Archive for February, 2009

Week 6 in Review

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Monday:
Class: Practical & Digital
Presented my clip from Eternal Sunshine and my explanation of how it was done. My analysis was correct except for the fact that I didn’t guess that they used a motion control (moco) camera. I would post the clip, but I can’t find it on YouTube or anywhere else. Assignment for next week: Create a storyboard for the clip.

Class: Animation 1.
Made a bouncing ball in XSI using the curve editor.

Tuesday:
Class: Story Process 1. New teacher this week, same teacher from my storytelling strategies class. I like having two story classes, one with all animation students and one with film, game, and audio also. The two classes cover different stuff, so it hasn’t been redundant yet. We explored the free screenwriting software Celtx. Assignment for next week: Start writing a screenplay using Celtx.

Class: Lighting & Texturing.
Practiced lighting a scene. Introduced to 3 point lighting. Assignment for next week: Light another scene.

Class: Storytelling Strategies.
Turned in our first draft of our childhood story assignment.

Wednesday:
Class: Modeling 1.
Worked with subdivision surfaces in Maya, which was really confusing. Then covered textures a bit. Assignment for next week: Keep working on hand model, but in polygons, not subdivs. Also look for tutorials on the web.

Class: Oral Communication for Media Arts.
Discussion about what makes a good speech. Watched speeches from Hitler and Obama. Assignment for next week: Come up with ideas for our informative speech.

Class: VFX & Compositing.
Worked with instancing vs. duplicating, and other techniques to reduce the number of polygons in a scene to speed up rendering. Assignment for next week: Take more pictures of environments to place CG objects in.

Thursday:
Class: History of Computer Graphics.
Watched some videos from the Computer History Museum.
Assignment: Watch this video

…and continue reading Droid Maker.

Class: Storytelling Strategies.
Got into groups, read our stories, and gave each other feedback. Looked at this article and talked about structure. Assignment: Final draft of childhood story. Eavesdrop on conversations and record a few pages of dialogue. Turn in brainstorm binder and observation notebook.

Friday:
No class.

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Ira Glass on Storytelling

Monday, February 9th, 2009


These videos were listed in the syllabus for my storytelling class as suggested viewing. They’re great vids, so I’m posting them here. Ira Glass does NPR’s “This American Life”, which is an awesome show.

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Week 5 in review

Friday, February 6th, 2009

Monday:
Class: Practical & Digital
New group of students this week. Things have been moved around a bit. Lecture on VFX stuff. Assignment for next week: Write a paper about a specific visual effect in a movie and how I think they did it. For this assignment, I’ve chosen a scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where Jim Carrey gets out of his car and runs toward the other end of the street only to find himself back at his car. He looks back and the street has been turned around, so he runs back only to find himself at his car again.

Class: Animation 1.
Missed this class because of doctors appointment. Assignment for next week is to work on the logo animation from previous class as much as possible.

Tuesday:
Class: Story Process 1. Talked about why Delgo was so lame, both story-wise and animation-wise. Lecture on character animation. Looked at the 11 Second Club.

Class: Lighting & Texturing.
HDR compositing, making 3D objects match the lighting of a photo, and appear to exist inside the photo. Projecting photographs onto objects as textures. Assignment: Take pictures of buildings to project onto 3D models.

Class: Storytelling Strategies.
Everyone brought in an object that had personal significance and told the story behind the object, which rolled into a discussion about the role that objects play in stories.

Wednesday:
Class: Modeling 1.
Played with blinn and lambert shaders in Maya.

Class: Oral Communication for Media Arts.
Everyone gave speeches, which were filmed and commented on. We got into groups and began brainstorming for our group pitch.

Class: VFX & Compositing.
Played around in Photoshop and XSI, adding CG objects into photos.
Thursday:
Class: History of Computer Graphics.
Watched a scene from Star Trek 2, created in 1982 by the CG people at ILM who later became Pixar.

Also watched some SIGGRAPH demonstrations from 2000. Important person to remember: Paul Debevec.

Class: Storytelling Strategies.
Broke into groups and created 3 story ideas, each one based on a predetermined object (dress, pen, old book). Each story had to have 3 acts: beginning, middle, end. We then shared our ideas and discussed how the ideas could be developed further.

Friday:
No class.

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