Final

This is my final assignment for the course

I compiled a few different things I've been working on throughout the semester to create a pseudo-trailer for my upcoming grad film, Odium (working title), which I am about halfway through developing.

What I am aiming for here is essentially to give the sense of what my film is about, introducing my farmer and the tornado.

Software used:

Photoshop
Flash
After Effects
Premiere
Maya
TV Paint
DragonFrame



Newest Scenes

Storm
I re-did the scene from my 'Character Study 2' video, taking the character out and tweaking a few other things.  I used this shot in the Directed Study to describe the storm exclusively.

Walking
In removing the storm aspect from my 'Character Study 2', I was able to recreate the environment that my character was walking through.  Now it has a much calmer tone to it, essential in creating the lead-up to the tornado shot.

Tornado
I spent the weekend (and then some) creating a tornado shot.  Using the reference of a photograph by Camille Seaman along with endless youtube videos of tornados, I animated one of my own using Flash.

Then I brought that into after effects and composited it with some footage I was using for my Deeper Focus work to get a sense of the texture of the tornado.

Maya Clouds

I spent some time experimenting with Maya's fluid containers to create clouds for my sky.

Here are some of the original rendered out images:

Looks pretty and all.
I thought they would be ready to go from here but they had to move too, and that's where things got difficult.

Here's a sample of the full render played out.
It doesn't feel like the clouds seem natural enough - especially since they already look so hyper real.

I composited this in after effects and tried giving it different looks. Here's a few of them:

And here's the last one that I decided to go with for my directed study.  It's much darker, but it blends in well with the other scenes I will be putting together in my final:

More Direction

I've decided to expand from doing the one scene for my directed study.

The Character Study 2 walk has been developing and has developed in different areas, but I'm deciding to include more scenes.

One will be of a run cycle of my character, Farmer Shel, showing the desperation of the situation.
Another will be a centered shot of my tornado, giving cue as to what he runs away from.

Each shot will use a set of different techniques, done mostly digitally, with workflows that are similar to what I was going through under the camera when I was shooting stop-motion scenes earlier this semester.
One example is of the shadow I animated for my run cycle.

Shadow
For my character, I wanted to create a better sense of the dramatic atmosphere.  From that I came up with the effects for the storm in my Character Study 2 scene.
Although I felt there was a disconnect from the look of my character and the scene he has been put in.  I felt there wasn't enough of a dramatic quality - I look towards lighting him in high key.
High key is known for it's dramatic quality in film language, so I thought it was appropriate.
This meant that my character had to have shadows.

What came up was drawing it frame-by-frame, which would be a heavy task knowing how many more tracking points I'd have to be mindful as I animate.
This seemed daunting.
But I experimented and wound up going with a technique in After Effects.

I created a black solid and masked out several shapes on the character where the shadow would be.
Then I went with straight ahead animation, going frame to frame moving and reshaping the black masks.
This workflow very much resembled what I did in shooting the sand and torn paper, having objects I am manipulating each frame as opposed to creating each time.  The main difference was that I was able to go back and edit previous frames and there was no camera capturing necessary.

Here's what my run cycle looked like originally:

This was made in the same way I made the run cycle, drawing frames in TV Paint, colouring there and in After Effects using mattes.

One change I made was to move the mattes with the character's movement as opposed to leave it be static in space while the line animates around it.

Then I animated the shadow as I described above, and topped it off with a dark atmospheric background to describe the sky.

This is what it looks like now:

The next thing I am going to tackle is the tornado.  As of now I am planning to draw the outline in 2D, then experiment with different ways to texture it ranging from stop-motion tests I've done before, to After Effects textures, to even overlaying video footage.

We'll see how it turns out.

A Directed Study

grad film oriented post here

I've developed a general story for my grad film and I need to make certain revisions - refinements of my animatic that would a) condense the film length and b) clarify the meaning of the message I am trying to convey.  Right now, the best plan of action to do that is to step away.  This refers to a previous blog post about Thinking vs. Making. I am currently in making mode and if I step away from thinking about the story for the next while I can come back to my animatic with a very fresh set of eyes.

So, what I've been doing instead is animating and experimenting with the visual look of my film.

An essential way of expressing your character's personality and testing out how they will move is through making a walk cycle.  I was excited to finally get down to animating again.

Here's the rough lines I animated in TV Paint:

It was interesting seeing how it looked with the shoulder rotation and the slight limp.  The reference I used had some and I wound up exaggerating it a little bit - which I think has to happen when translating any live action footage into animation.

So after that, I coloured it in, brought it into Adobe After Effects, then matted the textures of his clothing:

The most important part of this for me was creating animation that's coloured in with fully-refined line quality.  Something I actually haven't done before.
I do admit he seems a little more youthful than I was going for, but I am going to go with it for now - as a character this can be seen as him in one of his moods.

So after that I brought it into a scene I've been experimenting with in After Effects.  I used a few different assets from various software and brought it in to create a dark, stormy atmosphere.  This isn't necessarily the final way I will be compositing my grad film but it's a start.
In this I used:
Flash
Photoshop
After Effects
Premiere
TV Paint

I compiled a few walking shots with some music - The Only One by The Black Keys.  This song (pretty much their whole album) I think speaks to male angst which suits the tone of my film.

Character Study 2 from Jay Castro on Vimeo.

I'm currently looking into other ways to create the clouds using:
Maya Special Effects
Felt Needle (stop motion)
Torn Paper (stop motion)
Flash Animation

Animation Messy 3

This is a very late post. A very, very late post.
As much as I hate to use the whirlwind of grad film as an excuse, grad film making has been quite hectic for the most part.

But this animation test I was able to do near the end of September, actually.

The theme for this week was
Deep in Thought

Also, as an expansion from the previous week there is an emphasis on lighting and shading.
The class spent time focusing on breaking from a flat 2D world and going to mediums of 2.5D & 3D puppet animation.



My approach was an aside from puppetry but used 2.5D techniques that allowed for experimentation with lighting and shading.
One of the things I wanted to try this semester in Experimental Animation was torn paper, so I took this as an opportunity to work with that.  More importantly, it is a technical facet I am hoping contributes to how I animate the storm and tornado in my film.  Thus what I did with the paper is try to get a sense of movement through tears in the paper that are shot in stop-motion.

What resulted was the look of an upward wind that can be interpreted as storm winds.
Potentially I want to try compositing this on to the figure of a tornado.

To satisfy the Deep in Thought theme for this week,
I composited an animation test on top of the ripped paper.  A night not long before this assignment was due I went to a film screening and was left with a particular shot that stood out in my mind.  It was of a man thinking about what he had done, starting with a close up of his hands, tilting the camera up as he raised them closer to his eyes and finishing with his distraught face framed with his hands along the bottom, open and shaking.  This test is a rough of my main character performing that act as I felt it suited the tone of my film well.

Animation Messy 2

This assignment has a theme - Weight of the World

In class, we were given an introduction to 2D puppetry... although due to my grad film ideas limiting how far I explore with mediums I didn't partake in that medium for that week.
Instead I tried to develop more exploration with sand on glass.

As far as this week's theme went, I tried to focus mainly on the words and the emotional weight it brings.

Words that come upon contemplating
Weight of the World:

heavy

dark

difficult

trial

grand

purpose

desperate

suspense

destiny

I couldn't exactly cover all of these words but they definitely added fuel to the process.
I started by aiming to capture the rough, heavy texture of the black sand.

This test added an extra element of visual chaos to the Weight of the World - Successful

This was another test in capturing the heavy texture, again showing chaos - Not so successful

Another stab at the texture, this one speaks more to the vision of my film - Kind of successful

This test speaks to desperation, and in my eyes also to destiny - Successful

This test is purely experimenting with the vision of my film -  Not Successful

Here's me experimenting with the footage that I have in After Effects to see what happens to the successes and the not-successes when they are added together.

Doing these tests was good insight into the possibilities of my film and also into the possibilities of the medium in general.  There are some things I would like to keep developing and some that I think I won't mind putting behind me for now.  What I am hoping for, the more that I think about it, is to become competent enough to execute a few select ways of animating sand to be able to take that into a more commercial context... although right now I would also be content letting the sand take over certain parts of the film.

What I will definitely take with me is the boiling texture from the first test, and perhaps develop a texture from the 2nd or 3rd test.  But the hand and the top view of the tornado can be put aside for now... but if the urge returns I'll use it and attempt variations of these tests.

Just as long as I give myself the time to set up and clean everything up again.  That took a while.

Overall, I definitely have more appreciation for the works I've seen that were done using the sand-on-glass technique and feel excited to have partaken in a similar fashion.

Animation Messy 1

Here is my first 'animation messy' assignment that was created for the 2nd week of September.  This was my first time experimenting with sand on glass animation so there was a degree of adjusting to the medium.  The sand offered a very defined texture to it that doesn't take much effort to create as opposed to creating texture with pencil, although erasure isn't very possible in the same way thus going frame to frame took getting used to.  On the glass surface you can't exactly see where the sand was on the previous frame... although using the software, Dragonframe, it was possible to onion skin the previous and following frames to use as reference to animate.


Overall, this test was frustrating because I couldn't get exactly what I wanted right off the bat.  When I was slowly adding sand frame by frame to describe the fingerprints there would be times where I added too much or not enough... but I would only notice this after I shoot the frame, which by then (to me) meant that it was too late (because of the inexperience of handling sand on glass well... I didn't want to remove too much or accidentally knick it in a way that stood out).

Right off the bat it was difficult for me, but eventually I just learned to go with the flow and embrace the mistakes that happened.  So after I finished building up the sand in to the form of a full hand, I shot a few extra frames and then began to experiment with less thought behind the movement.

I began to play.

I played around with the sand texture in the palm of the hand for a few frames,

then started playing with the fingers, eventually trying to make the hand close into a fist.

Then I kept playing with the swirling in the palm and eventually made it sweep away off into space.

This last part was the most enjoyable and got me into a rhythm of animating that didn't involve much frustration - which is something I think every animator could use every now and then.



To make more sense of how my animation test turned out, I formed a mini narrative and complimented it with a flash animation.

This messy described the sense of touch, and I pictured a hand reaching out to this white space only to be swept away.  So I introduced it with a hand reaching out in flash.

If I may, this may be a way of describing my reaching out from the commercial flash approach to animating in the experimental form of various mediums.  I'll try not to read into the being swept away part, though.



I'm not a converted experimental animator just yet, but I enjoyed taking this first step of exploration.