End of Year Reflection

As the month of May begins to dwindle towards the end, my sophomore year is coming to a close. As I type this reflection, I'll look back on these years as the times when I was testing the waters of e-Communication. Freshman year was a taste of everything, and sophomore year was exploring what I believed was best for me, aiding me in my final decision on which strand of e-Communication I'll focus on until I graduate. So what did I learn this year that I can use for the rest of my time here?

Guarantees and Takeaways

For a bit of background information, the e-Comm program has five guarantees. These guarantees are Technology, Collaboration, Communication, Project Management, and Leadership. These five guarantees are meant to be the supporting framework behind the program, that which help guide students towards their best work. So what have I learned about these guarantees that I can keep with me for the rest of my life?

Technology is a necessity in the e-Comm program. To make our projects, we have to learn the ins and outs of many differing programs, each with a unique purpose. Whether it was building a character piece-by-piece in PhotoShop, making lively animations and intricate special effects in After Effects, crafting 3-dimensional objects in Maya, or putting everything together in Premiere Pro, all of these programs were essential in teaching me the basics that will aid me greatly going forward. Often times I would find myself arguing with the programs when things didn't work out, but with patience and proper guidance I was always able to work through it.

Collaboration applied to a surprising amount of projects in both of my e-Comm classes. While working in a group may be unfavorable to some at first, it's both fun and efficient to get things done with a group. When you're doing group work, it's important to make sure that everyone is carrying their own weight -- including you. I surprisingly didn't have much of a problem with group work this year! More often than not, everyone was ready and willing to do their part of the project and do it right.

Communication goes hand in hand with Collaboration. When you're in a group, it's important to make sure that you can contact everyone if something comes up. Lack of communication often leads to disarray and panic within groups, so having your voice be heard in your group is a major factor attributing to success. Sometimes, messages could fail to send or carry ambiguous context, but we were always able to work through it.

Project Management is incredibly important in a class where nearly every assignment is some sort of project. When assigned a project, you have to carefully plan out when, where, and how you plan to work on it. Leaping into a project unprepared is a surefire way of messing things up, making work stressful and ending in a sloppy final product. I'm usually not one for planning things, but this year helped me learn to take initiative and get things done on time and properly. I didn't have any major issues with time management this year, which goes to show how much project management helped me.

Leadership is another guarantee that seems prevalent when working in a group. While it's uncommon for one person to take all the initiative in a project, there's usually someone who works on planning and making sure everything gets done while also doing their own part. It's a leader's job to get their teammates on the right track when they're lead astray, and make sure everything has a set time, location, process, etc. They're not so much bosses as they are guides to other group members. I found myself taking the leader position in a fair amount of group projects this year, despite the fact that being in charge puts a HUGE amount of pressure on me. A specific example of this was in regards to my Short Film project. A bunch of things came up that forced us to push back filming dates, but I assured my group mates that everything was going to be alright. Thanks to everyone pitching in and getting work done, we were able to finish the project and make sure it was as good as it could possibly be.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Overall, I would say that my greatest strength is my sense of creativity. Whenever I was given a project, I always tried my best to go above and beyond and put my own personal touch on my work. This wasn't just to earn bonus points or approval, but instead to create work that I was personally satisfied with and proud enough to put my name on. Learning different techniques in both video and animation has inspired me to get creative with angles, assets, techniques, and some others. I try to take what I'm given, and have fun while I do it in order to make it my own. Often times, I had to get creative in order to work around bumps in the process.

An example of when I had to get creative in order to work around inconveniences was when I was making this container in Maya. I couldn't get it from a NURBs to a polygon, and considered giving up until I decided to play around with random settings as a bit of a last resort. Thanks to my incessant need to mess around with random settings, I was able to successfully convert it and finish the project!

My greatest weakness this year was time and project management, yet I seem to have taken a huge step forward in eradicating this weakness. When I had a set time frame for a project, I planned what I was going to do ahead of time. When I was in a group, I did my part and did my best to assist everyone else with theirs. When things didn't work out, I hopped on fixing them immediately. When there were things that needed managing, I actually tried to manage them for once. This would've been unheard of either last year or at the beginning of this year, where I was an unplanned, schedule-hating mess. Of course, there are still instances in which I slip back into my unmanaged habits, but I'm hoping to fix that in the future. Working in my e-Comm classes has helped me better my sense of management, and hopefully it'll remain that way going forwards.

What I've Learned, What I'd Change

Last year, I learned the bare essentials of every program. This year, I was able to learn the ins and outs of the programs and processes we used, alongside the guarantees mentioned earlier. I entered this program bright-eyed and ready to learn all I needed to know, and I came out knowing more things than I ever thought I would. As I plan on pursuing a career with a focus on visual storytelling, knowledge of how to make effective scenes and dialogue alongside telling engaging stories will be a huge help going forwards. Aside from helping in a career context, this program has also aided in fulfilling a childhood dream of mine. I remember seeing animations, movies, and special effects, finding myself absolutely blown away by them. I said to myself, "I want to do that." And by taking these classes, I've began to pave the road towards accomplishing that goal. Hopefully, I'll be taking what I've learned this year and continue to build upon it next year.

After thinking about it for a while, I don't think that there's anything I'd change regarding my e-Comm experience. I was able to do everything just fine the way I did, and even the bumps in the road often couldn't be changed. Sure, I'd have changed my reaction to these events, but other than that everything went very smoothly. Hopefully, next year will be just as good.

Conclusion

I've learned a lot of things this year. Not only about video and animation, but also about cooperation, management, creativity, problem solving... the list goes on and on. I've been able to fortify my strengths and diminish my weaknesses. While I may have chosen animation as my focus for next year, I'm sure that the things I learned in video will be far from useless. This year wasn't so much learning, but rather preparing. Furthering my knowledge of the strand I'll go into eventually. Helping me make the right decision on which path to go down. 

Freshman year held my hand and walked me through each strand, showcasing both the benefits and the downsides. Sophomore year continued to teach me about the two strands I was eventually going to decide between. Next year, my path will be set. I'll go forward, continuing to learn about animation, until the day comes when I've learned all I can, and I'll be free to use what I've been taught to do what I previously thought was impossible for me. I've got no doubts. I'm going to be just fine. And most importantly of all...

Next year can't come soon enough.

Thanks for reading,

Tate Johnson

I've Lost Track of How Many Bouncing Balls I've Animated But This One Is Special Because It's in 3D™

I'm aware that the title is long-winded, but it is the truth.

Our latest project in Maya was to animate three balls, each with varying levels of bounce -- these balls being a golf ball, tennis ball, and bowling ball, respectively.

Before we could start animating, we had to find a way to get specific measurements for each bounce. So we took a field trip down to some off the trail area in the school where we could drop balls of varying weights without causing major damage to significant areas of the school. Each drop and bounce was filmed, then brought into Photoshop, where we marked the highest and lowest points of each bounce alongside the frame number. We then put our results into a Google Sheets to keep everything organized.

I managed to start modeling the balls and plane a while before the bounce calculations; it mainly boiled down to making spheres of differing sizes with respective colors and bump maps that I pulled off the internet for each. Lighting was the same as usual -- so there's nothing new or interesting that happened during modeling.

The first few bounce keyframes were made with the timeline -- but after a while, we were taught how to use the graph editor to make our lives ten times easier! The graph editor is used to make frames, and appears like a line graph that dips up, down, and all around. Making keyframes on the graph editor and punching in each respective coordinate from the Google Sheet made animating ten times easier. Other things to note were making the movements linear (so the bounce looked more organic), and pushing a couple keyframes around to make sure everything looked good, which meant that some measurements (specifically the inaccurate ones) went unused.

Then came the crazy part -- picking an image to use as a background for the animation, so that it wasn't a plane with a black sky! I ended up picking a tennis court, and shifted camera angles and lights around to make everything look good and natural.

I'm quite proud with the final result, but the bounces still retain an artificial feel. While it may be outside my skill level, making the balls stray into different directions would improve the overall quality. But all in all, I'm proud with the finished animation! You can watch it below...

(I'm fully aware that it's a little dark. Maya lighting is wonky and doesn't like to cooperate with me.)

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you all in the next post!

-Tate

Napoleon Dynamite Trailer Recreation

Our latest assignment in Video was to take a movie trailer (specifically one with a high-school setting, since I imagine that assigning a bunch of sophomores to recreate Pacific Rim or Star Wars would be just a little out of our league) and recreate it. The team I was in decided to recreate Napoleon Dynamite. It was a simple project, but I've got a lot to say, so why don't we get started?

Pre-production was easy enough. We just had to make a film schedule with dates, props, and all that, which was simple but needed heavy revisions throughout the film process. Next up was the storyboard and script. Since Google Docs is a horrible program that has no purpose other than seeing me suffer, I compiled all the screenshots I took into the program, printed it out, and wrote on the notes myself. Needless to say, it was painful. The script was easy enough -- I just took any necessary notes and copied the lines.

Then came actual filming. We did any in-school shots after classes for the day ended (on a constantly shifting date because no one had a clear schedule and it upset me greatly), and any at-home shots were filmed at my house in my basement. The first day of home filming went smoothly for a total of three seconds, before me and my giant clumsy sausage finger went and broke the mic. So we were forced to film all the shots that didn't require sound, effectively splitting filming in half. But we were able to persevere and get everything filmed.

The roles in the trailer were all filmed by members of the group -- Seth was Napoleon, Maddie was the female lead whose name I forgot, and I had to film every other role with the power of wigs, fake mustaches, and determination since my friend list is extremely limited. The props were easy enough to get our hands on, and certain scenes were improvised due to things out of our control (such as the tetherball scene being replaced with moonwalking and the bike scene being filled in by me, since Seth had recently undergone leg surgery. Another thing we replaced were the car hydraulics, which were substituted with a funny horn).

Finally, we had to each edit our own version of the trailer, because your teammate saying they're too "busy" to edit their own and subsequently trying to pass yours off as their own is one of the most infuriating things (I speak from experience) and the pain of the situation is too great and never fades away (this happened to me first quarter, and I'm still salty, but not visibly because it's my best friend). Editing was simple -- I pulled animated intros and transitions out of the trailer itself, and tried my best to make sure everything mirrored the trailer to the best of my abilities. The music and sounds aren't perfect, but there's only so much you can do.

This project was able to refresh my knowledge of camera use, proper filming, microphone use, and clean editing (packed in with audio balancing), along with being able to work on a group schedule -- which are all essential skills in the video world.

Some more unorthodox things I learned were how to take responsibility when you accidentally break a piece of equipment despite the pure and unadulterated fear you may feel, and where not to put a sheet of fake mustaches so that they don't end up in the road on the other side of the neighborhood.

If I did this project again, I would keep everything the same, aside from a few differences in timing, clip size, audio, and color balance -- along with re-filming the bike shot because it's shakier than my entire body before a big due date (and that's saying something).

The next project is the short film -- and all I have to say about it is...

I'm only slightly terrified.

Thanks for reading,
-Tate


(Heck. I got copyright claimed. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.)

Maya Container Project of Wonder, Justice, and Illustriousness

I was going to make the title into a bad container pun but everything I tried either wasn't funny or wasn't grammatically correct.

ANYWAYS!

Our latest project in Maya was yet another combined test of our skills -- by using everything within our (somewhat limited but still pretty good) range of 3D modeling and animation knowledge to make the container of a fictional product, as well as a wraparound label texture.

There were no solid rules here -- we were allowed to make anything we wanted to, as long as it was... well, doable. Examples of labelled products are drink bottles, candy tins, and soup cans. I decided to go a little off the beaten path and make something completely new -- my own brand of instant ground coffee in a cute cookie-jar container, known to the public as Mortis Mocha™!*

Making the jar itself was super simple. All I had to do was construct the basic shape of the jar and lid out of curves, and then revolve them similarly to the goblet I made a few posts back.

Well... I thought it would be simple, but MANY mistakes were made during the modeling process. One of them being the fact that my first revolve was a NURBS surface, and not a polygon. Since NURBS couldn't support rendered textured surfaces, I had to try revolving again, but as a polygon this time. But for some odd reason, every time I tried re-revolving the curves, they ended up with weird dents in the model, resulting in awkward-looking flat spots. This plagued me for a long time, until just a few days ago -- where I tried converting a NURBS version of the revolved curve into a SubDiv (which looked strangely like something from a Nintendo 64 game due to its low-poly appearance), and then into a polygon from there. To my surprise, it worked perfectly and I was finally able to add the label!

The label was a long image made in Photoshop, meant to be wrapped around the body of the product. My label was simple enough -- name of the product, company name, catchy little slogan, fancy typography, an ingredients list, directions, barcode, cute little mascot of a latte-foam ghost in a coffee cup... you know, the usual. Making the logo was super fun (because I like drawing and designing things, especially in Photoshop)! Here I have to give credit where it's due -- a fair amount of the stylistic choices I made were suggested by my next-computer neighbor and e-Comm friend Evan, so big thanks to him. He's awesome.

Shading and texturing aside from the logo was simple. A nice cool-gray (which is the best gray and if you disagree, I respect your opinion because that's the nice thing to do) Phong E was used to shade the jar's metal lid and base, and a transparent slightly-blue Phong E was used on the unlabeled part of the jar to resemble glass. Another thing I made late in the project was a cylinder with a half-sphere (to make a domed shape) that fit inside the jar, and was colored with a coffee-brown bump map to resemble ground coffee inside the jar.

Now comes the fun part -- the label! It wasn't too hard to put on (aside from having to work with an unfamiliar mapping tool), and it ended up looking REALLY nice.

The final part is the same stuff as usual -- pick a background color, make a plane surface, add some lights, render some test images, pump out a motherlode of JPEGs to pile into an After Effects project, render that final movie out, and done!

Similarly to the pen, this project was a great way to teach some new skills while improving on the old ones I still have. The only thing I would do differently would be fixing the lighting so that the final rendered movie doesn't look too dark.

Thanks for reading as always! You're all the best.

See you soon,
-Tate Johnson


*Mortis Mocha is a fictional brand of coffee from a fictional cafe in a fictional city in a fictional universe inhabited by fictional characters that I have created. The death pun was made because the main characters all have died at one point, but were resurrected. I'd stay and explain more, but then we would be here for half an hour and you would all fall asleep while I continue to ramble on about this world I've made.

Snow Animation (Maya)

Hello again.

I haven't been able to do much work due to a crazy ice storm that came out of nowhere, slapped our school district across the face, cancelling school for three whole days and leaving us with only one day of work on Friday. I've gotten kind of sick of looking at snow and ice after all of that, but I made this animation nonetheless.

Modeling the snowflakes was actually quite fun -- all we had to do was make some weird geometric polygons, mirror them to create a whole snowflake, make an army of snowflakes, extrude faces, smooth the edges, slap on a rocky bump map, and done! All the snowflakes I made either looked like rejected shurikens, weird amoebas, or something that slightly resembles a snowflake. But it was fun either way!
Next in line for modeling was a wall with a window. It was just a plane with some fancy extrusions and transparent textures to make the wall and window. Nothing more, nothing less.

Lighting was the same as usual -- three point, a nice mix of spotlight and directional for the snowflakes, and a point light to make a lamp inside the room.

Next up was animation. I took my snowflakes, resized and duplicated them, and put them above the window out of sight. Then, one-by-one, across a total 240 frames, I dragged the snowflakes down and added a slight rotation to make the animation. Some snowflakes, such as the less delicate, chunky ones and the smaller ones, fell faster than others, whereas larger snowflakes and more delicate snowflakes fell fairly slowly. Making them fall at different speeds and intervals is important, because it makes the animation feel more realistic. And while a bunch of snow falling all at once blanketing the ground with six inches instantly would be hilarious, it would also be unrealistic (and quite painful).

Not much else needed to be done after animation, aside from fixing the lights to make sure everything looked good for the final render, and compiling it all in After Effects as a JPEG sequence to make the final movie, shown below.

Overall, I think the project went well, aside from the lack of time spent working due to real-life weather and having to re-render everything after fixing the lighting, which took WAY too long to do. I'm surprised that I didn't become a skeleton before the rendering finished.

Thanks for reading, and I'm sorry that this post is kind of bare. There's not much I can say that interesting, and I'm really tired right now, so I promise that the next post will have so much intricate detail that you can and will drown in it.

-Tate

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For...

3D ANIMATED AND TEXTURED ICE CREAM!!!



This project has a bit of a funny history. I actually finished modeling this before the pen, but made the pen in between modeling and animating. I don't know why we decided to make the pen in between animating the ice cream, maybe we could have done the pen before or after the ice cream, but then I would expect the pen to be animated, nothing makes sense anymore, holy heck my head is spinning more than the lazy Susan carrying the ice cream and I need to move on.


ANYWAYS!


First, I'll discuss the modeling process of the ice cream. It started like any other project in Maya- WITH CIRCLES! Well, to be more specific, I began by making the general foundation of all the objects out of basic shapes. The table was made from a large, flat cube and four tall, skinny cubes to make the legs. The bowl was made using boolean'd cylinders, and the ice cream stand was made with long thing cylinders and two toruses (basically a doughnut shape). The scooping apparatus was created using a sphere that had been boolean'd to make a scoop shape, a long cylinder for the handle, and a tiny half sphere for the end of the handle. You know, because it's fancy. I'll give you three guesses as to what I made the cone out of. Finally, I created a boatload of spheres in differing colors to make the best part- the scoops!


Next up was shading and texturing. I had to dabble into 3D textures and bump maps in order to achieve a realistic look on all the necessary objects. Examples of such being applying a cloud texture to the carpet and the scoops to make them look nice and fluffy instead of smooth and boring, and applying a wood texture to the table (which was a nightmare to work with). The rest of the objects either used Lamberts, Blinns, and some variety of Phong.


Next on the list was 3-point lighting. It's the same as it's always been- strong main light, gentle fill light off to the side, moderate back light behind everything to make the scene pop. After that, I rendered the final image and called it done!


Except, I wasn't done.


There was a surprise final challenge- animating the scene!


This was entirely new material, but it was surprisingly easy to accomplish. All I had to do was group every object together (which, in hindsight, I should have already done to make my life just a little bit easier), create a Lazy Susan out of a flattened cylinder, and group the objects to the Lazy Susan. Next, I set up a timeline, making the first out of 120 keyframes. It wasn't too hard, considering the fact that I didn't have to do anything to it.


But on the 120th frame, I set the rotation of the group to 359, in order to make it spin! I didn't make it 360, simply because doing that wouldn't make the objects move. It was surprisingly easy, considering the fact that I had no clue what I was doing. Exporting was just as simple, if a bit tedious. The way it exported left it as a huge pile of JPEGs that I had to compile into After Effects in order to achieve the final, fully modeled and animated video. The lighting looked a bit wonkier in the animation than how it looked in the single rendered picture, but that's okay. The video is at the top of the post for you to watch and enjoy!


I'm very proud with the final product. The shaders and bump maps look great, everything is fairly well modeled and the animation is wonderfully smooth. If I did this again, all I would change is the lights so that the animated product looks just as good as the rendered image.


Thank you so much for reading! I hope the rest of your day is wonderful.


-Tate

Music Video Project Personal Blog

Hello!

Our first video project in 2018 was to find a music video we liked, and then recreate it to the best of our abilities. It was a group project, so everyone had a specific role to focus on. I was appointed as the editor, but I ended up doing a couple of other odd jobs along the way (such as storyboarding, holding onto the camera+tripod until the filming date, even being in the video itself).

Getting Started

Before we could even think about filming, we had to choose a music video to replicate. There were a lot of good options that we came up with before we ended up choosing Try by Colbie Caillat. The first thing we had to do was create a beat sheet, which was basically just a sheet of paper with all the necessary information regarding the video and song, such as publisher and release date.

After that came the film scape -- which is a selection of possible props, backgrounds, etc... which we didn't necessarily have to do since all we needed was a white background. Next in line was storyboarding, which I ended up doing because I am (somewhat) good at drawing, and was willing to draw as much as I did to complete the storyboard. It was five pages of different angles, zooms, and facial expressions which we didn't even end up using since we forgot to bring it on filming day. Worth it? Absolutely.

Filming

Since the video features many people of different appearance, we ended up asking some friends to volunteer in the filming. All they had to do was put on a white t-shirt and some makeup, lip sync, take off the makeup, and lip sync again. Easy!

I will admit that I was a little shaken up by the thought of spending a few hours or more filming with people I either barely knew at best, or who were complete strangers at worst, alongside a sudden schedule change. I'll admit it was a little silly to get so worked up over, and deep down I knew everything was going to be okay, but my dormant chronic social awkwardness was telling me otherwise.

My fears were dashed entirely as soon as I set foot in our art director's house (where we were filming). Everyone we were working with was friendly and cooperative, and we ended up having a lot of fun filming everything! Since we were short a few people, both the director and art director (named Jess and Jessica respectively) had to step in and be in the video as well. I wasn't planning on being in the video unless it was absolutely necessary... and, as fate would have it, I ended up being filmed for the video as well. It wasn't hard at all -- I brought my own white shirt to use in advance, let one of the other girls put makeup on me (which was awkward since I don't wear any makeup aside from chapstick, and eyebrow pencil if I'm feeling up to it), and lip-synced a couple parts of the song. Remembering the lyrics wasn't a hassle at all, since I had heard the song so many times at that point that the lyrics were basically drilled into my skull. After a few hours of filming, impromptu makeup sessions, and awkward lip sync, we were done and ready to edit!

Well, not yet. We ended up leaving the equipment at Jessica's house, so that she could film another friend in order to accommodate for the lack of people, which was still in the way despite our last minute fill-ins. These later clips were harder to work with due to a difference in white-balancing, but it was easily fixed during editing.

Editing and Exporting

As the main editor of the video, I got to work saving clips and audio as soon as I walked into class that day. There were a lot of clips to work around, including some we couldn't use in our main video, so just saving everything from the SD card to a separate folder consumed a whole day of our time.

Since I wanted the final product to look as much like the actual video as possible, I did my best to make the lip sync in our clips match up to the song, along with cuts to other people in lines to keep the video from going stale. After the opening verse and chorus, there was a short instrumental break that was perfect for some makeup removal filler, followed by another verse and chorus plus instrumental filler. Since we didn't have enough footage to make the whole video (and also because frankly, I was getting tired of editing at that point), we cut out the final verse and did our best to mask the sudden transition between the instrumental break and the final verse.

Throughout the entire editing process, I had to keep continuity in mind. I couldn't use clips of people with makeup after showing them removing it, and vice versa with using people without makeup before showing them with it on. The lack of clips remained an issue through to the end, necessitating some clip-stretching and slowing in order to fill larger gaps.

Editing was still fun and manageable, and we were able to finish editing the video before the deadline and export it for all to see.

Conclusion

This project taught me many things -- refreshers on storyboarding, working with general video equipment, and everything few and far between. The main thing I learned, however, was in regards to working with a group. Setting dates that would work with everyone's schedule, working with each other during filming and editing, agreeing on decisions made by part of the group, and generally making sure that everyone was working together as a team and not on their own without other members' consent. There is no "I" in "team", after all.

If I did this project again, I'd obviously gather more varied footage to keep everything fresh, along with more footage of people lip-syncing in general so that we don't run short. A possible solution would be to film everyone in three parts- one run of the whole song with and without makeup, and removal filler.

In editing, I'd pay more attention to color correction and syncing so that everything runs smoothly. I'd also do a better job masking the cut in the audio so it sounds more natural.

Overall, the project went very well and I'm pleased with the final product. And I hope you'll like it too.

Until next time,

Tate