This week, I kept on creating my model. I managed to create the smallest and most important pieces for the project: the mechanism’s music wheel and the metal comb. Both had very small and precise pieces to work with, and it took a while, but I’m very happy with hoe they came out. Having a physical music box to base myself off of was extremely useful in getting the proportions just right.
Separating the combs from one another was an extremely long process, but I’m sure it’ll be worth it.
I modeled one of the music cylinders’ nibs after the one I have, which plays “Happy Birthday”. I’m considering that, if I figure out how to play music in my animation, I could have it play the song as the cylinder spins, to add to the realism of the animation.
I feel like I’m a bit behind in my modeling, but it’ll probably be fine.
After grasping some further concepts with Maya, I made a sketch and blockout of my design:
While not perfect, I believe it serves its purpose, and I’m sure I’ll be able to add details to it moving forward. I had some difficulties, and some problems that I’m still not sure on how to solve, but I’ll get there.
I also wrote a couple of paragraphs of story, to set the scene for my invention:
It’s silly and cheesy, but I had decent fun writing it.
This week, we started the first of our electives. I happened to be in the first group of the 3D elective, so for the next 5 weeks, I’ll be focusing on its project, which centers on taking a modern invention and recreating it in the aesthetic and functionality from an an older time period.
We started off with a 2-day group project, a condensed version of the final task. Me and my group did some research, and in the end, we came up with some drawn prototypes of Heelys made in Ancient Egypt; they were to be used by pharaohs and other upper-class members of society, and could be attached to animals to act as personal mini-chariots. Below is the Padlet board we made to showcase out ideas.
Next, to get acquainted with Maya, we were tasked with recreating a LEGO man as accurately as possible. I had some difficulty, as I’m still new to 3D programs in general and I was already more used to Blender, but I managed to work it out in the end.
I’m happy with my final result: the legs in particular are very faithful to an actual LEGO character. I had to improvise with the arms, making them out of spheres and cylinders, and the hands are more wide than usual, but I’m relatively satisfied with my end product.
Finally, we had to come up with an object and time period to work on for the next month. In the end, I’ve decided to work on recreating a Sony Walkman in 18th-19th Century Switzerland. The reason I chose such a specific time period is because that’s when music boxes were invented: I think that incorporating them into my design could look really good, and I’m excited to explore that idea further.
Currently, I’m working on my 2 pages of research for tomorrow. I’m excited to continue working on this, and I hope I end up making something I’ll be prouder of than my work in the 3D rotation.
I re-watched the videos a few times, and once I finally understood how to use Nuke efficiently, I got to work on making the cinemagraphs. In the end, I turned 5 out of my 6 videos into cinemagraphs: the fifth video was too shaky, and wouldn’t have come out well, so I just used a still image for it.
I compiled all of them into a single video.
I had to film all the shots by hand, as I have no tripod, so they’re all a bit shaky: you can notice irregular movement in all of them. Also, I accidentally filmed them all at a wrong image ratio, which meant I had to crop them all on the sides, which cut out some content. Still, it wasn’t a great loss, and I’m happy of the concept of the video itself; with a bit more practice I’m sure I could do better.
Overall, Visual Effects was very challenging for me: I’m not at all used to video editing, and it’s certainly not what I was expecting to do in the course. But once I got over the frustration of learning how to use Nuke, it proved to be quite fun. In the end, I’m glad I got to try it out through this rotation.
This second week, we started learning how to utilize Nuke, as well as visualizing how we’d interpret our chosen aspect of ourselves, and incorporate it into 6-8 shots. I developed some of last week’s sketches into thumbnails, as well as creating some new ones. They’re not very detailed, but they show what I wish to have in the final shots.
I used pencil for everything that should simply be a picture, and black pen for what I plan to have some movement in, on each frame. If I have the time, I’d like each shot to have movement, but if not I’ll select a few to just keep as still images, and focus on only getting a few done.
The first five shots take place inside a single room in my house, with the last one being outside, a few minutes away from my home.
The first 3 shots are consecutive and give off the same message in increasingly tense ways, zooming in more and more on the pencil and the blank page. The fourth shot would be the first real change, with a computer screen showing me researching art block, and understanding how to tackle the situation.
The fifth shot would be turned towards the room’s main window, looking outside, showing the start of an idea; which finally leads to the final shot, showing the subject outside, taking in the simple but charming view of a river, and taking a break from art (I plan to take the shot at sunset, to make it particularly fancy).
I took a few shots as examples, but none are quite perfect, so I’ll have to retake them. Still, it was useful to be able to picture how I’d want the shots to be.
Example of a possible first shot. Some details are missing, and I’m thinking of making it closer to the sketchbook, but the overall setup is good.Example of a possible fifth shot. The aspect ratio’s wrong. Example of a possible last shot. I’d have the water be the moving subject.Another example of a possible last shot. I like the lighting in this one.
I also watched the basic Nuke tutorials. It looks and sounds pretty complicated, as I’ve never even dabbled in any photo-editing program like this before, but I’ll do my best to try and get as much done as possible.
This first week of VFX was fairly basic: we got introduced to the main project we’ll have to complete, we were given some general knowledge on a camera’s components, and then allowed to research what we wanted to do.
I did a bit of brainstorming and mind-mapping on paper, and got a few ideas, but I decided to go with art block as my final one.
It’s a bit sad as a topic, but it’s a big part of my creative life, and it could make for some interesting shots.
I took some pictures, to get some nice vibes. I went for dark, but somewhat lit areas; I’m thinking of giving a sad, but hopeful vibe to my shots. I also sketched some things inside the study room.
I downloaded Nuke (not without problems), but I honestly don’t know how to use it, and from the look of the group-chat, neither do most of my classmates. We’ll see where next week’s classes take us.
I was able to lower the polygon count for the chains, which helped the freezing (though it still happened every once in a while after that, but I guess it can’t be helped). I also found a good way to animate the clouds: I made 3 layers (each at about 40% transparency, to show the chains dipping into them), and animated each layer so they go at different speeds: the top layer would go the fastest, and the bottom layer the slowest. This, along with the lighting, would make a nice moving “floor”, and have the buildings’ shadows wave around.
The 3 cloud layers, moving at different speeds.
Along with them, I also animated a man flying from the farthest building up to next to the camera, and some small people flying around the same building (they’re barely visible, but I wanted to add that detail).
I’m currently having trouble with rendering the animation; other than it taking forever, the rendering doesn’t show the clouds to be transparent at all, which really annoys me, as I put a lot of effort into getting the clouds to look and move nicely.
A screenshot of the rendering, showing the clouds being portrayed as opaque, instead of semi-transparent.
Also, I can’t seem to be able to upload the rendered file onto MyBlog, but I will as soon as I figure out how to do it.
Overall, this pathway left me more disappointed than the previous two, both in terms of structure and my own work. The program being done completely online generally made it less impactful and harder than the previous two, especially with how much harder 3D is for beginners, and I feel like I could’ve done a better work. I think my choice of environment was just a bit bland, which resulted in a pretty boring, if functional, piece of work. If I do end up taking 3D Production as one of my two choices later on in the year, I’ll put more thought into my environments before I start creating them. Still, all things considered, I learnt a lot in this pathway.
This morning, we presented our books for the first time in front of Jane, Stuart and our classes. By then, I’d managed to complete the paper-drawn book, stick all the pages together, and record them. I essentially shot it like a stop-motion video, one shot at a time: this way, I have specific frames I get to draw on digitally for the animation.
I still need to add any audio, but I think I’ll limit it to myself explaining some of the reasoning and my thought process behind the book, maybe with some light music in the background (I’ll make sure it’s not a sad piano solo, per Stuart’s request).
Everyone else’s projects were amazing. It’s hard to not constantly compare myself to them, and feel a tinge of imposter’s syndrome, but it’s also inspiring; I genuinely feel happy for all of them, and I push myself to be as good as everyone else.
I’ll make sure to have everything done as soon as possible.
During the break, I mostly focused on creating the animatic and “You Are Here” book projects. Therefore, while I did work on my 3D design, it wasn’t my main focus. Still, I managed to create basically all the setpieces, and colored most of them. This is what I managed to make by Monday’s lesson:
There are many things to do still, like giving the clouds a better texture, coloring the chains (and lowering their polygon count- more on that later), and animating some setpieces like the man flying through the screen (which I luckily understood how to do in Monday’s class) and maybe having the clouds move forward, as well as bettering the lighting.
I could’ve probably been going a lot quicker with this had it not been for Blender: from around halfway through the project, it started freezing for a few seconds every 30 seconds or so, whenever I had to color or move anything, even the camera. I asked Sam about this, and he said that I should lower the chains’ polygon count, as there are many chains and therefore many polygons. As soon as I’m finished writing this, I’ll look up a video detailing how to lower the poly-count of many objects at once, since doing it one chain at a time would take me forever.
I realize I essentially caused my own problem there, but I think it’s only natural: 3D is not nearly as intuitive as 2D, nor am I experienced in it as much as I am in 2D. The technique and knowledge needed to do anything is hard to learn, and I’m having to research how to do a lot of things (such as changing the opacity of the clouds), as the video recordings only contain so knowledge.
This isn’t the tutors’ fault, of course, but I really feel like this is the first time the current COVID situation is impacting my learning. Before now, the knowledge I needed for the rotations was fairly basic, as it was all 2D art, which I knew how to do, and the knowledge was delivered in person on Monday. With this rotation, however, I’m finding that the online learning method just isn’t enough, which is demoralizing. And I’m afraid the next rotation, VFX, will probably suffer the same fate.
This whole situation has admittedly made me feel a bit negative about this rotation, but I’ll still do my best to finish it and deliver a final scene as good as I can manage.
While the past few weeks have been mainly focused on making the animatic, I’ve still been working on the book when I had time.
After deciding the shape and context of the book, I began brainstorming ideas to include within the two sections of ‘How did I get here?’ and ‘Where Am I Now?’.
Some quick brainstorming for themes to explore in the book.
I was largely inspired by the Friday workshops when choosing the themes: I considered my culture, both the one I grew up with in Italy and the one I’ve gotten to experience in the 2 months I got to be in London before Christmas break and the current lockdown that’s making me stay at home. My family, who impacted me so much growing up, is also mentioned. My elementary school, that first taught me english and got me interested in storytelling, will have a page to itself too. My interests, both back then and now, are an important part of who I am, so I’ll talk about them in depth.
In the pages above, I brainstormed topics to talk about in the book.
I’ve decided to have the book contain both photographs and drawings made by myself, with text to accompany them and explain their context. Once the book is done, I plan to film myself flipping through it, and then animate on top of the video. The way I’m thinking of doing it is through a stop-motion of sorts: take many pictures, in sequence, of me flipping through the book. Then, I export every image into an animation program I have, and draw over them. It’ll be complicated, and maybe a bit time-consuming, but the final product could be really cool, like Feeling My Way.
Plus, this will save me time in the video; I’ve rehearsed flipping through a draft version of the book, and having to fold it back and around to flip through both sides takes a few seconds, which is way too much of my 30-second time limit. By approaching this like stopmotion, I can simply make the flip-around a few frames, maybe a second or two instead of five or more. It’s overall more efficient for the final product, so I’ll implement it.
I’ve made a quick sketch of how the pages will be separated and their general layout. The order of the pages could change (for example, I want the double-page spreads to match in terms of placement), but I’m firm on the topics, and I have a clear idea on how to create them.
Quick sketch detailing the page layouts.
Writing has always been one of my strong suits in school, so I’m not worried about that. The animation will probably take the most time to do, but if I manage my time right, I should be done in time for the 15th no problem.
I like my idea of the book; now all I have to do is make it a satisfactory reality.
