Stop Motion Has Literally Stopped Motion

Hey guys, my class has been assigned a group assignment that is a stop motion project. I am working with three incredible animators to create our story. If you want to check out some other things going on with this project check out my partner and friend Kelsie Wilt.


We were inspired by the stop motion music video Morning Elegance that was all shot with the emphasis of stop motion. Our idea deals with a girl having a nightmare that is represented by black sheets that continue to try and capture her. The difficult part of this animations the song we were hoping to put the animation to is four minutes and thirty- five seconds, which would mean we would have to take over 5,000 pictures. We decided to cut the song to two minutes which meant we only needed to take around 1,000-2,500 pictures.

I am hoping to get this project all set up and ready by the middle of next week. Our biggest problem is not having the bed or sheets, we are trying to get some loaned to us, so we don't have to establish a budget that is looking like it would be around $90 for just the sheets. Hopefully we can get a king sheets set and king mattress ready for shooting next week. 

We worked a whole week on the storyboard and it was a hard and long process. 

We had to go through the music second by second and plan out every frame, thankfully most of Kelsie Wilts past projects have incorporated this in-depth storyboarding music sync. 

In the story, a girl is running from her nightmares and is given a sense of hope by a horse that comes to save her. We had done a few tests with the sheets to see what it would look like and it looked awesome! 

We were hoping to be finished around this week, but that did not happen. 

Our stop motion project had not worked out because of time and material issues. We began to think of a new idea with only two days left to work on the project, so we re-started our project with a new idea.

Our new idea is a text message coming out of a phone, but it comes our as a note instead of a normal "cyber" message. The first note says "You Matter" and it crawls around the school, and to our good friend Mike's phone. Then Mike sends another message the same way that says, "UR 2 LegiT 2 Quit" that goes back to our teacher, Mr. Netterville  and he was happy to receive it. 

Our pre-production process for our new idea started with the idea of spreading kindness throughout our school. We had two students suddenly pass away last week and I felt that kindness is the only way to help people recover during this hard time.


We also wanted to add a fun kind of twist to the end by incorporating our animation teacher receiving the text in the end of our project.

We story boarded in a day, and shot the project in two days. This made our group very stressed and very articulate with everything we did. We moved the note card very slow, which took us even longer to shoot.

On the way of making this project I learned that we need to have all the appropriate materials and time before starting the project. Over time, I felt that our group was honestly ready to rip each others hair out and we started to get on each others nerves, but we made it through.


For my next stop motion project, I will check what time I have until the project is due and get the materials collected before you get set on an idea. My biggest problem is that once I get a really good idea, I get my mind set on it, and I do not want to change my idea at all. I need to work on expanding my ideas and projects to make them more entertaining to not just me, but my audience.

Our team 

Kelsie Wilt was one of our two project managers. She helped come up with the original idea and the new idea. She also drew up all the storyboards. She is a hand drawn animator than a stop motion or 3D animator, but she brought a lot of skills to our team and our project.



Mike Webster was our technical director. He would move the card around the floor for us to shoot, he also helped convince Mr. Netterville to have us put note cards on him.







Hasset Habt was our behind the scenes. She helped add her own twists and ideas to our project. She really helped out during the post production process, but was not as involved in our production or post production






Chloe Kraus (This Blogger) was one of our two project managers and director of the project. She helped come up with the new and old project ideas. She also was the cinematographer for the project, and had to move notecards when they are at Mr. Netterville's desk.

New Project Has Some Progress

Hey guys,

My new project is slowly but surely getting started. My group for our stop motion project is almost done with our final project, click here to get the hyperlink to my blog for that project.

As I said in my last blog, the movie Interstellar was the inspiration for my next project. I had spent several hours earlier this week to storyboard my idea so I could see what my plan for this animation is. I am combining both my portrait and animation skills together for this project.














Here is the song I plan on using for the animation. It is from the original soundtrack, so I do not own any rights to the music.

 My storyboards are very different from other peoples storyboards. I do not like being confined to a small box. Even if that is the size of my frame, I like to be able to see the whole thing all together.

The first part is going to show the house and under it list the directors name, until dust blows the name away. The camera then moves up to the window and goes inside Murphy's room. It will be zoomed on the book shelf where the books will fall to spell "Written By Jonathan and Christopher Nolan". In the movie Murphy has a model of the moon landing rocket, I am going to have the camera zoom into the rocket and it will list the executive produce. The rocket will flip over and become a chemistry beaker to symbolize the labs they worked in, with the name of another producer bubbling out the top. The background going up will turn black, then show rockets shooting up with lines reading the others producers names, now this is where it gets really complicated; I will zoom up on the lines with producers names are, then rotate the lines, and inserting the other producers in the spaces between the bars. The next transition would be the one of the bars stretching out to make a part of the watch that the main character wears, then zoom in on the watch, which has a hand ticking a morse code message. I would zoom into the watch part, and when the hand moves down it will wipe the word, "Music By" on the top, then it will wipe the letters away and say the composers name. I will zoom out and the shape of the watch will make one of the engines of the space ship.

On page two it starts with the "Gigantic" planet they have to pass by that gets them into a different dimension. I will have different parts moving within to, then have the name of the editor flow through it. The next part would be a wave from the first planet they visited with the words "Casting By" then the wave comes crashing down and the casting persons name pops up from the water. It when then going into the vector portraits of each character. Some will shatter for a transition to another character.

***SPOILERS***
The final part is when the main character goes into the 5th dimension and it will show the way Christopher Nolan had illustrated on the scene. It will then transfer to Cooper's daughters life span, which is showed by the vector portraits from her being young to old, while Cooper's portraits state the same since the time he was in was slower than Earths time.

Here is the first vector portrait of Cooper I have done so far. It took me two days in class to complete, but it will all be worth it in the end. I will have to do eight portraits of just people, then over a dozen of just objects. I hope that this project will look good enough to enter into our state wide multi media festival. 

I will check back in a few weeks to show my project. 

Interstellar Idea!

Hey guys, 

This past week has been a long week. We unfortunately had two students pass away, so not a lot of work had been done through this tough time. My group was dealing with the problem of a fast approaching deadline, and lack of materials. We have had to scrap our whole idea (which seems to be a normal thing with me) and come up with a shorter simpler idea. Our idea is a kind text being sent, but instead of digitally the text jumps out of the phone as a piece of paper and runs through the class room to the other person. The test render looks very good, so the final should be done by Friday.

Now you're probably wondering why the title to this blog is Intersellar idea. My dad and I got to go see the new Christopher Nolan movie Interstellar starring Matthew Mcconaughey and Anne Hathaway,  last night. 

I was inspired by some of the fan art I found online today, 

(Source: Pintrest I do not own any of these pictures.)

and began storyboarding a credits animation, that goes with some of the music to the movie. It will look similar to my past Supernatural animation that was not finished. I hope to get this project started tomorrow. 

STOP... COLLABORATE AND MOTION

Hey guys, it has been a while since blogged about my animation class. We are now doing a group assignment that is a stop motion project. I am working with three incredible animators to create our story. If you want to check out some other things going on with this project check out my partner and friend Kelsie Wilt.


We were inspired by the stop motion music video Morning Elegance that was all shot with the emphasis of stop motion. Our idea deals with a girl having a nightmare that is represented by black sheets that continue to try and capture her. The difficult part of this animations the song we were hoping to put the animation to is four minutes and thirty- five seconds, which would mean we would have to take over 5,000 pictures. We decided to cut the song to two minutes which meant we only needed to take around 1,000-2,500 pictures.

I am hoping to get this project all set up and ready by the middle of next week. Our biggest problem is not having the bed or sheets, we are trying to get some loaned to us, so we don't have to establish a budget that is looking like it would be around $90 for just the sheets. Hopefully we can get a king sheets set and king mattress ready for shooting next week. 

We worked a whole week on the storyboard and it was a hard and long process. 

We had to go through the music second by second and plan out every frame, thankfully most of Kelsie Wilts past projects have incorporated this in-depth storyboarding music sync. 

In the story, a girl is running from her nightmares and is given a sense of hope by a horse that comes to save her. We had done a few tests with the sheets to see what it would look like and it looked awesome! 

I'm hoping to start this project this upcoming week,

and hopefully be finished by the end of November, then 

have post production for about a week. 

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.