Yesterday, I and my fellow animation/vfx students at Flashpoint got to take a tour of Sol Design, which is a design and effects studio in downtown Chicago. You’ve probably seen a lot of the commercials they’ve done. I recommend checking out their “before and after” reel, which is on the “works” section of their website. It shows their visual effects process, basically all the steps involved in going from raw footage to finished product. It’s pretty amazing.
The tour lasted about four hours. We got to talk to a multitude of employees who showed us what they were working on and answered all our questions. Overall, it was pretty inspiring to me to get to see the whole process and get a better understanding of how the commercials I see on TV get made, and it motivated me to work a little harder at school so I’ll be more up to snuff for employers like Sol Design by the time I graduate.
The most recent issue of my school’s school paper features a short story, a poem, and three illustrations by yours truly. You can check it out here, or you can go directly to the story, the poem, or the illustrations.
Today I attended a one-day course titled “Presenting Data and Information” taught by Edward Tufte in Chicago, which I signed up for on somewhat of a whim a month or two ago. Though the topic of the seminar wasn’t directly related to my field, per se, I thought it was relevant enough to my work as an animator and illustrator to warrant attending. I am, after all, a creator of graphics. And even if it had no relevance whatsoever, I still find Tufte’s work intriguing. So that alone was reason enough to go.
I enjoyed the course greatly. Topics covered included interface design, integration of graphics with text, the importance of resolution, what makes a graphic engaging and communicative vs boring or confusing or irrelevant, and why PowerPoint is the most god-awful way to present information ever. A lot of time was dedicated to that last point. Too much time, in fact. I guess it was justifiable considering that the audience consisted mostly of business types who probably give PowerPoint presentations all the time. I, however, wanted to hear more about the graphics.
Overall, I would say that my biggest take-away from the seminar can be summed up in a quote that Tufte said toward the beginning of the day,
There is no such thing as information overload, only failure of design.
Below is a film by Malcolm Sutherland called The Astronomer’s Dream, of which I am quite fond. What I enjoy most about this film is the strange logic of it, and by that I mean how it seems very strange and surreal while also making sense from an engineering point of view. Films like these are the ones that inspire me the most, as both an animator and a person.
I recently bought a couple of disposable cameras from Walgreens and went to Millennium Park to take some stereo photos. I wasn’t sure how well the stereoscopic effect would work with me just holding the cameras next to each other, but the pictures turned out pretty well.
To view stereoscopically, cross your eyes until the two images merge into one (and here’s a tutorial that explains this process in greater detail). Click on the photos to view them slightly larger.
Here are a few animated videos that I’ve enjoyed recently. I also want to mention here the animated short film Pigeon Impossible, which is not available online right now. I was lucky enough to see a screening of it at my school Flashpoint Academy a couple weeks ago. The film’s creator Lucas Martell was there and did a Q & A session after the film. He’s a really cool guy (from Texas!), as well as a persistent one (it took him five years to make the film). He also has a really cool, tutorial-style video podcast about the film and how he made it.
Alas, I cannot share the film with you on my blog until it has made its way through the film fest circuit. Until then, I’ll have to settle for sharing the videos below.
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.
As my blog at Polysemy, The Electric Mirror, comes to an end, I’m bringing my blogging back to my own site, danallison.org. Coincidentally, I’m just starting my study of animation & visual effects at Flashpoint Academy, so I’ll probably be blogging a lot about that. If you’re a former reader of The Electric Mirror, or you have an interest in animation & visual effects, or you’re my mom and you always want to know what your son is up to, then I welcome you to my new blog.
The template looks pretty bland right now. Hopefully I’ll get around to making it pretty at some point.
