canada Line Project light reference (Nov.29th)

samples of how to create dramatic lighting!

canada Line Project WIP journal (Nov.28th)

For this week's update from 3D department of team the other world for Canada line project for our experimental class.

http://vimeo.com/33704783


The above video is a work in progress (wip) file for our latest progress. For this week, Emilie has joined our 3D department to help us. I really feel very grateful for her kindness. Judy created the body of the puppet on Friday. I came by at 2 o'clock Friday afternoon to help Judy with cutting the cloth and gluing stuff together. Judy is an amazing sewing and stitching artist! She sewed the cloth beautifully with attention to details. Nick was working an armature for the head. He built up the jaw and eye sockets for the head using wire and sculpting clay. Later Nick needed to attend another meeting, so after finished making the puppet's body, Judy and I kept working on the puppet's head by adding skin colored clay on the puppet's face and grey clay for the puppet's hair. We left at 8 o'clock.

On Sunday David, Nick, Emilie and I were working on the animation of the puppet within the set. Emilie and David also added a lot more details in the train set. David added texture on the chair and floor. Emilie created map, newspaper and a coffee cup for the set. Nick fixed some details with the puppet head and added teeth into the puppet's mouth. The process took another four hours. Nick was a bit stressed out, but we tried to ease the stress quickly. Nick and I were then working on animating the puppet's flying scene. I was in control of taking photos in Dragon program and using the onion skin function to direct Nick to animate the puppet with subtle movements. The flying scene was 43 pictures under camera shot. Once the flying scene was done, all team members seemed to be very excited with the results. After exporting the stills, I went to station 241 to put the image with correct timing and erasing our all the unnecessary backgrounds while David, Emilie and Nick were working on the scene of puppet standing inside the train and being blown away. The above video is a quick version about what we have done for this week. Cheers.

Tension Chart Study, both my grad film and "Alma"

Here is a tension chart study for both my grad film "Fishdrop/ Raindrop" and a 3D film "Alma". The purpose for this assignment is to study the tension flow and grasp the overall rising and falling action of my story with a proper timeline. After creating exercise, I understand much more about how much time I am spending on introduction of the story, how much time I spend on unfolding the story. From this study, I sensed that the unfolding rising action in my story is quite busy. Before I had worries and confusion about which part of the story should be cut or shortened, but now I got a much clear picture that I should really start to cut the scenes of Ethan visiting Larry's family.

Canadaline Project Train set

This is a current update for the train set that David and I have spent 6 hours together last weekend to build. I worked extra 2 hours to wrap it up on this current stage. Martin, my experimental animation professor has suggested me to add more materialistic texture to it rather than have an absolute literal presentation of a real sky-train. I.E we can add the texture from newspaper or change the proportion of the scales to make this set more than just a cardboard made set. So, keep working!

Puppet reference (clp Nov. 20th)

Some amazing puppet artists' working process. So many details and work involved with this!

Canada Line Project WIP journal (Nov.16th)

For this week's update information about our Canada line project from my experimental class, I am currently working in train set department. For this week, David has composed a file with detailed design of the interior of a sky-train. The train set, according to David's design, has 1.5 feet as length and 8 inches as height.

So I built up this set using cardboard and chopsticks. I started to work on this at 8 o'clock on Sunday evening and roughly stopped working at one o'clock in the morning.

Cody has also uploaded the new storyboard drawings and uploaded on moodle. I downloaded the drawings and combined the first drawing with the rough train set image. After the photoshop process, I put the four images into Premiere project at station 241 on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday's class, I brought the train set to class. Judy also brought her the first version of puppet. The puppet is quite cartoony like. Martin provided very specific suggestions and techniques to fix the puppet and his cloth. We are also very pleased to get the approval from team hallucination that they would like to also use our train set in their piece. After the class, David offered to help me to make a more solid, polished up version of the set during this week. So we arranged to meet up on Thursday afternoon to work on things, since I will be busy having an interview with Jeff Chiba Stearns for a documentary short during this weekend. Anyway, here is the update for this week. Go team!

Gradfilm work update (111112)

http://vimeo.com/33709838

an attempt for putting all dialogues in to the reel, unfortunately the sound files crashed, so I have to compressed the file to this level that you could barely listen to it clearly. Hopefully I would create a better version using school stations!

Canada Line Project WIP journal (Nov.9th)

     This is a updated journal for Canada Line project from my experimental class, and I am working with another eight students from my class on a ten seconds animation piece. Our group's name is team the other world. For this week, we have Omar, Cody and David working on the storyboard. Omar generates the story and sketched out the first version of rough story board. Cody did a very professional illustration version of that storyboard and passed to David for coloring and compositing. I downloaded the file from moodle and readjust the timing for our first story animatic on station 241 in a premiere project.

     The beginning of the class was a bit confusing and chaotic. When I left the school with the finished project on the station, things were still fine. But the next morning's class when Martin showed us the file, the file that I have been working on was gone. It took me some moment to figure out what happened. Martin pointed out that as a class we are two weeks behind the schedule and he is not exactly happy with our lack of participation as teamwork. Martin gives us some more time to be organized to be able to present the file. After he left the classroom, the group was stressed over and very chaotic. People were speaking in harsh tone and having busy, intensive crossing-over conversations.

     The good part was that some voices were activated through the process. Basically Karla and Laura from team parade, speaking for their team, insisted that there should not be transitions between the three groups' animations and we would create one animation piece in the very end to connect all three pieces. Also, a few classmates quickly spoke loudly and actively to the whole class about how a fourth episode could be like. And there were also classmates wrote down notes on the whiteboard. So when Martin came back the class has found some important solutions for stories. Then Martin viewed the files and people recommend that for our group it would be better if we could keep four simple shots instead of many shots like the one presented today.

     After each group presented their animatic, we had another group meeting regarding the progress and next week's strategies. Cody generously offered to do a quick sketch for the new shots. Since Omar strongly wish to practice paint-on-glass techniques, so we firstly decide that our main technique would be paint-on-glass. I was more into 2D puppets,  and Judy, David, Janice and Emilie also presented a level of interest for puppet animation. Later Nick joined our group, saying that if no one is interested in doing puppets, he will just work on his own. This talk provoked few more discussions. We tried to explain to our late coming team member that we are considering to combine puppet and painting techniques together to ease his stress.
  
     Then as a large team we decided to divide into two departments. Rocky, Cody, Janice, Emilie and Omar are going to work in painting department. David, Judy, Nick and I will work in puppet department. Since we only have one main character, we will have one puppet to make. Four people working on one puppet seemed to be a bit crazy for me. Also, Nick claimed his great knowledge and experience for creating physical 3D puppets. I would for sure prefer experienced and professional hands to get working on our puppet. I then suggested that we may consider to make the train set from the discussion happened last week, as the physical 3D train set also belong to 3D category. David passionately agreed with me and expressed his interest in creating the train. Our 3D department then divided into two smaller departments. Judy and Nick are going to make the puppet and David and I would work on the train for this week.

     David would work on the design of the train and provide me the visual image and actual scale measure design for the set, and I will create the physical set using cardboard. Before we left the classroom, I also asked Cody to please post on moodle about the character's whole body proportion design. Since people really like Cody's drawing in this first animatic and the outlook of our main character. Cody offered he could finish the drawing and new storyboard quickly and upload them. There is going to be a meeting on Thursday. Hopefully things would be smoothed out and people can be more relaxed once we start to work.

What can you make out of cardboard? (clp reference Nov.8th)

Ideas and references for our cardboard train set!

Canada Line Project reference journal (Nov.8th)

Here is a link as good reference for paper sculpting set and characters to create two and half D feeling. The artist is from Taiwan.

Canada Line Project WIP journal (Nov.5th)

This is a class note I have taken on November 2nd, 2011 for our canada line project from experimental class. For our team, the narrative is based on the storyboard posted by Omar, and it is depicted as such: a single character falls asleep, falls into/ blown away into another state/ world and turns into a bird, flies as part of a block of birds, nest near to the train, wakes up. Is he a bird or human?

Design: we are working on color choices for the palette, (the time of the scene is drawn/ early morning)

Techniques: general interests are painting on glass, cut-out puppets, people also suggest that the bg and birds could be painting, character is puppet in the begining, but there could be transformation and morph from the cut-out to painting style for the character when he is blown away to the air.

As a whole class, people share great interest in building a 3d set (the train/ maybe train station, too), and we agree, as a class to build a real 3d set, using paper/possible other materials (I have tons of materials like wood/cotton/clay in my place)

The Parade group:

Narrative: Train is a parade, chaotic group, set in a station, characters on the platform and in the tunnels, possibly incorporated other characters from other scenes. Techniques: Actual cut outs, paint dyes in water, 3d set

Team Inner Worlds:

A passenger interacts with the window, "is there anyone out there?" He/she has headphones on, hearing an explosion of sound, has an acknowledgment with the window

Technique: masking tape for the window, pixilation, train set.

So far, the rough order of the team sequence is Inner worlds-other world-parade-coda/conclusion.

For next class, we as a team need to bring both storyboards on 4*3 index cards and an animatic on premier project with 29.97 frame/second, 4:3 aspect ratio, NTSC 720*540. The animatic need to be connected with the other groups, as for our project according to the current arranged sequence, the beginning of the story needs to connect to the end of Team Inner World, and the end of our project needs to connect to the beginning of Team Parade. Jennifer from Team Inner World, Karla from Team Parade, and I are responsible for putting up the animatic and connect the sequence into one big animatic in premier before next week's class.

 Jennifer had a talk with Omar and I today after class, and figured out a match cut for the scene change of editing. I will contact Team Parade when Omer finishes polishing and refining his drawing storyboard. Our story ends with the scene when crows fly across the train, and maybe a zoom-in shot could be linked to the next scene with the chaotic train of Team Parade. Omar for now is mainly responsible for the storyboards. He will post it on moodle once it is done. I am responsible for polish it up and putting it as a time-based project. Emilie volunteered to help with coming up visual designs for the train set. What we need think as a team for this week for the project, except the storyboards and animatic which are taken care of, are: concepts for train set design, color choices for an urban early morning, crow designs. Put your updated ideas, images, tests and share your efforts on moodle. Apparently we are not having any actual meetings for this week. All discussions will be held on moodle. 

I would also suggest we could think of our roles and interest as working individuals for this team. For instance, my interests are character animation, sculpturing the set and making puppet. I am familiar with Premier. I would prefer to take roles in preproduction (puppet making/ constructing set), some part of animation, and final compositing in premier. I think that is all about what happened today. 

Canada Line Project WIP journal (Nov.2nd)

It took about three weeks before some solid ideas for the Canada Line Project were settled down. Meanwhile, we, as a class, has generated many random ideas regarding this project. So far, the class is divided into three groups working on topics including: the other worlds, hallucination, and group sociology. Two weeks ago, I joined team the other worlds. The original idea coming from the group from the first discussion was that there would be a dramatic transformation happening from a daily, normal scene, such as on a sky train ride. What should we create for the dramatic transformation became our first problem. People have had conflicts and debates amongst the group that what would the transformation be like. Some choose stories involving fantasy, such as human-like animals and vegetables, giant bread train station, bread train, and roller-coaster train. Some suggested that if we were too much involved with fantasies, the theme could be confused with the other team who worked on hallucination. One of our team members, Omar, then strongly suggested that we should go with a scene that would be more connected to people zoning out, rather than having overwhelming creatures or objects. Yet, even when we tried hard to compress our ideas down, there were about five animatics from the team members, and there are people who were very keen to their ideas with no compromise for mixing the stories from the others, which was totally understandable, too. As a result, we pitched our ideas through those animatics during last week, and received feedbacks about further compressing and mixing the story down.

Team group sociology decided to do a bunch of animals chat to each other and turning into the same kind of animal when all of them sensed the existence of an unknown creature. Team hallucination was being very innovative and creative that they had a more abstract approach on doing masking tape animation on glass window. The story-line for team hallucination was unclear, but the random images were definitely appealing. What our group did for last week for mixing each other's story, thanks to Cody, another great team member from our group, was that the passengers on the sky-train would fall over when they zone out, and they would fall in a world full of natural elements. I think if we could keep going with this story, we would have a very easy time connected to team group sociology. For instance, since the other team wants to do animal sociology, we could let our passengers fall on the ground and become the animals, or we could let our fallen passengers became the reason of the transformation and assimilation of the animals from the other team. When the story passes to team group sociology, we could create the third video bridges the gap between group sociology and team hallucination. I would suggest to put the work from team hallucination as the last piece to conclude all previous three pieces, simply because the unique nature and experimental quality of the work from team hallucination. As for the third bridging piece, my suggestion is we could create a piece making the animal-like characters turn their interest to the passing skytrain, and they tried to get on the train again. From there they could somehow become part of the animation on the skytrain glass window.

 As an individual, I like character animation and puppet making. I think puppet creating and puppet animation are things that I am really interested in. I would like to have further chance to develop the knowledge and technique for that field. I also like to apply natural elements in my work, and I did some character design for the group presentation before using prototypes like animals and vegetables. For the latest version of our group animatic, I am not sure if we would still keep the natural elements. I am perfectly fine with staying with my current team. The idea of the other world is quite interesting to me. I am also more than willing to offer my help to the other teams if there is a need. So far there are a some character design, concept art and some animation tests I did based on my own interest and practice for this project. If people could find any usage of these ideas being applied for a broader scale, that would be great. Otherwise I will just keep working within the team while building my knowledge and interest from further research. Below are the images and animation test. The animation test was generated based on the natural animals idea, and the puppets and sets are build up from leaves and found project. Hope you would also enjoy.

Film Review of I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors by Ann Marie Fleming based on Bernice Einsenstein's memoir

 I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is director Ann Marie Fleming’s animated film based on Bernice Eisenstein’s illustrated memoir. The film depicts the main character’s life experience and family members’ traumatic experience through Holocaust. A broad variety of sophisticated life topics, including human nature, life cycle, traditional ritual, collective behaviors, are covered through the film. The voice over narrator of the film is Bernice Eisenstein, who represents the main character, a Jewish girl who grows up in a community where her grandparents, parents, relatives, and friends of her parents all share the same pain and loss from Holocaust. The film is a 2D animation combining both cut out and hand drawn characters, rendered in After Effects. A large chunk of the animation uses only black, white, and gray to fill the screen, yet colors are also introduced when there are important motifs, memories or objects, such as the girl’s mother’s golden wedding ring. Match cut and metamorphosis are two major editing methods used for most transitions between scenes.  In certain scenes, Fleming also applies multi-frames as a unique visual cut to create a stronger impact. When the main character falls, instead of seeing her fall once, we see her fall three times in three separated frames in the same cut. Cycle, is one strongest motif appeared in the film. We see cycle in the film visually represented as a circular shape for several objects, such as a wedding ring, a ripple on the lake, a round cookie, the family dinning table, and a rolling snowball. This motif is not only shown through visual illustration, but also embedded through the storyline. The story starts with the girl’s father’s death and ends with the girl’s son’ birth. The newborn inherits the girl’s father’s name, labeling a meaningful rebirth of life and love.
I enjoy watching this film a lot, especially for its well-designed plot, unrevealing a series of unbelievably complicated events, personal stories, and powerful emotions. The story is huge, and the time span of the characters’ experiences is long, yet the Fleming has done a very successful job by compressing all that rich elements into a short animated film while keeping a sense of humor to connect with the audience. I feel I can learn a lot from this film. My grad film also deals with real-life experience, which is about a young Caucasian enters China and encounters both evil and good nature of people. My film is still at the beginning stage, where storyboard has not even been settled down. So far from the class critique, my biggest issue with my grad project is that I am not decisive enough from cutting unnecessary scenes from the original stories. Also, my way of depicting the story is very straight forward, and it loses the power of poetic storytelling in animation. I am working on that part a lot. By viewing Fleming’s work, I learned a lot about how free animation expression could be, and I am thinking of trying some brave editing techniques for the visuals, such as metamorphosis and match cut in my newer version of storyboard to test if the storyline could be more condensed. Also, the narrator’s one-person narration and sometimes playing as other characters’ voices, which supports the entire dialogue of the stories, attracts me for its impressive connection created between the audience and the film. One-person narration is certainly an efficient audio method for sound production process. My story does have a narrator, but I was not sure before about asking the voice over actor to play both male and female roles in the story. Maybe I am very factual, and have not really learned much about open, bold, and free expression. Fleming’s work encourages and provokes my urge to try something new this time for my way of thinking as a storyteller, instead of as a person who just copies the happened fact.