*A collection of Stills from the different scenes of "I Am."* Approach: First, I would like to mention that last week I made a mistake in the amount of content in the short. I happened to actually have 4 sections of words rather than 3. I miscounted, my mistake! Now, for this week I went through and chose color schemes that I thought would work for each scene. Above you can see some examples of the ones I chose. The scenes colored for clarity and the toon-shader's rendered quickly with the Deadline application in the labs. It can render via Maya-Software render as well as Arnold. I haven't rendered out an Arnold pass with ambient occlusion, but the toon-render looks very fitting in my opinion. I have a question-mark after 'sound?' in the title because I'm not sure if just having the static noise is enough to push the scene. While watching my animatic I happened to notice that each section could have either some soft sound effects or some sort of ambient sound attached to it. Choices Made: This week I began rendering fully completed scenes. I also made some changes to some scenes that I did not feel I had time to animate, but still wanted a 'complete' product. I once had a professor who said to me, "Get it to 80%, and take a short break before getting that next 15%. You'll never make it to 100[%] because perfection isn't real." I made some decisions about the color keying of the animation and the lighting behind the meaning of the imagery. I hope that people will ask questions about the somewhat intentional compositing of scenes. I don't want to explicitly say anything about what I interpret the scenes as, because I am more interested about their reaction to the imagery and their interpretation as well. *An evolution of my awkward enthusiasm.* Inspirational Sources:
I had a tough time this week with contemplating my presence at ACCAD. But, speaking with professors from the Design department and ACCAD helped change my perspective. I felt a sense of relief while asking peers in the department if they thought I should continue. They said yes, and another wave of confidence came. It seems funny that it is coming so late in the semester, but I feel pushed even harder in the right direction now. I consider having the other graduate students a blessing; I'm not a religious person, but they are supportive until the end. I re-watched "Over the Garden Wall" this week. It will always be one of my favorite cartoons, as it is evocative, inquisitive, full of metaphorical inquiry and philosophy, and beautiful storytelling with wonderful animation. Questions Raised & Needs:
Next Steps: Continuing forward this week, I have to finish compositing the scenes together, consider the changes to the words between the sections of the film. I've thought about having a moving pattern in the background for the sake of making them less static. Maybe having an item from each scene in a diagonal pattern with brighter colors would help with conveying a foreshadowing before each section. Hopefully the rest of the week is as productive as this last one. -Taylor Olsen *Still from 3D Animatic for "I Am." Ironically, as the preceding 'I am patient with myself' statement says, I am trying to be patient with myself and the ideas forming from this short.* Approach: This week I began with creating and compiling more scenes together and made some decisions which scenes were actually important to the short if they were included. I have ultimately decided to remove the scene of "I am good at my job." and "I am alive." I also have decided that using Arnold will take up too much time for rendering and have decided to switch to Maya's Toon Shaders. I also went back and made some tweaks to Chuck's animation, making his visible front arm less static. I also went ahead and added in the rest of my animatic playblasts into the template animatic. Choices Made: The decisions to get rid of specific scenes have stemmed from the fact that I feel like I do not have time to model, animate, and composite these scenes. I also think that including these scenes takes away from the animation itself. To me, the text representation of the phrases seems a little too ambiguous for the short. I think sticking with 'Patient, Happy, Healthy' will help pull back from being away from the main scene with the narrator for too long. When watching the scenes, it almost felt like too much time was being wasted on scenes that wouldn't help pull the philosophic narrative back to the introduction scene with Chuck. *A visual representation of Plato's allegory of 'The Cave'* Inspirational Sources:
I gained inspiration this week from the allegory of Aristotle's cave. I feel like this instance of being unaware of the outside world and every aspect of beauty, form, and reasoning is a good metaphorical relationship between the setting of Chuck's initial spot. the window represents the exit to the cave door, the stands of the birds are the tiers of how close we become. The difference in the height and the more ornately decorated stand resembles our proclivity to to be more susceptible and willing to accept the pleasures in life and remain close-minded to what's behind the curtain. Questions Raised & Needs: This week I need:
Next Steps: This week, I just want to keep working. I have spent a good amount of time forgetting to take imagery of my work process and what renders I attempt. I need to be more proactive about documenting as I go, even if that means opening up my blog during the week and continually adding before Sunday. I have taken advantage of my own work time, but when I choose work time over my relationship with my Fiance and family, it becomes and issue. I have mentioned this week that I will be extremely busy and don't have the time to fully pledge myself to my outside influences. I feel a connection to the readings because of this, there is a term for a person in this type of situation, it is called an 'ethical existentialist'. An ethical existentialist is someone who pledges all their time to work and doesn't factor in family, friends, or free-time. This is their reasoning to live. I am not regarding myself as this, but sometimes it feels like I'm dipping more and more into this pattern. -Taylor Olsen *Chuck (render) still from short "I Am."* Approach: I began this week by creating the complete mouth set to Chucks dialogue for the short. There were a few issues with having the slider control but the key-frames interpolated as "Toggle Hold". Some of the frames between the mouths wouldn't actually stay as the set key-frame and would switch halfway through. This caused a headache, my only solution was for these frames to be hand-keyed until the next sequential mouth appeared. I also began to color and prep some intro scenes for rendering, just to test out lighting schemes. I think the intro scene is the most important, as it will be seen twice throughout the film, and to me appears to represent the philosophic abstraction behind the visuals. Choices Made: I imported Chuck in Maya and began to deal the issue again of transparency of Arnold rendered scenes. Once I unchecked the "opaque" box in Arnold, and changed my naming convention of PNG sequence from _01234 to .1234, it read my sequence correctly and I was able to get the shader to work as needed. It was because of my naming convention having too much frame padding (i.e. [_#####] vs [_####]) and also because of my use of (_)underscore rather than (.) periods. I also decided that changing the audio wasn't the best idea, and decided to keep my original audio. I have also made the decision to cut out some the ending lines at the end of the intro scene. This will leave the intro with a little more of a pondering thought rather than a, "it is for you to decide. now without further ado, repeat after me" (excluded from final output). Inspirational Sources: My inspirational sources this week include being at the open house for ACCAD, and seeing how everyone was happy and ecstatic to work with projects that were happening. I worked with Lipman, a Design student to help showcase her app and collaborative work with professor Price. She worked closely with him on the layout, many people had positive comments and nothing to say when questioned about how the app could be improved. I noted more technical issues and some small anomalies and workarounds while playing with the interface. I was also helped by fellow students on what artists or researchers have done work in visualization that deals with the condition that animation can triumph over text where text fails to succeed. This being realized through animation isn't easy, but considers the implications of using the medium of animation to learn about key ideas/theories that aren't necessarily given a second glance because of imposing information. A classmate (Zach W.) led me to some different researchers in the field such as Greg Smith, Manovich, and Peter Greenway.
Questions Raised & Needs: I have been suggested by my professor to ask a fellow classmate named Lakshika who would be able to aid in the creation of procedural-generated and animation-cached scenes in the short.
*A rendered still from the combined 2D & 3D intro scene of the short, "I Am." [Arnold Render]* Next Steps:
Honestly to just keep working towards creating the short. Change my render modes if things take too long (Arnold takes a while, Toon does not). Consider changing small body motions of Chuck if I think something looks awry. Try to completely render first scene and attempt to try out Toon shaders for backup. Assess how lighting can play a vital part in the opening scenes as well as the others. -Taylor Olsen *An example of a mouth-phoneme sheet for reference. the red line is the mix of the two mouth shapes that I needed to create for Chuck's lip-synch to work properly.* Approach: During this week I created more assets for the short. I had personal apprehension to create any assets this week, but sitting down and having a podcast or a background noise helped with putting my mind at ease. It felt good to accomplish a good amount of work and scene creation. I also completed a few scenes regarding asset creation and continued to test and animate Chuck's mouth. I did a quick test of me saying "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." to make sure that I could animate his mouths correctly. I found that it looked like Chuck was missing one syllable in his mouth files. I watch a few difference cartoons and it was a form of "AH" but with the edge of the lips more in an "OO" position. For the sake of the dialogue looking weird without this mouth position, I added it into the rig. In Maya, I used more of the MASH plugin to make the pile of pills to work for the scene with the baby bottle. If I would have a successful attempt in creating this asset, I decided that I could use MASH for the scenes with the bananas and the pile of money. Choices Made: I reworked most of the audio file that I initially created to make it sound more surreal. I added an echo effect to my voice and added a second track on top of it with a different pitch to give it more of an overarching narrative effect. Before it felt like it was too quiet and boring. I'm hoping that the echoing voice will help the audience with remember what was said, almost like a passing thought that won't leave the head immediately, but give it more time to interpret a meaning. I decided that I would create my own assets for the short instead of using free online models. I wanted to dust-off my modeling skills and get back to understanding more of the knitty-gritty of modeling in Maya. I created a single chain-link and duplicated that among the 4 different spots that it would happen to connect to the central platform in the baby-bottle scene. I also used this method in creating more of the ornate decorative objects that were adhering to the bird-stand in the first scene with Chuck. The scenes are relatively easy to create, as they only have a few assets and don't need a high-level of complexity in order to get the point across. Inspirational Sources: This week I attempted to find relevant sources in philosophical-abstraction based on humor. Unfortunately I didn't find anything that pertained to this, but I was recommended a video from Maria called "Is the Man who is Tall Happy?" In this film he attempts to recreate the conversation from himself and Noam Chomsky. Noam is mainly talking about the evolution of language in people, often citing how we as children know much more than the naked eye can perceive. The director of this film also wrote and directed "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", a psychological film that dealt with the memory and emotional disparagement that comes with it.
I feel like the sources I have been finding have been much more text-heavy speaking about the implications of using a more visual-based model in creating philosophical abstraction, but no actual proof that it has been done. This film of "Is the Man who is Tall Happy?" is one of the only sources that I have been shown/found to be a more direct and blatant interpretation of the textual to the visual. Questions Raised & Needs: I have had issues with logging into computers around ACCAD this week, and have been utilizing more of my external hard-drives to transfer files between desktops. It seems like this has been happening to many other students. We've gone to our tech supervisor and asked if there is a way to fix this issue; a solution hasn't been found yet, so I will continue with working from the flash drive. I feel like I don't have a professor readily on campus that I can ask about issues with using MASH in Maya or one who is procedural-animation adept to mentor me with the issues that I am running into.
Next Steps: Some foreseeable issues I see happening are me not having the full capacity and understanding of how to use MASH's procedural nodes for creating and baking the animations of the simulated objects. I also do not have an idea of how to have the scene with the banana's fall into the scene and expand like balloons to work. I think that will be part of my process this week for what to accomplish. I am continuing with animating Chuck's mouth for the dialogue and making sure that I have enough knowledge to create and continue forward with asset creation in Maya. If I were to change my approach this week and what I thought needed to be accomplished, I don't think I would have time to complete the short. I am still not sure if I will have enough time to complete the short at all, seeing as it's about a 3-5 min time-span and I don't have enough time at hand to create, animate, composite, edit, and finalize the short. I am going to try my best, but it may spill over into finishing the short in the summertime. -Taylor Olsen |
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May 2020
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