I made a very rough video in 1.5 hours, for a guy who was paying $15 per video you uploaded to his website, which is interestingly devoted to probing the phenomena of online instant message conversations through the medium of user-submitted re-enactment videos. Being somewhat intrigued by this idea, and somewhat poor, I submitted a video, which you may enjoy watching.

In other news, I have been making progress on my soundtrack in the two days since the After Effects “orkshop”, working out the finer points of Ableton Live and Sonar 5. Thanks to an excellent Live workshop put on by Ben Stein and ElectroSOW tonight, I have a bunch of ideas and excited motivations abound. That is all for now.

1 Comment

Greetings fellow Mediaworks students. I am conducting an introductory workshop on Adobe After Effects tomorrow (Wed 2006-04-26) in the Multimedia Lab, from 11am to 1pm. You can download the PDF version of the handout here. This might be useful if there weren’t enough copies to go around at the workshop, or if you couldn’t attend, but were still interested in getting an introduction to the program. Pretty much everything I plan to go over in the workshop is in this rather detailed PDF. I hope this is useful to you all.

1 Comment

This is my first “video blog”. Behold its uncompelling exploration of anti-fecundity.

Here are the Rushes I showed for class critique on Thursday, 04-20. The movie is 38MiB, so you may with to download it instead of streaming it.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Last night and most of yesterday morning was spent animating the Blonde Baby Barbie. There were vanity shots and eating disorder vomiting inspired by the nested media dancer. I want to make it very clear that the purpose of the vomiting, in part because of the harsh criticism of the tangentially thrown-in vomit during my critique. I have also been thinking a lot about the mysogeny and race issues in my rushes. The end-result of my work should have no conceptually unjustified grotesquity.

I really really want to make a very normal, very mundane work of media, which is peaceful and beautiful and innocent.

Today I wrote some music, and discovered some interesting new ways of controlling parameters of video effects with audio amplitude and frequency in After Effects, using expressions and Trapcode Sound Keys.

2 Comments

Today I picked up the DVX100A, and performed about 10 minutes of test shots. The purpose of this was mostly to make sure that motion looked okay in 24p advanced pulldown mode, as Ben Stein was somewhat disparaging towards the capabilities of 24p.

Having performed initial experiments, I can say that it looks beautiful compared to normal interlaced 60i video footage! There is more motion blur in 24p mode contributing much less to that “video feel”, and the results definitely look more film-like than video.

During the process of my “Diary Film” project back at the beginning of winter quarter, I shot about 20 frames just of blurred tree branches and foliage. This looked amazing on film with the motion blur and contrast. I decided that for my test, I would capture a bit more than 20 frames of this same thing. Being suddenly completely giddy with the sudden capability to capture real progressive frames, without the lengthy process of 24p conversion, as well as with pulsing brainial dopamine from the recent release of the new Tool single, Vicarious, I decided to (finally) whip out a bit of musical sound with all of the software knowledge I have been accumulating over the last few weeks, and synch it to the footage I took. This is all very rough, but hopefully it will give you good folk an idea of how good the footage from this camera looks. (check out some of the still frames!).
(more…)

2 Comments

Here is a short entry for a change. I just did another test key of Lumbar Laura dancing. I was worried about how well her hair would key, because even though I wetted it down with water to reduce the amount of stray hairs flying about, it was still not a solid object. Fortunately, it worked very well. Keylight is amazing! I tried the trick with the blurring chroma information with an adjustment layer, and it does help a little bit, but there is actually a parameter of Keylight which accomplishes the same thing.

Also present in the following video is a very rough composite of some of that gross mud with worms crawling around in it warped with a cheesy liquify effect (I would do this better if this were a serious composite), and some TV static generated with the Bad TV plugin from the excellent Tinderbox plugin collection. This just a very short clip, so don’t spend too much time waching it…
(more…)

No Comments

Tonight I performed an experiment with chroma keying the circuit board footage as a test to see how much of an arduous process I am in for over the rest of my post production. This is a still from my footage:

As you can see, the chroma screens are underexposed, as are the subjects, and as a result the image is somewhat noisy, which doesn’t help matters with the already artifacted DV source. Also, there are lighting inconsistencies in the chroma screen. Also, like an idiot, I decided it would be a good idea to backlight the subjects with a blue-gel; I thought this would make my planned key more believable. I thought that because the blue light was from a source other than spill from the bluescreen, it would be okay. It’s not okay. Blue is blue! That must be kept in mind in the future.
(more…)

1 Comment

Last night (Mon. 04-10), I did another healthy 8 hours of animation, and captured some interesting things, which you can see below. If, after seeing all of the animation I have completed, you are wondering what the hell I’m doing, and how I’m going to combine it into a form that means something, I’m worried too.

Bio-Circuit Social Network

(more…)

3 Comments

This post contains all of the animations I have completed so far, including the 1020 frames I captured last night during a rather fantabulous 10 hour shift. probably 1/5 of these frames were taken rapidly, just to capture movement, and aren’t of the greatest quality, as you will see in the Lumbar Laura clip. I think I made some progress on creating lighting that doesn’t look bad. At least an hour was devoted to setting up for the dance clip. I am glad I am shooting puppets instead of people, because they take much more kindly to exceedingly slow homicide.
(more…)

2 Comments