Canada Line Project WIP journal (Dec.14th)

I think this is going to be my final journal of this year about Canada line project. The project will be published on mid January on Canada Line TV system. Our benefactors have visited our class today and they saw the four pieces together and highly complemented our work as a class. Later Martin and I stayed after class to figure out some final rendering issue with our episode, and with our technician Steve's help, we are able to generate two versions of the file. One HD 1440*1080, the other one is 880*660. I see Martin put both files into his dropbox. Therefore, congratulations people from team the other world! We are truly finished with this project! For people from my class, if you are interested in getting a copy of this file, it is in the old place on the same station that I mentioned on moodle post. Anyway, here is a link for the finished product from team the other world, enjoy the show. HAVE A WONDERFUL HOLIDAY!!!

http://vimeo.com/33323602

Canada Line Project WIP journal (Dec.8th)

     We got a satisfying result for our episode team the other world for Canada Line project from my experimental animation class. There were a few mistakes I created for the transition from team the other world, due to the confusion and lack of information. Omar from the painting department provided a clearer statement about what they have visualized the transition would be like. We also received an updated, much more polished painting background from Omar. I added those parts in after Wednesday's class. Also Martin pointed out that there needed to be a few more frames of drawings to smooth out the man-to-bird transition. Cody suggested we should have two flaps of the bird flying. I fixed the editing according to people's feedbacks, and did a few more drawings in photoshop for the man-to-bird transition. So there we go. It is done! Here is a movie file that I quickly put up together as a reference for the behind scene editing process during each week's editing.

     My main responsibility in this project is to collect, organize and put all files from everyone in the group into a time-based piece in premiere project as an editor. I was part of the set build up, part of the puppet creation, part of the character animation, mainly on directing. This piece is a group work and teamwork with everyone's great effort. So, thank you all, my great team members and Martin. It has been a great experience working with you guys. Special thanks to my dear Mr. Security Bal, without you I would not be able to keep a healthy state. You kept me eating and drinking normally even during late working hours, so a billion thanks to you from me!  Anyway, enjoy this behind scene editing movie, here you can truly see how each week the piece is improving better and better.

http://vimeo.com/33324448

Canada Line Project WIP journal (Dec.6th)

     This is an updated journal report for my work at team the other world for Canada Line project from my experimental animation class. Last Wednesday's class, we have presented the latest work in progress reel to our sponsors. And they were pleased with the level of completeness of our group's project. They asked if there were more to add. Our professor believed we could push this project up to a higher level.

     Martin provided us a very specific note on the animation flaws of our puppet. He stated that the flying animation was good, but the animation for the puppet drowsing in the train and blown away were not well done, as there were unsteady shifts and movements of the puppet and the set. Martin suggested that if we practiced more with the puppet, like the flying scene animation, which he thought as later production, we would feel more comfortable animating it. After I read through the notes and studied the animation scenes for both the drowsing scene David, Emilie, and Nick did, and the flying scene that Nick and I did, I noticed that for this kind of puppet animation, unless you are the absolute animation professional, otherwise it got to be a team work to make it work. The difference between the qualities of the two scenes is that for the flying scene I was directing Nick to move the actual puppet while I was using computer program to check carefully for any possible visual flaws, either it was an exposing masking tape under the cloth, or if the head did not have enough movements. When I went to work for cleaning up the images while the rest group members were working on shooting, later on they told me, each person got a chance to animate the puppet, but no one kept a constant look at the animation shots. Also, Martin suggested that we should get better lighting plus a tighter close up shot for the first scene. The puppet also needed to be fixed up with more details. Martin also informed Judy to build a more muscular body for the puppet.

      For last week, Judy built a new body with much softer wire embedded inside for animating. Nick carved out the skin of the puppet head and worked on the puppet head basis. Emilie and David worked on setting up and adjusting the lighting for a green screen shot. Due to certain events that happened later during the production process, I took over the task to build up the puppet's face, hair, and texture. Judy helped me with building the jaw and eyes of the puppet after she finished building the puppet's body. After all her hard work, Judy had an event to participate for Saturday night, so Emilie, David and I start to work on the animation session of the puppet. I explained my observation to both Emilie and David about how we need to have one person constantly standing right in front the computer to check and direct the animator's move for the puppet, both Emilie and David have been very kind and understanding to volunteer to animate the puppet and let me direct them.

     Emilie went to animate the puppet drowsing scene first. David was working on setting up the puppet. The actual new puppet's body scale was much larger than the set. David put a lot efforts in adjusting the camera and bending the puppet's knees to create the illusion that the puppet fitted the train. When I told Emilie what to do with the puppet and began the shot, I found Emilie's way of animating the puppet was very gentle and delicate. Once I told her some directions to move the puppet, she could get the puppet moving to the exact position I wanted very quickly. Later when Emilie took a break, I asked David to animate the puppet, and soon found that David had a different animating characteristics from Emily. When David moved the puppet, there were more force and power, so the puppet movements were broad. Then I shifted the strategies based on my two animators' different animating style. Emilie did the interior scene for the guying falling into sleep, because this scene required gentle animation. David did the puppet blown away scene to make the movements bold and vivid.

     As a result, the animation quality for this time was quite high. After the shot, I went to edit the timing for the scenes so that I could deliver the file to David, who was an expert for compositing and AfterEffects and he handled the background compositing and masking out the wire on the puppet body during flying and green screen. I finished putting things together on Saturday evening after the animating session. After I came home and re-looked at my editing, I felt unsatisfied with the timing. I arranged to meet with David on Monday afternoon with a polished version of editing for him to composite the background into the scene. Yet since masking session in AfterEffects on station 241 did not work well on Monday afternoon, David had to bring the file back home to work on the compositing process.

     Meanwhile I collected the files from the painting department, delivered by Cody. Since there was no specific direction about what images should be on which spot at what length of time from the painting department, I have to guess to figure it out myself as an editor. I collected well polished files that seemed to be the final versions, imported some of them in photoshop to fix up the lighting and cut out the backgrounds.

     The process for editing still images and set up the correct timing was a long process, sort of like playing a puzzle game by placing all pieces in the right position. For this ten seconds piece, I have viewed thousands of times for every week to make sure I was doing a correct job. Every Monday or Tuesday of the week I would stay working on station 241 till the security needed to shut the school door. Late night at Emily Carr was my favorite time. My dear security, Bal, was always supportive and offered me his homemade cookies and desert to back me up. If I could do an adequate enough job for editing the piece as a whole, Bal would be for sure one of my biggest supporting source. On Wednesday morning David would bring the finished composting version and transport the file to our premiere project. Before that, here is a link for our current progress updating.

http://vimeo.com/33065324

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.

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!

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.

Canada Line Project animatic test 1 (the other worlds)

A Train Ride To Experience Canada Line

At 8:00 p.m., Saturday October 8th of 2011, I went for a ride of Canada Line from Waterfront Station to Richmond Station. The purpose of this ride is to experience Canada Line and to initiate generating creative ideas and thoughts regarding the coming up Canada Line public art project. And below is a short video clip that I took in the sky train using my phone.

When I was waiting for the train, I started to look around the place. The truth is that was my third time actually for taking a ride of Canada Line. Of course the train of Canada line is much more advanced compare to the normal sky train, as the line is very recently built. One big difference that I firstly noticed between normal sky train and this ride is the location set. Canada Line is built up all underground. The ceiling of the platform is very low, which makes everything in this space have a condensed tone. The  wall and floor are made of rock. The color of the floor and the wall is a combination of light brown and yellowish color under the bright yellow lights. The wall on the other side of the train track is a darker brownish color. The weather was a little cold that day, and the air underground felt wet and cool. People were standing in front of the yellow waiting line. It was night time, and probably because of the cold weather, people were not exactly behaving very active. Most of them were just standing there quietly, and once a while moving their legs for a limited range of walk to warm themselves up. The color of people's clothes was more to a darker tone, and from their wearing jackets, thin coats, and shirts you could tell the step of early winter was already slowly approaching to this city. The other fact that I have noticed among the waiting group was that a large percent of them was Asians. It could be caused by the fact that this ride was going to Richmond, where large percent of Asians inhabited. I have only been in Richmond twice. According to my high school classmates, you can almost speak Mandarin in every shop at Richmond. I have a very complicated feeling towards Richmond and the idea of speaking mandarin to other Chinese-Canadians. Many people in Richmond seemed to be quite able to use cantonese, chinese, and english as languages, but I felt weird the last time when I visited. I saw them speaking Mandarin with all different accents, but it felt just not correct. And I saw them, very similar to Chinese people like my hometown, but there was something about their characteristics that made me feel immediately separated from them, like an invisible wall of subconscious feelings that stop me from feeling close or comfortable to talk to them. They were like Chinese, but they were really not Chinese. And that knowledge made me feel even more alone and alienated when I was there.

Anyway, the train arrived, and I stepped into the train. The inner space of the train was much wider compare to other sky train tracks. The light was fluorescent white light. I could see lots of reflections of light reflected from the glass windows, door windows, and light greenish floor. When the train was started, the speed was fast, and the ride was really smooth. I could merely sense a speed change or any loud train track noise. Even people's conversations were quite gentle. The train track carried on driving through a tunnel, which was not that dark due to the bright lights along the walls of the tunnel. The tunnel under the lights had a brown yellowish color. Yet between the lights there were dark shadows. The tunnel felt narrow and long. I started to think what if the train would be under the sea, and the tunnel became transparent to us, would we be able to see all weird deep sea creatures? Even if it was not under the sea, just have the tunnel transparent, would we be able to see the creatures live underground, like mouse, snake, and bugs? What if the creatures were really huge? What if we were actually in an unknown, mystical world underneath the ground? Then the tunnel became wider and brighter. Suddenly I saw more yellowish light and brightness coming through the glass window. The space became much wider, and I saw more colorful advertisement plates on each side of the walls. I then see another group of people waiting at the platform. Then the train stopped. Somehow, the train ride process reminded me of birth, like how a baby was struggling out of the narrow space to meet the outer world. Few minutes later, I heard the bell-like music on the train started; another journey was ready to start.