Scribbled into my notebook, the thoughts came as follows…
Do we have as much control over this technology as we believe? This can be related to internet, mobile phones, choices on television etc.
Does the way we use technology say a lot about us?
Are we more open/honest through the relative anonymity of technologies than we are to each other?
How do we see ourselves and how do we represent that in the technology we use?
The first time I remember thinking about these concepts was when I visited the Requiem For A Dream website, back when the film was released. It was a fantastically subversive idea that, whilst not being quite as fresh these days, certainly had something to say about our own sense of control.
So, in combining these ideas with my first comment that I don’t want to create a ‘reflection’ as such, I thought it was high time to put this video of a UVA installation on my blog…
United Visual Artists are just about hands down my favourite group of installation artists. Their concepts and execution are impeccable, and I am particularly interested in the way that their technologically-based work can exact such a human response. As you can see in the above video, Volume not only responded to each of the participants, but also combined these responses, forcing each person to consider others that were moving within the work. Beautiful stuff.
I should precede this post by mentioning that I really have mixed feelings about doing 3D modelling and animation as part of my course. At this point, i’m quite interested to see how my thoughts about the subject evolve over the semester and looking back on these early posts, what I will think.
In my mind at least, 3D is a tough business. There are a lot of young artists and designers out there that are falling all over themselves to get into the industry, making it competitive as hell. Combine that with some seriously complex knowledge required to be a contender and you have a recipe for zero social life. Take what we were introduced to this week when opening Maya for the first time…
…it’s as though the interface has been designed by the same people who are responsible for the Starship Enterprise. Which is another reason that a passion for 3D eludes me at this point: it seems to have a distinct audience. Most of the amateur 3D animation I have been exposed to in the past has been, well, amateur. It takes a lot of work to get it to the level where it gains a life of its own and therefore an emotional response. And even if there has been a lot of work put in, that emotional response isn’t always guaranteed – take Final Fantasy for instance.
However, my glib critique of 3D isn’t totally justified. As with most of these technologies, as the hardware required to produce 3D becomes more and more accessible, the end product finds itself in more interesting places. Whilst not a new film, the combination of 3D and cell animation in Princess Mononoke (1997) is the kind of joining of technologies that really excites me (of course in part because it’s where I appropriated my DJ moniker from).
Work
Bouncing balls, bouncing balls, bouncing balls. It’s a staple of animation, apparently. Far be it from me to argue, so off I went to do some research and YouTube dished up a beauty. More bouncing balls than even my immense mind could handle…
More seriously, there are some quality bouncing balls in that clip. So I whacked a loop of it in QuickTime and watched it over and over until my eyes started to bleed. Rather than simple, linear looped bouncing balls, I decided that emulating a ball thrown against a wall would be far more interesting. So, from there I quickly sketched a reference (keeping note of the important ’squash’ and ’stretch’ keyframes) before starting work in Maya…
Taking things into Maya had an exciting added layer of complication, due to my wrist recently starting to play up. Yes, using a computer all day starts to take its toll on the fragile body. So, i’ve been trying to use my Wacom tablet as much as possible to decrease any risk of permanent RSI. Maya is one of those programs which if you find yourself accidentally mashing the keys in a fit of white-hot fury (which I have been known to do, once or twice in my time), you will find that your work has disappeared forever. Or, if you’re luckier, you’ll find it again, but your happy, bouncing ball has now turned into one of the soulless lead characters from Final Fantasy. Every key does something magical. So using this alien program with a graphics tablet I am still coming to terms with was… testing.
It’s probably for the best that I don’t yet know how to export movies from Maya, so you’re spared the jerky result of my bouncing ball for the week. However, I am finding the process quite interesting, and am looking forward to getting a better understanding of the physics of an object like this, so be prepared: a bouncing ball of awesome is in the works. In the meantime, take a look at a very static ball…
…clearly, it’s just begging to be bounced.
Inspiration
This has been doing the rounds on YouTube for a while, and whilst it’s not 3D modelling, it is fantastic animation and a downright beautifully executed concept. The idea of combining our 3D work with video capture is also something that appeals to me, so you’re likely to find some more videos along this line here in the future…
So this is pretty much as basic as it gets: primitive shapes. Just coming to terms with Processing’s coordinate system, as well as the basics of syntax within the Processing Development Environment (PDE). Points, lines, primitive shapes and stroke/fill colour…
It’s good fun though. And i’ll be commenting my PDE files as well as I can, so that if you ever would like to take a look at how I did something, i’ll make the sketch available for download and hopefully it will be clear what i’m up to.
Code Research
Being given a pre-existing sketch, this project was simply an exercise in understanding Processing’s coordinate system. However, because the existing sketch had its own set of physical rules (which I don’t yet understand), I had several false-starts…
The idea of this sketch is that clicking the mouse within the window can produce one of two different shapes. These shapes can interact with each other by crashing into walls, or themselves. I decided that each shape should represent two sides of the same coin, so my first concept was to create the Autobot and Decepticon symbols:
Not only was this time consuming, but the symbol would instantly lose its shape because of the physics within the sketch. So, i decided to strip it back to a simple, geometric shape, surrounded by an enclosing border:
Putting this together in Photoshop using the grid was quite simple and adding the coordinates in Processing was much easier this time around also. I grabbed a few sounds from The Freesound Project and this is the result. Warning: keep the volume at low levels.
Concept Research
I have chosen this link as inspiration for the week, because of its relationship to physics within coding, and of course because it uses Benny Hill music. There are obvious parallels to the Springy Shapes sketch, however this is not strictly related to Processing – it is a library for open frameworks – just another example of the community out there, that is only too happy to allow others to use their code…
There’s nothing quite as sure to keep you popular in the opinion polls as handing out free cash. In a measure reflected around the world, our generally underwhelming head of government, Kevin Rudd, is handing out around $900 to most people across the country. As the cash bonus gets dished out over the next month, it seems that everyone already has plans for what they’ll be doing with it. And i’m certainly not going to buck the trend.
It has come at a great time for me: i’ve just returned to university for the year and need (well, maybe ‘want’) a few new geek-tools in my ever-expanding arsenal. First on the list is a new external hard drive. I’ve been thinking about this one for a while, as my excellent LaCie Rugged has nearly evaporated through use as my OS X Time Machine drive. It was always supposed to be a music-only drive for taking to gigs, but I never got around to purchasing another.
After spotting an article at Scott Hansen’s blog about RAID devices, I thought this might be the way to go for dealing with the graphics, sound and video onslaught that this uni year will bring – not to mention taking some pressure off my LaCie and MacBook Pro. In my research, I came across this excellent looking G-Technology G-RAID2 (they’ve updated to the G-RAID3, but the price jump doesn’t justify the addition of an eSATA connection for me). Using this bad boy as my Photoshop and Final Cut swap drive is going to make life much easier. And i’ll be netting myself a tidy 1TB of extra storage space. Good times.
I’d also like to thank K. Rudd for allowing me to update my uni-related software… First of all Pro Tools. Bloody Pro Tools. I know there are a lot of lovers of PT out there, but most of them come from a film sound, or live sound background. Not me. My first experience with sound production was Ableton Live and for me, there is nothing as intuitive and enjoyable to use on the market. Not to mention stable: PT has been a nightmare from day dot on my MacBook Pro. It seems that Digidesign, the makers of PT don’t care much for their lowly light-version customer (PT LE), and would rather release a new version than fix what people are already using. Let’s hope that it works this time, because i’m not looking forward to another semester of battling my software to make the most basic of sounds. ‘Industry standard’ doesn’t hold much weight these days.
Finally, i’ll be grabbing myself a student subscription copy (lasting around 12 months) of Maya. I’ve only spent 2 hours with this program in my first tutorial of the semester, but already I can see that not having a copy at home will leave me at a disadvantage. I have no real desire to pursue 3D modelling and animation as a career path, however I can see that a good understanding of the concepts within Maya could be helpful at some point. Only time will tell if it’s another Pro Tools-esque program that will bring those grey hairs on a little bit quicker.
So, Mr K. Rudd, I would like to extend my thanks to yourself and your well directed vote grab… I mean financial stimulus package. As a young student of this proud country, i’ll be injecting 100% of it immediately into the ailing economy and nerding it up like i’ve never nerded before.
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