Unreal Project Blog

This was the first project for this class that I really felt out of my depth. I haven’t used a program anything like the Unreal engine before this point, so everything we were doing here was completely new. That reality combined with the fact that I was fairly squeezed for time with finals, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to export out a slick final project. Instead, I decided to use this time to explore some of the things about the Unreal Engine made me the most excited.

I was curious about finding ways to use the program in ways that it wasn’t exactly built for. The idea of building characters from a stock set provided by Adobe Fuse didn’t interest me too much, so I set about finding ways to make them my own. The 3-D models were stored in a format that I wasn’t familiar enough with to really play with them, but I saw that the textures wrapped around them were simple PNG files. I know how to manipulate those easily enough, so let’s see how badly we can break this thing!

I left my Wacom at home today, so any Photoshop modifications are gonna be pretty simple. Let’s see what this looks like!

Enh, ok.. but I think it can be made weirder.

That’s a nice look on him! Now let’s get him some fancy new duds…

And that’s a character!

I think it’s fitting that a class full of exciting creative ideas ends by showing us a brief peek at a program with incredible potential for future exploration. I am excited by the possibilities presented by programs like this, so I’ll definitely be taking a look at some Lynda courses for both Unreal and Maya over the break.

After Effects Blog

When I made a stop-motion video a few weeks ago, we both worked on the whole project, This time around, Atharva, Defne and I each wanted to accomplish different things with the project, so we decided that the best way to proceed would be to divide up the film into three segments, each would be animated by a different team member

In our first meeting together, we decided on a loose story, and chose what each of our roles would be in telling it. I had created a character that I wanted to play with, so I volunteered to make different cut-up versions for each of us. Atharva, who animated the first section of the piece, opted to make the creature move sideways. Defne, who animated the final section, wanted to make the creature move forward, and I would make it move up in the middle section.

Scott McCloud Response

Sometimes you wind up reading the right thing at the right time. I had read Understanding Comics before, so I wasn’t sure if I really needed the refresher. I opened it for the first time in years assuming that I would just skim it for the good bits. Of course I wound up reading the whole thing.

I was especially interested in the way he talks about time being represented spatially. There is a temptation to assume that the linear representation of the page is just a one-for-one substitute for time. McCloud points out that it doesn’t need to be.

Arranging time into a series of panels on a two-dimensional plane seems like it could be limiting but it really does open up a crazy world of possibilities. Time and space are tools at your command. The subjects of your story are framed within their own panels, and those panels are framed within the page as a whole. Exciting opportunities for storytelling can open up when we look at time this way.

This is notably difficult to do with film. Subjects are framed within individual two-dimensional compositions, and those compositions (shots) are mended together along the one-dimensional time axis. Film editors have spent a century carefully constructing an art form around how these compositions relate to each other along that single axis, and how to use that relationship for storytelling purposes. But they’re still limited to using one composition at a time. Putting together multiple compositions spatially in film has had limited success.

Which is why I’m so excited by the possibilities of interactive media. No longer being bound to a single rectangular frame (like a movie screen), we now have a chance to open up temporal and spatial possibilities for storytelling.

My PComp final involves making an animated character across two screens, one of which is in front of the viewer at the outset, and one of which is behind them.

An animated character will jump out of one screen and land in another. It’s a bit of a gimmick, but I think that the concept opens up some new opportunities going forward. I’m looking forward to expanding on the idea over the next couple years at ITP.

Stop-Motion Blog

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. It’s honestly not often in the professional world that you get to practice something like stop-motion animation, so having the chance to work on it here was really exciting.

I had done a little sketch a while ago when I was trying to think up a creature for another project.

I was hoping to find a reason to make him move at some point, and interacting with a 3d space seemed like a great idea. I talked with James after class, and we came up with the idea that he could kick a table and have some liquid fall into one of his suction arms. I would do the hand-drawn elements, he would do some of the post-production work, and we would both film the stop-motion side.

So step one was for me to get to work on the hand-drawn side.

It was a pretty cozy weekend in my apartment making the 50 drawings necessary for the movements that we wanted. Honestly, after spending so much time in front of a screen, sketching on paper was a nice change of pace.

I have a little make-shift light box at home made out of an art box and some remote controlled puck lights, and I have a camera on a stand hooked up to Dragonframe, which I use as a pencil-test machine.

After a weekend full of podcasts and snack food, I had the animation at a place where I was satisfied.

It was time to take the drawings and combine them with the real world in Dragonframe.

 We set up in the workshop with a camera mounted on a bar between two tripods. We filled up a coffee cup with brown play-doh to serve as our coffee, and got to work.

Of course, that wasn’t all. We timed things out in After Effects, and James put together the sound in Premiere.