Fractured Morning Sky is the title of a collection of poetic writing that was created while I was in the Monstrous Possibility program at Evergreen.

The video below is a translation of that writing into an audiovisual experience of a flicker aesthetic. If you are sensitive to flashing lights, or are even a sensible human, I would avoid watching it altogether.

Or, if you would rather just hear the spoken words . . .

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Lethe was originally intended to be the first section of a larger project about the growth and perceptual evolution of an artificial intelligence. Unfortunately my time in SOS: Media ran out, due to The  Trouble With Unicorns and my insanity of time overcommitment. Having spent a great deal of time on conceptualization and preproduction for this project, I intend to finish it when time allows. This short and incomplete segment is all that currently exists.

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Download Dream Sublimation (72.5MiB)

Dream Sublimation is an attempt to extract and refine a sense of the pure feeling of remembering an expressive and significant dream. 3 dreams here are diverted aesthetically from a memory into animation. The result is at once intensely personal, yet surreal and illusory. A consistency of underlying internal logic perhaps exists in quantity great enough for meaning to be distilled.

I don’t consider this animation completed, but here it is in its current form, until a time at which it is finished.

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Many things exist still in this that I want to change and make better. Unfortunately time is running out, and my efforts are now being directed towards Dream 2. If the embedded playback of the video above doesn’t work, you can try downloading the source video, and playing it back with Quicktime or VLC, etc. It is just a standard baseline mpeg4-avc video file.  

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So there it is, the ending of scene 1. With 2 weeks go to finish the entire project, I have finally sortof completed a somewhat mediocre version of the first 3rd of what I was envisioning (it’s not really done! it still needs even more tweaking! hard to believe isn’t it… I guess the process of this type of animation is just endless tweaking until the author can stand to look at it)…

Now, one of two things will happen. Either a), I focus on this and nothing but this for the rest of the quarter and make a ridiculous amount of pogress, or b), this project ends up being significantly less epic than I had intended.  I intend to try my best to make option a) happen, although there will likely be some compromise into b) territory.

This project still needs a name. I’ve got a couple in mind, but I don’t think “yet another project that Jed tried to get done on time and failed” will work very well.

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I happened across the 2007 Adobe Design Achievement Award Winners page today, and enjoyed watching some quite amazing works of animation and other design arts by students and folks not older than myself. Being in my position and seeing things like that makes you think. There are a multitude of people out in there in the big wide world who are orders of magnitude more dedicated, focused, and hardworking than yourself, and who for those or other reasons are able to create work that is seemingly incomprehensibly better than anything you yourself are capable of creating. I suppose that is a good starting point, and certainly better than living in a state of ignorant denial about how great your work is.

Not everyone can be a genius, because then no one would.

Regarding my previous post, which is by far the most “rant-ish” and emotionally charged post on this blog so far, it turns out that brutalizing Maya into doing your bidding is a challenging and time-intensive occupation. Sortof like this graph:

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See that cube with the checkerboard texture on it? See that whale looking thing with just a lambert shader on it?

Too bad I spent 4 hours learning how to model in Maya and then modeling that shape which was going to be the walls of the white room in scene 01 shot 3 etc. Too bad Maya has decided that it is impossible for that object to have any type of texturing applied to it, whether or not it is converted between polygon/nurbs/subdiv surface object type, regardless of whether or not it is exported and reimported, regardless of the type of textures or shaders used.

I am seriously reconsidering my choice to use Maya for this project, simply because it is the established standard of 3D modeling and animation software. There are numerous other brilliant alternatives, that make Maya’s interface and usability look like it was designed in 1983, and that don’t crash every 15 minutes because you looked at it funny, and that don’t hide every possible essential function behind 10 layers of context menus that are near impossible to remember until you use the software for 2 years, and that don’t structure the interface in the most unintuitive, difficult to use, inefficient, and unecessarily complex way possible.

Granted, this problem with an object not wanting to be textured is probably something with a “simple” solution, but in that very aspect lies the problem. If something like this problem has a simple solution, it should be readily available and easy for the user to figure out through the design of the interface, or at the worst, by looking in the manual. Maya’s documentation is some of the most unwieldy, rambling, and chaotic software documentations I have seen. While given the program’s complexity, this might seem forgivable, but seriously, it is 2008. My software should do things for me, and have the capability of doing more advanced things in a readily accessible and transparent fashion; it should not have all of the advanced things vomited all over the place in the most confusing and haphazard possible way, with all ease of use features hidden behind large barriers of prior necessary knowledge. I could go on, but I’m not going to, because I have to figure out how to get my model into Cinema4D 10.5. Wait, no I can’t do that because Maya corrupted the most recent iteration of my project file because it crashed catastrophically. Awesome. Time to start over from 4 hours ago.

=edit, 2008-03-07= There is a good discussion of Maya interface refinements and suggestions, at Thomas Mann’s webpage.

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Here lies a draft of what I have been working on. It is a very rough version of the first scene, with cursory sound design. The final portion of it, the white room section, is extremely rough, and would probably be better termed an animatic than a draft. The 3D camera movements are jerky and nearly unnacceptable. The room was built in After Effects as a last resort on Tuesday, because I was running out of time, and was having a great deal of difficulty getting it built in Maya. I will probably redo the entire scene in Maya in order to make it look more like I want it to, and then do a better job on the compositing of the arms. In this draft the arms appear to have some sort of field-inversion error, causing jerky movement, which I also need to fix.

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Hopefully another update will follow soon, with work that is more polished.

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