Lets Talk Software

I talked a little bit about 3d animation in one of my last blog posts, so now I just want to show and explain a little bit about software and how it can be used to create a piece of 3d media.

In the world of 3d, there are multiple programs that could be considered "industry standard". These programs are highly robust, allowing you to make almost anything you desire. Perhaps the most popular and widely used across the industry in studios such as Pixar and Sony Animation is Autodesk's Maya and 3dsmax. While Maya and 3dsMax are fantastic programs, they are mostly used in very big projects with hundreds of collaborators, making them cumbersome to work with for a solo artist. They are both also ridiculously expensive, a single license costing upwards of 1600 dollars a year.

Exemplary work done in 3dsMax

Due to the aforementioned facts, I will be using a different program, one more suited to solo creators that has recently taken over the 3d artists landscape. This program is none other than Blender, an open-source 2d and 3d Animation Program. With the nature of it being open-source, this means that it is completely free to use for anyone, meaning I won't have to worry about paying for expensive licensing. Not only that, Blender has recently gotten some of the most mind-bending and shocking features that almost no other program has, even ones like Maya. As I said, it also acts as a 2d Animation program, meaning you can combine the 2 techniques quite easily. In my opinion, this makes it the perfect program for my film Opening.

Exemplary Work done in Blender

Now of course this doesn't mean I should just limit myself to this program alone, after all, many programs have to be used in the 3d Production workflow. For example, you might create a texture in Photoshop and then import it into your general 3d application to work with. You will eventually render out your result and put it into a compositing program like After Effects. 

If you want to check out any of the work that I have done using blender, ill link two of my pieces here.

https://vimeo.com/manage/453317567/general

Group Talk

Today I sat down with a couple of my peers and we all presented to each other what we were thinking of doing for our film openings.  Even though I have been struggling with time management and overall working, now I can see that almost all my other classmates are in the same boat. Getting together with them also allowed me to give some input into their films, and I feel as though I was able to make an honest impact in their projects. Even though I wasn't able to present to my classmates, just talking with them about their projects helped me think a little about mine. Honestly, I am feeling a lot better about where I am at with my project now, and I hope that I am able to talk with this group again as they were all very nice and collaborative.

Lets Search For Inspiration

My day has been pretty tough, so we are gonna keep things simple. I'll just be talking a little bit about style and what I found while searching for inspiration for my film. I think I would like to focus heavily on visual storytelling, so I'll be looking for that first before coming up with my story. 

While thinking about my film opening and what kind of topics I would like to tackle, I thought it would be cool to focus on more surrealist and existentialist themes. It's something I relate to and am deeply fond of, but I haven't ever made a film that tackles the topic. I think this is the perfect opportunity for that, so I got to searching on Pinterest for some inspiration. 

I put together a little collage of images that are inspiring me for my film.

Atmosphere

Characters

Scenery

I'll definitely break down more about the overall style of the piece in a later blog post, but for now, I'm pretty happy with the direction that my mind seems to be taking with this.

3D? 2D? Ah who cares, I just like moving things around.

So then why 3d animation? After all, It's most likely easier, less time-consuming, and overall a more relaxed workflow to film this in live-action. Well, I wanna discuss a little bit in this blog post why I have chosen the medium of 3d, and how it will ultimately benefit the production of this piece.

With the situation, we are currently dealing with, I am absolutely mortally terrified of going outside, and I doubt I wouldn't have to if I were to do this live-action. I think it would also just be very difficult to make an entire film opening without having a crew to assist with lighting, acting, camera operation, and more. The thing is over years of working in the medium, 3d animation has become a key part of my toolset that I can comfortably and fluently work with. With this in mind, I should be able to stay inside and not have to worry about catching any sort of crowned virus. If I need any line recorded, I can ask friends and family if they can help out with the project, and if I need any sort of texture or asset for my film, that shouldn't require me to come in contact with anybody.

3d animation is something that is deeply important to me that I would love to pursue as a career. Getting the chance to work on a large-scale project to add to my overall portfolio will help me to develop my skills, apply to college, and possibly break into the industry.

The medium is also just highly underrated, and something that can be used to tell more than just family-friendly stories. There seems to be this misconception about the medium in where general audiences believe that its only purpose is to tell stories that will have lively, round, and overall fun characters for the entire family, but this could not be further from the case. Throughout the creation of my film, I wish to address this problem and show audiences that Animation in general has the possibility to tell stories that are much more complex and intriguing. 

Not only that, the actual techniques of 3d Animation can be implemented in more ways than one, for example as background art for pieces mainly focused on 2d, or as block-ins to later be filled in. This means that even though I will most likely be focusing on producing a piece in 3d, I don't have to be shy about experimenting with other interesting techniques if it fits the story I try to tell.

I hope I was able to layout a good case as to why Animation as a whole is an interesting medium that can be used to tell important stories, and why it should be used for my film.

Let's see what I can do

 Alright, everyone, we made it. The big project we all were waiting for is finally here, and with that, I will be taking you on my adventurous journey throughout it. Over the course of the upcoming eight weeks, we are to produce an entire 2:00 film opening about any fictional story we want to create. This sounds like an incredibly underwhelming task to overcome, even more so when choosing to go alone like I'm doing, however, I could not be more excited as this is the exact type of project that I like to work on. At heart, I believe that creativity cannot and should not be rushed, so when we are given the opportunity to finally work on a long term project, this gets me completely revved up and excited. 

So then what are my plans? Where am I going with this? and what will be my thinking throughout these upcoming weeks?

Well to answer these questions, I would like to break down my creative process into three simple and not necessarily chronological steps. 

Ideation

Ideation consists of mainly gathering inspiration and references from different places and letting my brain form those concepts into new ideas. After all, nothing is truly original. If you are to ask any successful creative where their original ideas come from, they will never tell you ideas pop into their heads for no reason. Human minds are extremely effective at taking differing pieces of information around them and merging them into new thoughts, eventually forming what we all know as an idea. Due to this fact, during the creation of my Film opening, I will be making sure to constantly be consuming content related to what I want to create so that it ultimately stimulates and helps to form new and creative ideas in my head. After ideas are formed, I am able to document them(most likely here) to keep track of where I am and how the story I am creating is shaping out. 

Creation

Creation can be a broad topic, but it really just boils down to me creating some piece of media to get closer to my end goal. Creation will usually follow after Ideation, but it can sometimes help to breed new ideas itself. During creation, I will be sitting down usually for longer periods of time so that I am able to truly get in the zone and create as much as I can for that time. Lastly, creation is a very messy process, so I will most likely have a lot of rough drafts and scenes that still need to be worked out.

Finalization

Finalization mainly consists of cleanup. After working out a rough scene, draft, or script, I will most likely leave it and come back to it a day or two later with a fresh perspective. This allows me to review my creations from an objective and unbiased point of view so that I can make changes I'm sure will benefit the piece.

Closing Statements 

Lastly, I want to make one thing very clear. This opening will be in some form of 3d animated medium. I am a 3d artist and animator that has worked on short projects similar to these before, and I believe that my 8 weeks of taking on this project will be drastically different from the majority. I will be explaining why I am choosing to go this route and what it means for the future in my next blogpost, but for now, all I want to say is that I am thrilled for what these upcoming weeks hold and very eager to see how I can challenge and push myself to be even greater. 

Music Marketing Blog #2

 Hey there Everyone! Here is part 2 of our adventure in creating our Music Video Marketing Project!

We started by creating ideas, forming concepts, and overall creating a brand around our given song. This allowed us to overall get an idea for what we were aiming for and decide what decisions we would take while creating it. We decided on a name, Neue for new, and started dividing up jobs and creating a storyboard. This entire planning and distribution process was an essential piece of the puzzle when creating our project as without we would have been completely aimless throughout the entire production. This will be something that I keep in mind when working on the upcoming portfolio project.

We had just finished distributing the work and had started pre-production for the music video. After creating all our scripts and getting the work for each person sorted out we got right into it. We decided that since I was not able to go out due to Covid-19 and some of my teammates were unavailable, Nick would take care of the filming of the project. Everything during shoot day went just fine and the footage was delivered to me so we could start editing. This distribution of work let us focus on our parts and not get too overwhelmed with what had to be done, allowing. us to complete the music video project not only successfully but also to a satisfactory level. 

Editing was a completely different beast all in itself. Not only were we attempting to do some pretty crazy transitions, but we also had to complete everything by the deadline, something that was getting scarily close. Nevertheless, I was assigned to edit and was gonna make sure I did the best job possible. I sat down and started grinding away at the editing while my teammates took care of preparing the presentation and creating the website. While editing, I discovered some great new techniques that I had never used before. One of these is called Datamoshing, and it really saved me a whole lot of work when creating transitions for the video. Datamoshing happens when the compressed keyframes of a video are replaced with data from another video on top or below it. It's kind of like the effect that you get when the antenna on your Tv doesn't catch signal for a second (wait, people probably don't have those anymore do they?), this causes the movement from a previous scene to appear as if it's transferred onto another. This creates a really weird and glitchy look, something we were definitely going for. Another technique I found was that of Pixel Sorting, a technique that displaces the pixels of an image in a different direction and makes it look as if someone was getting warped away like in star trek. Editing was most definitely the toughest part of the project, but the work that was put into paid off and gave me a sense of how I will manage my time for the upcoming Portfolio project. 

Datamoshing from our Music Video

Next, I came back and reunited with my teammates to finish the presentation, merchandise, and overall cleanup of the entire production. Rodrigo did an amazing job on the Website for the Artist and Biana in combination with him took care of the social media. To finish everything, we sat down and grinded away in one day to finish everything. At this moment I was editing and working on the presentation back and forth, so while clips were rendering I would change one or two slides to have more updated graphics. When taking care of the merchandise, I took clips from the original Music Video and Slightly distorted them to make them fit into our design aesthetic for the long sleeve shirts. Not only that, I thought having a consistent theme would make the shirts feel like they were part of a collection that was exclusive to this music video, so the phrase "Simulation Terminated" was plastered across all of them. After finishing the presentation and the marketing, we cleaned up any rough edges, uploaded the Music Video, and Finally submitted our entire project.

Updated Music Video Graphic

Overall, I am extremely proud of not only myself but my teammates for what we were able to create during our time together. Not only did we tackle a complex Idea that had new challenges for us to overcome, but we also came together and wrapped it all up in a nice little package to deliver to all our watchers. From this project, I learned some important techniques that will aid in any visual and artistic endeavors in the future. Not only that, I learned even more about the importance of strong planning in creating a successful product. Perhaps the most important thing I learned was how having teammates who help out when needed can be a make or break for an entire production as a whole. I will take these into account for the future and make sure that I implement them into my portfolio project when the time comes.

Anyways, thank you everyone for embarking with me on this journey, and I will see you next time!

Music Video Marketing Blog #1

For the past few weeks, me and my team have been working on our Music Video Research and Marketing project! Here, I am going to run down our process and experiences as we have worked on planning, research, and brainstorming. 

Planning 

Screenshot of our Rough Idea Document

We first got to work on planning by hearing the collection of songs we were assigned. Our group got the R&B music playlist, and out of the 4 songs we listened to, we thought that one stood out like a sore thumb for its immersing glitchiness and catchy beats, something that we would use to our advantage in the brainstorming parts later on. We continued by planning out who would be in charge of what. We knew that there was a lot to this project, from marketing to video production, so we wanted to divide work evenly so that it could be completed in a reasonable amount of time. We made sure to give everyone a job that would fit their strengths, but also to take some parts of the project and dissect them together so that we would all be in the loop. We created a google doc to keep track of our ideas and then we moved onto researching different bands and artists.

Research

Frame From the Weeknd's "Blinding Lights"

The research process went very smoothly, being able to finish our assigned "research chart" and figuring out what we like and disliked from the genre and its music video culture. We finished it in the span of a day and from it, we figured out the ins and outs of the genre, its artists, and the way that they market themselves. One key realization we came to was that most contemporary artists use social media platforms and their online presence as their number one way of marketing. Perhaps the best thing we found in the Research process was The Weeknd's "Blinding lights" Music Video. It contained everything that we sought after, engaging composition and camera movement, stunning lighting and color, and sharp edits that were just on the beat. We would go on to use this Music Video as a great piece of inspiration into what an effective, groovy, and yet modern music video looked liked for the R&B genre. With research wrapped up, it was time to Brainstorm.

Brainstorming

Test Render Made by me to plan out the ending shot.

Lastly, and perhaps most exciting, brainstorming. From the very beginning, we knew we wanted to make this Music Video related to technology in some way. We thought that the beginning of the Song sounded like if something was rebooting or glitching back into place, so we thought it would be cool if we took some of those themes and attached them to our music video. Making something 4th wall breaking seemed like a really fun idea, so the story was to follow an artist in some form of cheesy music video, however with a dark twist. The artist is actually just a simulation being run by somebody to create a music video, the specific reason as to why is never stated. This Idea would open Pandora's box of creative opportunities that we planned to take advantage of.

We would make the beginning of the video a rewind playback of the entire video, matching perfectly with the stuttery sound of the start of the piece. Throughout the video, the character would start off normally, but as the world around them becomes different and distorted, they notice that the camera has been following them all along, so they try to catch it but fail to as it teleports to another shot location. Towards the end, we would have a 3d render of the person pulling the strings of the simulation. Perhaps one of our favorite ideas was the use of data moshing, a technique that makes it look as though the pixels of a previous shot transfer to the movement of the next, which we could use to signify that the simulation is falling apart. All of these would come together into a single coherent concept of a person who realizes they are in a simulation and try to break out of it, eventually failing and being sent on the same cycle of despair yet again.