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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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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Last week was Thanksgiving Break week. I was going to not take a break and spend the entire time in my room working. Then I decided that was a bad idea, and went up to see my Mom for a few days. She lives near Friday Harbor on San Juan island. I did not get nothing done while I was there, however. I brought audiovisual documentation equipment consisting of my Canon HV20 HDV camcorder, my Canon 350d digital still camera, my brother’s laptop and Tascam US-122 audio interface, a Rode NT4 stereo microphone that Peter Randlette was kind enough to lend me, and 2 MCA SP1 microphones that my brother also has, for stereophonic recordings of varied stereo width, or to have mono documentation options.

I captured a large amount of moving water textures at dusk on the ferry trip over that will be useful for the 2nd dream. I recorded audio of water lapping at the ocean shore that is a very good approximation of my memory of the 1st dream. I captured photographs of many moist rocks while at said shore that will also be useful to create the environment of the 2nd dream. I also got to direct my mother as a voice actor, while she delivered her lines from the 3rd dream. Most interesting! I also captured some brilliant wind-in-trees ambiance that will be quite useful for sound-design in the 1st dream. Here is a pointless landscape picture.

When I got back, I had a bit of a difficult time getting motivated. I took Thanksgiving off. I started then working through even more tutorials on Nuke and Maya, delving deeper into the ridiculous complexity of these programs. I discovered by happenstance, a new tool which is magically assistive for tasks involving rotoscoping. It is called Motor, and is part of a suite of tools by Imagineer Systems. What is interesting about Motor is that it uses the companies proprietary planar tracking technology to track the motion of objects in footage, and extrapolate the motion of a 2d plane in 3d space from it. This amazingly accurate track can then be applied to the motion of a rotospline. This effectively means that 80% of the roto work is done for you, and all you have to do is provide the fine-tuning keyframes. This is difficult to explain completely. Once I start roto work on all of the pornography for the elements in the 3rd dream, I promise to post a screencast and show what I am using, and how I’m using it to do what I’m doing.

Then I decided that it would be a good idea to stop burying my head in software for awhile, and start work on my project, bringing about a new paradigm of learning software as a necessity to achieve an end-goal of creating something specific! Always a better way to learn, right?

Fortunately, the first scene is not too hard, and I had a plan of how to do it. This plan involved the creation of a wide-angle still image stitched from many tone-mapped HDR exposures. I resorted to this complex plan of image creation because the picture I had remembered from my dream couldn’t really be captured with … my camera, using conventional techniques. I used the PTgui software to do the image stitching, and Photomatix to do the HDR processing and tone-mapping. This is a similar technique to the processes of gigapixel photography, and the specific innovations of these techniques in regard to visual effects, pioneered by Eric Hanson and compatriots, at XRez. I then took the footage into After Effects and did some 3d camera mapping piled on the filters until it looked right. (After Effects is more suited to this type of effects processing than Nuke, although I did play around with Nuke’s 3D system with this footage a bit).

Soundtrack:

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Recently I was doing an activity that I have previously found myself doing on multiple occasions: Looking through all of the different codecs that are options to render out my newly perfected 1080p23.976 scene into. I could choose the apple Animation codec, which is rumoured to be nearly lossless, at the expense of harddrive space and at the cost of being unable to play it back in real-time, but to the benefit of having a lossless image. A similar predicament with the 8-bit 4:2:2 Lossless codec. On the other end of the spectrum, there is the temptation of encoding to something like mjpeg, and having a small file, easy playback, but horrendous image degredation.

Apple and Red Cinema have been hyping the new Apple ProRes 4:2:2 codec for a while. “Perhaps I should use that!’ I thought. “If this codec can compress 4k video from the Red camera down to 200mbits/sec, then surely it could help me with my mere 1080p workflow problems!” And so then I decided to do some research about just what technology the ProRes 422 codec used and how it compared to others of similar variety.

During that process, I came across this comparison of the ProRes 422 codec and the Avid DNxHD codec, which is apparently one with a similar intended specialty of “Why yes! I can compress your HD footage so you can actually work with it, while preserving detail!” Apparently, the ProRes 422 codec is a bit more lossy at similar bitrates than Avid’s codec. After a little bit of searching, I discovered that not only are Avid’s codecs freely available, they are cross-platform between Windows and OSX. This issue was lending me trepidation earlier on as well, myself considering what would happen if I had a bunch of scenes rendered out in Apple ProRes 422, and then needed to reboot into Windows to do some specialized work on something, only to be unable to read my files!

Anyway, barring complete disaster, I will be using the Avid codecs for some of my needs.

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Here are rough storyboards for my project. If the nature of my project is unknown to you, I posted a Visual Treatment earlier.

These storyboards represent a keyframed point-to-point abstracted version of the visual contents of my project. A lot of detail is missing, such as specific transitions and even in-between points of some shots. I am still not sure about the visual treatment that I am approaching this project with. As touched upon in a reply to a comment left by my Mother, I am somewhat torn between the idea of representing the dreams as faithfully as I can recollect them, and the idea of altering the dreams to provide a coherent or more easily digestible presentation for the viewer.

Some examples : I was having a very difficult time while storyboarding the 3rd dream. There is such an emotional and personal experience element to this dream that is difficult if not impossible to convey when using the convention of 1st person perspective shots that I have decided to use in order to try and accurately represent the visual experience of the dream. A purely audiovisual format is a much much lower resolution type of medium than a real experience of dream or of reality, in the sense that much less can be communicated and be transparent to feeling. I think that I need some way of bolstering that missing information of emotional poignancy, so that it is still present in the work. The challenge is how to do this without completely altering the form of the dream as it was originally experienced. I am unsure of what to do, and am considering whether it is more important to convey the original visual experience of the dream as accurately as possible, or to depart slightly from the original visual experience and in doing so be enabled to better convey the emotional aspect of the dream as it was originally experienced.

At any rate, I thoroughly consider these storyboards to be a starting point, and a place to create changes and build from. A definitely and incrementally defined structure of how this project will come to be, they are not. Nor could they be with my obviously lacking drawing ability which, though getting slightly better, is still sorely in need of bettering. I feel like this is a valuable first step in starting to create the images themselves though, and will work to my benefit in not getting lost in the process of production.

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