And thats a... FLOP

Well, our video to promote our program flopped. The deadline was really early and the video portion of the project was not put together how we envisioned it. We went in and had another meeting with the video department to see what we could do to re-shoot and come up with some new ideas to make the video better and more about our project. We are currently brainstorming and meeting again in about two weeks to share our ideas. The big thing with this project is to to have everyone on board. Both the video and animation teachers need to be fully supporting our idea for the collaboration to work between the two strands (focus groups)
  

So since I had been working at school and at home with the ideas of the cubes, I did not really have time to finish my previous tutorial driven project, so for my final project I will be using one of my test renders for the cube.
I hope to have better news in two weeks!

A Bigger Project Instead

Hey guys, it's been a while since I was last on. The last time I blogged, I was in the middle of a "tutorial" to do the smoke FX from the show Supernatural. I have had to pause that project for a big school project in which all of the Video, Animation, Graphic Design and Web students all come together to collaborate on one project. The project is a promotional video advertising for our program. The central theme is to share ideas and become creative as a whole program. To represent ideas, we are using cubes that continue to pop up above peoples heads as ideas are shared.

The collaboration part of this project has been a bigger challenge than what I had anticipated on. The video group wanted the video to have the animated cubes being passed in peoples hands, like handing someone an idea. With a time frame of two weeks, that idea seemed impossible. We met up three more times that week to see how we could make it manageable for us animators. That is when the cube coming above the head came into play.

Some video people disagreed with the idea, saying it looked too much like the Sims games and that, it wouldn't look good. My teacher and I got a sample clip after the meeting and showed the cube being tossed back and forth, it took us about two hours just to animate  the cube being tossed between two people. This obviously meant that the change of the position and actions of the cube above the head were are only option. 

We will be getting the footage on Monday and begin working our magic! 

This is Harder Than I Thought

Hello all, it's me again. I have made a daring endeavor by try to combine a couple tutorials together for my first project, as I talked about in my previous blog. The effect I am trying to recreate is a "demon" (smoke form) going inside a person, as seen below.

Now this effect is actually harder than it seems. I have looked into  exact tutorial on this effect, but most of them are not crisp and clear as I would want them to be. I then looked at Andrew Kramer's site for Video Copilot. I found a flying smoke similar to the effect in the example video above. I attempted to format the Video Copilot tutorial to the project I was doing, but unfortunately it did not work as I wanted it to.

This is where I will be coming into the career of animation strong. In major animation careers, they do not get to watch tutorials to figure out how to do their entire project, they have to mess with the settings, lighting and sound all on their own and with their own knowledge with the program and animation.

(Top: Andrew Kramer,
Bottom: Original PIXAR Team )

At this point I am actually only about a class period behind schedule, and at the same time I am still ahead on the project, it's just creating the effects without anything to look off of is difficult. A big problem I have been having though is having the smoke get darker. I have played with the color for about three days now and it just won't balance out to be the dark black/gray color. I hope to get this figured out by late this week, early next week.

Here is the final render of the demon possession video FX I did. the entire animation was not complete, but I still understand all of the content and can use it towards other projects i the future.