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.)
Monday, March 26, 2018
Friday, March 23, 2018
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.
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.
Thursday, March 1, 2018
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 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
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