Idle animation in engine

[by Tim]

Did they do that on purpose?

I was just doing some research for my dissertation [guess what, it might actually turn out okay!], when I noticed an advert on the right hand side of my screen.

My mind, like most people's, tends to wander now and then when doing work. It wasn't hard to keep my eyes on the ad to see what happened next.

Picture the scene; you're on a boat, on your way to America. But it's not just any boat; you're on The Unsinkable Boat.. the one that sank after hitting the iceberg. You know the story. You don't make it onto one of the few lifeboats around, and die a long, horrible, freezing death.

Less than a hundred years later, someone makes not only a movie about it, but there are also at least two films called Titanic 2, and there are novelty icetrays to allow people to "recreate history in their glasses". I'm not joking, my sister received a "Gin and Titonic" icetray for Christmas. The ship shapes are too large to fit in a cup floating horizontally the way a boat should, so until they melt they assume a slanted half-submerged position.

I don't think I really need to go into detail about how sick it all kind of is... Meanwhile, the following advert for quick money transactions online appears on the net for anyone to see.

Now, is it just me, or is the wording on the second-to-last frame combined with the choice of movie displayed just a little bit unfortunate?

Plan of Action!

Final Project

I've been feeling very unorganised lately and don't feel like I've been focusing much brain power on course work. So, today is going to be a full on organisation evening, where I'm going to gather up all the different bits and bobs to do with the final project, such as placing blog posts into the dev-diary, and gathering written work into the Concept Doc, so I can figure out how much time we've got left to do what.

Rapid Films

Jess and I managed to hand something in, unfortunately I can't figure out what the problem is with the exporting of the avi... it did the compressed version but all the colours were screwy and the animations didn't play, but the uncompressed version ended up being 3.3GB and wouldn't play... I don't know.

The next brief is to add to the story of a video the organisers created, in which each of them died an unorthodox death and there was a mysterious brown envelope involved.



Only rule is that entries must contain the brown envelope. The original rules were to have exactly 3 minutes 33 seconds with an unorthodox death and less than 25% dialogue, but the organisers changed it and pushed the deadline back to December 5th to try to get more people involved and not scare off those already around. Personally I didn't think the original limitations would have caused any of them any problems, but some people seemed put off for some reason.

Dissertation

Got some a couple of interesting links about Digital Natives and Immigrants recently [here's Part 1 and Part 2], which nudged the direction of my dissertation over again. Definitely going to have to rewrite my proposal now and change what's going to happen with my chapters. I'm hoping this will be the last time now for major direction changes, especially since the Digital Natives idea has brought the ideas in the dissertation closer to the essay I handed in last year. It gives another explanation as to why writing an essay would be difficult for students now.

Lots to dooo

Dissertation

Had a help session on how to write a dissertation yesterday, was probably very helpful. I realised that if I write a minimum of 500 words per week [starting yesterday], then that will be 9000 words in the 18 weeks I have left [not including 2 weeks for proofreading the final draft and a week for printing and binding]. I'm still a bit iffy on the subject I'm writing about, but I think it will definitely be centred around the concept of fun and having fun and the effects of the need for fun on society.

Final Major Project [blog]

It's going alright, this week I'll be working on the house which will act like a hub for the levels, while Tim works on the levels and some character designs.

Rapidfilms

The animation seemed well received, I enjoyed how many laughs the "that's what she said" joke got. The next challenge is to create a 2-3 minute film by Thursday based on two characters, in the genre our groups picked out of the hat. Our genres were Horror and Scorsese styled gangster/crime.

It's probably going to be an animation from us again, but so far all I've actually drawn is this picture of De Niro's face:

The story I came up with is this:

A gangster is walking along a street. He's somewhat aged and world-weary. He passes a young pretty girl; he doesn't know her, but her face seems familiar. He wonders where has he seen her before. As the girl passes, she also seems to find his face familiar.

Flashback to a faded past, and the guy is much younger. He has been sent to kill the men of a rival family - the girl's. Shots fire everywhere. Blood falls everywhere.

Colour returns. The man's eyes widen as he realises who the girl is. He turns, a breeze blows by. She's not there.

Colour fades and we're back to the past again. The camera pans up towards the nearby window. The girl has been left alone, surrounded by the dark red of her brothers. The breeze blows by, the scent of blood filtering out through the night, attracting the attention of a dark figure. The dark figure, fangs glinting, dissolves into the darkness, and the scene fades to black.

The quiet echo of a scream is heard, as the camera pans across to a close up profile of the man's troubled face, still peering out at the dimly lit street before him. Out of the darkness behind him, the girl emerges, hate ablaze in her eyes.

Just as she is about to strike, the scene cuts swiftly to black.

"Stealing's Bad"

There we go:

Hand in for it is before 7pm on Monday. As this was pretty much just for fun for Jess and I, we're not going to spend the weekend making it look better... Especially not after Jess said it looked "delightfully crappy".

Being Productive: RF, D, and the FMP.

Final Major Project:

Have not done a lot of work the past few days due to RapidFilms and life, but I did find some more beautiful pics of abandoned places and copied out Escher's "Relativity" to get to know it better. Tim sent me a link for another website with more nice photos of abandoned places too.

RapidFilms:

Been working on a RapidFilms project this week, so far spent two days on it. The brief was to create a film no longer than 2 minutes based on your favourite joke. I'm working with Jess Reynolds and neither of us seem to have one favourite joke [because all of life is either hilarious, or ridiculous...], so what we've done instead is taken some things we have found funny and worked them together into a storyboard [day 1].

Yesterday [day 2], I pulled all the images Jess drew into an animatic with silent-movie style piano music by Kevin MacLeod. I made a few minor changes to some of the text that would appear and switched the first and last scene around, but yeah, we're pleased with it so far for two days work. All it needs now is the images to be done properly and the transitions and camera movements put in, which will probably take a couple of days.

Dissertation:

Jess posted the help sheet under my door this morning that they were given for writing dissertations. I copied it out, did the exercises, and I'm now going through the Georg Simmel text on "The Metropolis and Mental Life" we were given last year, separating the sentences with pencil lines. It looks horrendous until you separate the sentences out; then things become much more clear..

Here's what I wrote for the exercises:

"Free" writing [5 mins each]:
1. State the subject of your thesis in one sentence.
Fun - what it is, why we want it, and why it sometimes feels like we shouldn't be having it.

2. List the aims of your research/analysis.
To explore the feelings and mentality of those who strongly align their arguments with a "superego" kind of point of view. To suggest that living a life of fun is not at odds with working hard and being a productive member of society. To show the importance of "having fun" as a driving force and as a glue for a productive society.

3. "My project is about"
... the relationship between people and what they perceive as fun, and how society sees "fun" and those who have it.

4. "The stage I am at now"
... still the "Free" writing stage, although I have some authors to look at as well.

5. "The main argument is"
... that the freedom to have fun is vital not just at the beginning of our lives, as children, but throughout a person's entire life.

"Generative" writing [5 mins each]:
1. What I find difficult in writing and researching my dissertation is:
... keeping my mind on one subject. If I come across something interesting I will take the time to read it, even when it has nothing to do with my subject.

2. The key sections of my dissertation are:
- What is fun? [because fun is a term that covers different things for different people]
- Why we all NEED to have fun
- The ways we prevent ourselves and eachother from having fun
- "Rules were made to be broken". Thanatos and Chaos. How humans strive to break free and remain free.

3. What I can write about NOW is:
Expand the section about the ways society has prevented itself from being a fun one...
- Law, order, rules.
- Morality, religion, thou shalt not.
- Goals of a society and the accepted norms, how people are expected to behave, and the attitudes towards those who deviate from the expected behaviours.

Like a Headless Chicken

You may be wondering about the title of this post. Or maybe you're not. In any case, you probably won't be by the end of it.

Gyland: Oh, has it only been a day since yesterday's post?

So, what happened was this:

Which then turned into this:

Which then... uh.. became this...

Which inevitably resulted in this:

That's red biro hand-drawn circles on a scrap bit of paper painted with watercolour paints. Apparently there are only so many straight lines a girl can handle in one go.

In other news, I haven't developed the Morse Code game idea any further since I last thought about it. One of the WOF programmers, Dan Wynne, sent a few of us a message a few days ago about a game he wants to make based on a town like Dudleytown. Not sure what's going on with that right now, I think Dan's on holiday so I'll have to ask Pete what plans is.

I felt a little zap of inspiration today when someone I know posted on Facebook that Tetris is the reason kids drop bricks off of bridges. Made me laugh. I was thinking of a game based on the 'lives of Tetris block characters when they're not busy being dropped', but I don't know how long that idea is going to hang around for.

I also watched this recently:


Reminded me of a request made of me by a friend to make an inspirational martial arts film over summer... Except I don't know how I'd even begin...

I guess I'd have to start with baby steps. Maybe I'll watch some of the old Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers for inspiration, since it was a childhood favourite... Or I could use one of my friend's own fight scene films as reference for choreography and recreate it with some snazzy cartoon characters in place of the human fighters. Haha. Ooh! Maybe I'll use some of the old flash characters me and Ben were working on. Maybe Squeak and Headphone Jack...

I don't think this is going to be quite what Mr Ware meant when he requested an inspirational martial arts film.

"Doritos: King Of The Ads"

Scott gave me the last of his Doritos the other day.


The packet says if you make and enter the best advert by the end of April, they will put it on the TV and pay you for it... I'm seriously consider trying it, if I have the time. I'm also going to let my film-making friends know about it, because making short funny videos should be right up their street :D

Haven't written a post in over a fortnight!?!?!

How naughty of me. The Interaction thing came and went, but apparently there wasn't enough drive or momentum in most of the groups because only three people including myself turned up to the showing... we ended up watching inspiring videos on Youtube on the big screen :D

Sebastian's Voodoo. I saw this ages ago and can't believe I forgot about it. It's so beautiful. Totally still makes me cry, haha

Watched this later in the evening with friends, but still posting it up because it's another one I'd forgotten about and couldn't believe I had. I love it.

My group didn't finish our film/animation, I think mostly due to technical difficulties [with not being allowed to use uni equipment, e.g. cameras, for it for some reason]. Shame. But never mind, Hains has said he still wants to finish it eventually because it would be a good showpiece for him. It probably wouldn't do that much for me except possibly teach me how to put film and animation together maybe, but if it'll help out Hains then I'm happy to help finish it.

As for actual course work, we've got a new project underway, 8 of us CGD designers working with 3 of the Games & Artificial Intelligence dudes. We seem to have a good group going people-wise, but we've got the brief that was rejected by one of the groups last year. Not sure exactly why they rejected it because we like the idea and are pretty happy to work on it. Here's the brief we're working from on the website Pete set up for the group. I may have to set up a blog especially for Wings of Fate pre-pro and production work.

"Interaction"

Went to a meeting last Friday - my friend Dave Ware has set up a little independant-of-uni event going on where people from different courses meet up and work on a project together for a couple of weeks, with the aim being to help people network. Basically we have to create a piece [be it performance, film, animation or game] under the theme of Interaction.

The group I'm in consists of Matt Hains and Matt Lee from 1st year Film and Video, Ollie Elliot from 2nd year CGD, and moi. So far the plan is to create a film/animation of a looping relay race, where live action, 2D animated and 3D CGI characters interact and pass a baton between eachother.

Here's a quick idea for Mr. 2D, based on a run cycle guide I found online. Not sure why but the animation sort of skips on the last few cycles..



For some reason, possibly because of my experience during the AIR project, I feel like doing some side entries done just by myself. There are soo many things you could do for this theme. Recently I went climbing at Boulders in Cardiff, and also went to a Capoeira session with Dave, and both of those things involve interactions...

I think I'll do it if I think of anything good, but won't neccessarily show them at the screening thing. We'll see. Hehe.

Age of Conan, The Last Bastion, and The Order of the Silver Dragons

I am so very intrigued right now. I came across the MMORPG, Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, and now I really really want to play it. Here's a "re-review" of the game, from curse.com.

I'll be honest, part of the attraction for me is the fact that it sounds different to WoW in gameplay. I was trying to play WoW the other day and found I'd forgotten how to play my belf rogue. Button mashing, anyone?

However, I also found what I've seen of the world to be quite pretty as well. Shiney water make Lottie go, "Oooooh! ^_^". Also, I kinda have a thing for watching the sun and shadows move in games as time goes on...



While researching AoC, I found out that somebody called Zsolaith has started an epic machinima series, The Last Bastion, inspired by the player Silverar in the guild they call the Order of the Silver Dragons. I'm intrigued by not only the way The Last Bastion came into being, but also by the idea of the Order of the Silver Dragons.

The Order of the Silver Dragons (OSD) are a long-standing multi-wing gaming community that was founded on January 9th, 2006, and exists well beyond any one game, being involved in many gaming environments. What makes the OSD unique is their ongoing commitment to mature interactions, their proud display of civility and concern, their desire for adventure and their healthy placement of value on individual effort and communications. They are known across many gaming servers for taking the high road when situations arise, and they pride themselves in the knowledge that they will always strive to help others. Their continued success stems directly from the OSD officers of this order whom take it upon themselves to uphold these virtues, reminiscent of the fabled Knights of the Round Table, which in turn are mimicked by the community of players within the guild.

- Zsolaith

Anyhooo, I've found Zsolaith's channel on YouTube and I'm about to watch what he's got there. You're more than welcome to join me :)

Big Blue Lion & co.

The other day [yesterday?] just for fun, I began making a series of flash clips, using voice clips my friend Daniel sent me via MSN during a random conversation [or three]. It's almost like a follow up to the AIR project I had been involved in recently.

[AIR - Animator In Residence. Basically the animator, Ian Gouldstone, would make a 5 second video clip for us to make a response to. We would have 24 hours to make our 5sec or less response. He would then respond to that, as if we were writing animated letters to eachother, creating a dialogue between two characters that were created by us as the story went on. Click HERE for the result...]

The project went on for a few weeks, and I found it a good way to practice different animating techniques or try new ones I haven't done before, such as the digital rotoscoping maya method Eric and Rhys introduced me to.



This is a video of one of my entries. Bit frustrating as I haven't figured out why I can't export Quicktime movies from Flash, so it wasn't in the format requested. I also ran out of time to do what I originally intended, which was to have a picture of a joker on the side of the red cuboid - like a pack of cards - which would have an animated facial expression.

Also... in the previous clip done by our character, we called Ian's character a leprechaun... I wanted to make a leprechaun style "Jack" pop out, but also didn't have time to get it done. I made the box and handle in maya, animated it in maya, and then put printscreens of each frame into photoshop and traced over the action there. Rotoscoping is a cool technique, but rather time consuming. Especially at 25 fps -_-

But yes. I'm going to show Dan the first one before I put them up anywhere, to see what he thinks. I imagine he'll end up laughing. I know I am, and I haven't even gotten to the good part yet.