*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 Comments are closed.
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May 2020
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