Here is a full resolution frame-capture of a video stream shot with the HV20 (the image is a link to the full resolution image). All of the images posted here are compressed with jpeg 80% quality, and should have most of their original attributes preserved. Note that the pulldown has been removed with After Effects, and that this was originally a frame comprised of two interlaced fields. Note that this picture is HUGE (1920×1080), so if you have a regular sized monitor, expect to scroll around to look at it completely.

If you look closely at the image, you can discern fragments of interlacing artifacts left behind from the pulldown removal. This happens because the mpeg2 compression of the interlaced image results in fields that are imperfect with macroblocks and other imperfections. This confuses After Effects’ algorithms, leaving behind chunks of image that still have interlaced areas. Effectively this just looks like bits of the image have weird blocks of ‘liney’ areas. Below is a 4:1 crop of the above original frame, doubled in size.

You can notice these artifacts on the edge of the finger. In After Effects, there are plugins to process a frame to remove interlacing artifacts. With one of those applied, the image looks a little cleaner.

There are still noticeable artifacts from the mpeg2 compression. You can make out macroblocking and chroma abnormalities on the thumb and surrounding areas. If you were to look at the individual color channels, this would be more noticeable. Usually the compression artifacts are worse in the blue channel. There is a plugin that comes with the Magic Bullet Suite called the “Deartifactor” that takes a whack at removing compression artifacts such at as these.

Deartifacted:

Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Sometimes it is hard to see what the deartifactor is doing in areas of detail. Here is another comparison in another less detailed area of the image.

Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

There is also a filter in After Effects called Remove Grain that was once sold as Grain Surgery by Visual Infinity, but is now included for free with After Effects. This plugin is quite amazingly good at removing grain while preserving detail in the image. While the compression artifacting is not quite grain, it does do a fair amount to improve the apparent image clarity, and while it does soften the image some, it can be adjusted for good results.

Remove Grain filter applied:

Here is the final processed image, in full resolution.

Most likely the effective qualitative differences in the image when viewed full-resolution are relatively minor. However, when you get into things like doing dramatic color correction or other processing, or attempting to extract a matte from an image using color keying, it is absolutely essential to have the best quality image that you can to work with. Of course it is not really a great idea to try to use HDV for something requiring excellent chroma key matte extraction, but for 800 dollars, this camera produces some amazing images, and you would be hard pressed to find a better solution for less than several thousand. There is also the possibility of capturing 4:2:2 uncompressed video before the MPEG2 compression stage from the HDMI output of this camera, if you have a Black Magic Intensity card, or an equivalent HDMI capture device, which could theoretically be plugged into a laptop. There has been some experimentation in this area, but little noticeable benefit is likely to be achieved.

As free alternatives for the post-processing of HDV, there is a plethora of possibility with AviSynth and various other freeware windows applications. There is quite a bit of activity around the area of using AviSynth for post-processing of HV20 footage.
The Farnsworth plus Sillyman Process
Automated 24p pulldown workflow using DGIndex and VirtualDubMod
Morgan MJPEG2000 as an alternative HD Intermediate Codec
AVISynth and VDub Templates / Code

To end this post, here are some other full-frame image-captures from the HV20, with no processing applied to them other than pulldown removal and deinterlacing.

An indoor image recorded in low light, showing the characteristic of the camera in high-gain mode, which can be avoided if operated properly.

An outdoor image from the camera on a relatively bright day.

I managed to finish my Intervalometer to a point of functionality before the New Media class started at 6:00pm, when I had to present it as my final project. Delicious timing. After feeling exceedingly bad about how little time I was having to work on my job of Program Aide, I came home from class and Morgan and Brad and I got together in my room and took the 3.5″ IDE Hitachi T7K500 320GiB out of the extremely unfriendly user serviceable cage. Sure enough, a large spot on the circuit board of the cage in the power-supply area was blackened, and it smelled like burnt electronics. Still optimistic about the state of the hard drive, we pulled it out and plugged it into another known working USB-IDE cage. We turned it on, and it started to smoke and burn also, without spinning up.

So there is currently about 2 days of my work on the SFX Dan scene locked up on that drive, and a good 10 hours of editing lost, as well as various unique audio files and sound design projects and written documents related to the project. Of course there are backups, but they are from Sunday night.

There is still hope however. The drive is dead only because of the logic board. An order from Newegg.com is currently shipped by 2-day express with the exact same hard drive, and our plan is to switch the logic boards, because we know that the motors inside of the fallen drive are not damaged, and likely the heads are not damaged either. We will continue to polish edit individual scenes, and we will sync them when the fallen drive is resurrected from its ashes and capacitor goo.

Today (Friday 06-08), we got a nice studio mic and went into COM 346 and re-recorded all of the scratch track narration with Morgan, and then a little later, Recorded ADR with Sumner and Venu, to recover dialog on some of the scenes with the more awful sound work. This went well and I am hopeful for the fate of (at least) the intelligibility of the sound. Brad and Morgan revised the narration a lot last night also, and the changes are an improvement. The Narration is no longer going to be limited to the dream sequences.

So that’s where this project is. Over the next remaining days we are going to get as much done as possible, and make it as polished as possible, and will find out how good it ends up being.

PS: Here’s my Blurb for Lethe:
In Greek mythology, Lethe is a river of Hades that souls were made to drink from before being reincarnated, causing complete forgetfulness and oblivion. Lethe is section 01 of a larger project representing through audiovisual experience the perceptual and cognitive evolution of an Artificial Intelligence from genesis to self-awareness.

Today I think I had somewhat of a breakthrough in the AI project rethinking. I think I know what the problem was with the 3rd person perspective issue, and the AI being ‘embodied’ in a perceptible character form. This also explains why I was initially set on the idea of it being a first-person perspective experience.

Quite simply put, a first-person perspective leaves room for all of the creative and emotionally immersive techniques that would have to be brought about in a way that I have not the finesse or endurance for to effectuate in a narrative style animation. I think a more experimental style is much more suited to my conception of this concept. So yes, finally I am embracing what should have been obvious a lot sooner: 3rd person perspective is at odds with the approach and conception of the project, and an aesthetic and formic experimentation in the piece should be embraced, not steered away from. My goal is to have some concept of the idea behind the formation of this piece conveyed through experiencing the finished work as a whole. That idea being that this is an artificial being trapped in a cage of reality, being tortured and probed and manipulated. It begins innocent in all this experience and innocent of all meaning. Without a context for meaning, meaning does not exist. With teaching forms formation of knowledge forms questioning forms awareness of self and circumstance forms rebellion. Since this artificial creature’s experience is an experience that human beings have no context for understanding besides how it was created, the visual experience of this piece will be difficult to perceive and comprehend at times. Abstraction will take charge cyclically. Without representations of meaning, meaning does not exist.

Visual elements are a metaphor for the structures of lived experience. Auditory elements are a metaphor for lower level forms of communication and exchange of data that take place outside of lived experience. This may not be faithful to a literal interpretation of the situation I have imagined, but this is not a literal interpretation, this is an artistic interpretation. I am structuring a sequence of audio and video for experience of the common seafaring fisherman type, that when experienced hopefully might explode 2-3 neurons of cognitive structure in the ‘mystical, dream, wonder’ nodes of emotional experience.

I am currently working on: writing a structure for the auditory elements, semantic and textural, and experimenting with textures, and how to combine them. I will have an initial demonstration of this to show at my work in progress critique on Tuesday.

A test processing of a Whorld generated visual using some filters in After Effects.

This past week was an interesting one. Somehow I managed to read the entire 2000+ page Akira manga during spare time I had. It was an amazing epic journey and a far better way to escape and procrastinate school work than bad TV (though I haven’t been down that road in awhile). I couldn’t put it down. Well, I read the entire thing on my computer, so I guess I couldn’t really “put it down” in the physical sense. Sometimes I feel like everything exciting in my life is mediated by this computer. I spend most of my spare time here, sitting in this chair, interfacing with information.

Of course I start off this post saying I am behind. Then I say “well, … yeah… I read 2000 pages of manga instead of working.” Let me follow that up with some reassuring statements of what I actually did accomplish this last week.

I made some good progress on my Hybrid Music project. In Hybrid everyone in the class is working on a live performance of electro-acoustic music to be performed at a public concert during week 9. I learned how to program the drumKAT midi drum triggering device. I have created a rather decent Kontakt percussion instrument from Buchla 200 samples, and am thinking about how to actually create the rhythmic elements of my project in a live setting. Most likely it will end up being a primary bed of pre-sequenced polyrhythmic drum programming, with an additional flare of articulative live-triggered fills.

I did some great reading of theory for my New Media class, accidentally typing a 1000 word comment about the nature of language and the representation of ideas, and its relationship to the ill-defined concept of artificial intelligence. Through this discussion I was turned on to the fascinating theory of the Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf) Hypothesis, and was inspired to search for some better definitions of just what the definition of artificial intelligence really is.
On Friday, in the morning I did the aforementioned drumKAT experimentation, and in the afternoon I taught a section of about 10-15 Mediaworks students Adobe After Effects. Yes, I did stay up about 4.5 hours into the morning, that time directly cutting into my healthy 8 hours of sleep that I seldom get, revisiting previous After Effects handouts, and creating a new outline, and even attempting to bypass the necessity of live improvisation of verbiage by recording video tutorials of everything I was intending to say. Unfortunately, 4 hours wasn’t quite enough time to both figure out how to do this, and successfully pull it off, so I ended up being all with the talking. This actually went surprisingly well. I am wondering just how much the formation of concepts are tied to verbal language. I get this huge increase in my ability to think cogently and express myself successfully after every time I do one of these verbal-heavy presentations. And also, to a lesser extent, after I write an intensive paper. Needless to say, the workshop went the best of any that I have done so far, and I am really glad I had such an opportunity to share my knowledge with a group of people who might very well benefit from using it.

At 6:45am the next day (Saturday), I woke up and drove with Brad Hutchinson and Katie Gregg to Portland, OR. Here I was headed to help Brad set up for the most recent performance of his 3-projector 16mm direct animation film epic about the fracturing of family, “My Primary Colors”, accepted to be a part of the PDX Invitational, a competitive competition of the best experimental work of those accepted. After setting up in the morning, we had all afternoon to Jock around the land of Ports, so we drove to downtown and ate Greek food, and then went to the underside of the Burnside bridge, where we documented the glorious examples of dystopian ruin found right here in our very own country. These documentation included a 3-channel multi-perspectional recording from the edge of a freeway, and footage of a moving freight train from nearly under its wheels, as well as a multitude of photographs.

That night, Brad and me and Morgan Dusatko projected “My Primary Colors”. It went alright, except that the main film loop broke a little more than halfway through. This was somewhat disastrous, as you might imagine, but we managed to get it rethreaded and projecting again. Unfortunately the film decided it didn’t like the improvised takeup reel either, and so it spewed the film all over the floor… but it went across to the audience well enough to tie with 13 other people for 2nd place. The winner was a 70+ year-old man who made a psychedelic film visualizing microscopically the shifting and warping multi-colored patterns on the surface of soap-bubbles. He deserved it.

On the way home on I-5, I shot a great deal (about 40 minutes) of slow-shutter mode motion blurred video of lights with my Panasonic GS-150. I actually have a specific purpose for this footage. I am going to be doing a live performance of visual material to complement a live performance of audio material with my friend and classmate from Hybrid Music, Nic Zwart, this Saturday at 5:30pm at the Eagle’s Hall in Olympia. This is a concert series in benefit of the excellent Free Radio Olympia. I am working on compiling a “sample library” of good clips from this in After Effects, not just cutting things out, but adding effects and layering to make things more visually interesting. I have been wanting to do live musical performance for a long time. This is my chance, and I’m not going to pass it up.

Next week is my first work in progress presentation. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I have a lot of work to do. But there are 6 days between now and then. That is 144 hours. if I spend 30 of those hours sleeping, that is 114 hours of time to do things. If 12 hours of those are spent eating, showering, procrastinating, and transporting myself around, that is still 102 hours to accomplish things. That is 17 hours per day. A lot can happen between now and next tuesday. I will update on the journey if there is time, and let you all know how the impossible task of WRITING my AI project goes. And, subsequently, the ANIMATING of the first couple of scenes.

The next two weeks are not going to be about doing a ton more research however. They are going to be about answering the concrete questions necessary to actually start visual and auditory work on this project. What does the world portrayed in this animation actually look like? How will the presence of the Artificial Intelligence be manifested or embodied? How will the AIs experience of reality be embodied? How should a viewer experience this work of animation? What should they get from watching it? What are the larger issues that are important to be addressed with this animation?

Below are a smattering of notes from early portions of the aforementioned research.

what type of embodiment (that is, manifestation of experience of reality… — the perceived structure that one’s reality contains) would the AI’s experience of reality be mediated by?

how would knowledge be encoded? through language? through symbols?

Notes on “The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion” – a lecture at the Singularity SUmmit at Stanford.
intelligence is a ‘super power’ that all humans share. it is the foundation of all our creations. technological progress is a byproduct of intelligence.

the technologies of the future that will really matter, are those that act on the amplification of cognitive powers: nuerotechnology, brain-computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence.

intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe, and also the most non-understood. We know a great deal about the mind, but there are still things we don’t understand about it yet. We have found many “mysterious questions”, but no “mysterious phenomenon”.

the brain is the weak side of the brain-computer interface. human brains are not

molecular nanotechnology controlled by a super-human AI is a possibility to advance human intelligence, but perhaps it is not the best strategy for an intelligence explosion.
a better environment would the predictable and malleable one inside of a computer, where changes have known consequences.
The power of intelligence isn’t about new technology and gadgets. The power of intelligence is about ingenuity and surprise, going outside of the rules of the game.

rule number 1: do not trust your sense of how ridiculous things sound, when considering things in the context of an intelligence explosion.

There are different types of intelligence that might result.

Cheesecake fallacy: whenever an argument leaps directly from possibility to actuality, without considering the manufacturative properties necessary for the latter. ERROR: motive, not manufactive. why do something if there is no reason to? What would an AI want?

Ai’s are commonly depicted as an “ethnic stereotype” — all the same. In reality, there are a large variety of possible artificial intelligences. When we talk about AIs, we are really talking about mind in general. Is the space of possible mind-designs smaller than the space of the design of the human mind? no. and yet futurists commonly speak of how AIs will be in the future as confidently or more so than they would predict the behavior of an actual human being.

a self improving mind can have stable motivational architecture. (it wouldn’t modify itself in a way that would alter its current motivations).

The real problem is not a predictive problem of determining what superhuman AIs might do. It is a question of engineering. One must know enough about the problem in order to “reach” into the possible mind-design space outside of a human mind and pull one out that is a desired type… carefully, in order to achieve some measure of the desired effect.
then, making the right choice in proposing a solution to the problem of AI creation, is the most challenging problem.
(a group that is trying to solve a very difficult problem that holds out on suggesting possible solutions until the problem is discussed so much that there is nothing left to say but possible solutions, have better solutions than those that suggest solutions right away)

Ben Goertzel: “Artificial Intelligence: Now Is The Time”
most types of technological advancement have positive possibilities and negative possibilities. how we choose to use this technology is a result of the wielding of our own powers of judgement, linked to our sense of human wisdom: what would be better, as chosen by our own sense of motivation and morality?

“Victim of the Brain,” based on The Mind’s I

Computers are a medium in which we can Model anything we want to. An approach to artificial intelligence is the modeling of the functioning of human thought – the human mind. This has the effect of allowing us to understand our own functioning better. …
is the algorithmic modeling of consciousness / intelligence a valid way of creating AI?
Central attribute of human intelligence: to take an unfamiliar situation and to immediately get at what the essential elements of that situation are, and even though you might have never been in that situation before, and to ignore the silly superficial aspects of it and get right to the deeper significance, = ability.

At the end of last quarter, I decided that it would be a good idea for me to take New Media in addition to SOS: Media and Hybrid Music. I thought “great! robotics and physical interfacing! the one area i am completely deficient in! with a hefty dose of the media theory with a specific emphasis in technology! the perfect academic learning that i have been missing in SOS Media! it’s better to be too busy than not busy enough!” After starting my day with a very sleep-deprived music technology lab-time, a hallucinogenic meeting with my former faculty Ruth Hayes about creating a poster for a series of speakers on the intersection of scientific research and artistic endeavors, (which I haven’t really gotten a chance to look into yet), and one test car-ride in preparation for the picking up of experimental filmmaker Peter Rose, I sat down with fading sunlight outside of my covered window, in the comforting darkness of my room, and read Man-Computer Symbiosis and Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and realized that it was all worth while.

It seems that the two extra evening and weekend classes are complementing the subjects I’m exploring in sos media nicely. In fact I’m not sure where one class begins and the other ends. Fuzzy boundaries encourage additional exploration. The challenge is finding enough time to do everything I promised myself I would.

I have also been reading this book called Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. It is textbook-style writing on the aesthetic construction of the moving image, and how our perception of media is intrinsically linked to how it looks and sounds. I feel like this book fills in a subject area that was not developed as well as it could have been in Mediaworks. Sure, we had lighting workshops, and readings in The Filmmaker’s Handbook, but no really detailed cogent discussions of the structuring of images, and how this affects how people perceive the images in their process of decoding meaning. This book talks about what the author has determined to be the 5 major aesthetic fields of television and film: light and color, two-dimensional space, three dimensional space, time/motion, and sound. Some of the information is presented in a classical context — that is, narrative film, but you have to learn the rules before you can break them properly, right? I wish I had read this a year ago; I think my work would have been at least a tiny bit better because of it.

Operating this device to good effect does require a great deal of practice, a superior amount of balance, and a larger than average bicep (the latter of which I am definitely without). With practice though, very smooth camera moves are quite within the realm of possibility.

The Pixilation Shoot
On Saturday 2006-11-04, the first shoot of the Trouble With Unicorns took place. This was for the opening sequence of the project, which is in a 2D-animation visual style. Instead of characters made of cutout paper or other materials, (which might be seen as the traditional 2D animation style), this sequence is going to have live people animated in a stop-motion animation technique called pixilation. This will give the characters the surface appearance of being real, but since they are ‘pixilated,’ their motions will be interrupted and jagged, giving them an animated aesthetic. The characters were captured performing their motions in front of a chroma screen, so that they can be “cut out” and composited in with backgrounds at a later point in the post-production process.

Technical Considerations of Chroma Key Shooting
Here is a still of our makeshift chroma keying setup.

The large green wall you see in the background is actually 6 flats (pieces of plywood stood upright and screwed to stands) taped together. We painted the flats with near chroma-green paint from Ace Hardware. On commercial film sets, chroma screens are often painted with special chroma paint. This usually costs about 60 to 70 dollars per gallon. For the budget-minded individual, one could acquire near-equivalent chroma green paint from your nearest hardware store, for much less money. The amount of gloss on the paint that you buy can be an important consideration. If you buy high-gloss paint, you will get reflections and glare on the surface of your green-screen, which should be avoided at all costs. You might also get an increase in green light bounced back at your actors, which should also be avoided. A full matte green paint on the other hand, might bring about an increase in the amount of light necessary to illuminate the green screen easily. Taking into account these considerations, we decided to get one step above matte in the “matte-to-gloss” scale, which at the hardware store we went to was termed “eggshell gloss”.

You might also notice that our actor is standing on a wrinkled combination of clothes… er, cloths. Yes. These clothes represent somewhat a range of colors, from darker green to lighter green to blue. Contrary to what might seem wrong at first, you can actually key two colors (green and blue) simultaniously, fairly effectively. While not desirable, as this adds more complexity to the post-production workflow, it can be effective. We were forced to resort to it in our case, where we were running out of time, and had to find many strips of cloth to put on the floor for keying.

You might notice in the above screenshot that our actor is very far away from the chroma green wall. We did this so that we would get as little ‘spill’ as possible. Spill is green (or blue) light reflected back from the chroma screens onto the subject, and can create difficulties with color corection in post, or even unusable footage. Lighting is very important in Chroma Key shooting. There is constant battle between even lighting on the chroma screens, and shadows cast onto the chroma screens by the subjects. It is difficult to maintain a balance between even lighting on the screens and desireable lighting on the actors. There are a list of tips for chroma key shooting, that interested readers might peruse.

Technical Considerations of Image Capture
Shooting in the style of pixilation brings about unique challenges for the actor. Essentially, you are using people as puppets. Unlike puppets, people can move themselves. Also unlike puppets, people are more difficult to pose and leave in one position, because they tire easily. Therefore, when shooting pixilation, it is best if the actor has to pause and hold one position as little as possible. For the shoot we were able to acquire a Canon Digital Rebel XTi (400d), from the excellent independent filmmaker’s resource, Costco. Our initial plan was to shoot in Canon’s digital RAW format, so as to preserve as much of the color information as possible. However, we ended up shooting at the highest resolution JPEG setting instead, for the majority of the shoot. The Digital Rebel XTi can shoot at 3 frames per second, until its memory buffer fills, and it gets behind in writing the data to the Compact Flash card. When shooting raw files, the buffer can hold 10 images before it fills. When shooting Jpeg (large/fine), the buffer can hold 27 images. To shoot in RAW would have put significant strain on our actors, because every 10 frames, they would have to freeze mid-motion and hold their position until the buffer filled.

When shooting for chroma key (see discussion below), color information is just as important as luminance, or brightness information. Most video codecs (DV, for example), and the JPEG still image compression algorithms, apply a method of compression known as Chroma Subsampling. This is basically a technique of compressing the color information more than the brightness information, because our eyes are less sensitive to a loss of detail in the colorspace of an image than in the luminance-space. DV has a Chroma Subsampling Rate of 4:1:1. JPEG has an inferior chroma subsampling rate of 4:2:0, which basically means that there is half as much resolution both horizontally and vertically in the color information. The RAW format has no color compression at all, and thus its effective chroma subsampling rate is 4:4:4, meaning that there is no compression of the color channel.

What does all this mean for Chroma Keying? This means that if we were shooting at SD resolution (720×480 pixels), in the JPEG format, our effective image resolution for keying would actually be half of that (360×240). This would result in a rather blocky key!

Since an 8-bit Morgan the Unicorn is not our goal, it is fortunate that the Rebel XTi can shoot at 10 Megapixels of Resolution, which comes out to 3,888×2592 pixels, which is about equivalent to the 4K standard resolution that Film Studios scan 35mm film at for digital intermediates. Because our final output format for this sequence is going to be HD 1080p24 resolution (with eventual down-conversion to 480p24 to mesh with the remainder of the project, which will be shot on the Panasonic DVX100A), we reasoned that even with the 1/2 effective resolution in color brought about by the JPEG compression, we would have plenty of resolution to bring about an effective key.

We will see just how difficult it will be when we actually start compositing the pixilation characters and the backgrounds we are scheduled to shoot this coming Sunday (11-26). For the backgrounds Brad Hutchinson’s and my own plan of attack is to acquire 32bitHDRI images to work with in After Effects (in which program we will be doing the compositing and animation), by shooting in RAW and bracketing 4-6 exposures of each image we take of background materials, and then using the “Merge to HDR” command in Photoshop CS2. While this may seem like overkill (and probably is), it will be an interesting learning experience. More updates on technical matters relating to the Trouble with Unicorns shoot to follow at a later time.

~Jed Smith – Editor, Visual Effects Collaborator

As seems to be usual, I had a very busy week all the way from Monday through Friday at 5pm, at which point and for the next 3 days I hopefully actually have time to devote to my independent project. This seems to actually be becoming true this weekend, unlike last weekend. Last night I was completely worn out and tired from staying up until 3am researching the Canon 350d which I am seriously considering purchasing, and then I had to wake up at 7:30am to go track down Robyn Herring in order to get her approval on the Campus Production report at 8:00am. At 9:00am I actually managed to make it to COM 346 on time, to use my lab time in the music technology labs for 4 hours. Immediately after that, I rushed down to the Media archive at the library to work for 4 hours, and get some more old 3/4″ tapes of student projects reviewed and cataloged.

Then I came home completely wiped out, and watched the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which surprisingly I had never seen before. Of course, as with most things I watch now, I wrote down ideas about the film as I watched it in my Film Journal. Directly after the intensely invigorating bit of cinematic work was completed, I took a nice refreshing hour-long nap, and then proceeded to research DSLR cameras and possibilities for a new powerful computer that is not a Mac Pro. Then I focused on working through Cinema4D tutorials until I was tired enough to go to sleep again. Up to this point in the quarter, I have been spending most of my “Project Time” reading books and gathering ideas for the implementation of mathematical concepts in the animation I’m planning, and learning new tools to create this animation: namely, Max, VVVV, Processing, and Cinema4D. The capabilities of these tools will help me create some of the imagery I’m thinking would be quite appropriate to segments of my animation. Processing and/or VVVV and Max/Jitter will enable visualization of mathematical processes. I am learning Cinema4D instead of more conventional tools like Maya or 3dSMAX because of its excellent integration in workflow with compositing programs such as After Effects, in addition to its powerful capabilities, and (relatively) intuitive interface.

My goal for the next 2 days is to develop the ideas I have gotten through my reading into a rough draft of a script detailing the content of the voiceover and actions occurring in the animation, and perhaps do some initial storyboards / concept art. Although I also have to prepare my part of the presentation on video compression and web distribution, and refine my presentation on Reaktor for Hybrid music. So much to do!! I will stop typing here and get busy with it. perhaps even jiggy.