During Winter quarter, I got in the habit of creating an “exegesis” post for each of my projects. They contained an inside look at the process behind the creation of the project, and my view of the conceptual ideas behind the film/video.

Consider this a placeholder for just such an exceedingly extensive and detailed post about the process of creation of “Transference Simulation“, mostly regarding my post-production workflow choices and process, evolution of the conceptual content, and some explanations for my choices. And including, of course, a web-compressed video file of the final final cut. First, I will actually finish that tunnel of wires, and finish my eval, then I will write this post of gloriousness. You will see.

Here is an MPEG4 AVC encode of Transference Simulation, for your repeated viewing pleasure.

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Transference Simulation is my final project for the Mediaworks program at the Evergreen State College. It is an animated music video recursively examining the representation of gender and sexuality in popular media. By accentuating morbidity, and asserting the vapid portrayal of the human body as a sexual object, this project attempts to bring light to the superficiality and delusional distraction of pop-culture media, such as the pop music video. Affected reflexively by this blight, the diegesis is allowed to play out and descend necrotically into the metaphorical consequents of this infection. Specific meaning is intended to be created in a willful dialectic between the viewer and his or her experience of the work.

This project was submitted to the Platform Animation Festival, and I ambivalently awaited word as to my acceptance or rejectance for quite some time. I had a feeling that it was likely to get rejected because of its lack of conceptual cogency, and overall stylistic roughness, and my inclinations were correct.

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You can download my Rough Cut here. It is a 25MiB MP4 video file (MPEG4 AVC standard h.264 video, aac audio), which should play equally well in Quicktime and the VideoLAN Client. You can also download this file from a YouSendIt Post, in case the previous link did not work for you. The right-click, “save as” method would be optimal for the first link, while you must visit the second link.

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This last weekend – Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, were all 16-17 hour days for me. Some of the composites I’m attempting are rediculously complex (as I outlined in my last entry). I think I have made good progress in getting the skeleton of the composites I want there, and a rough outline of the sequence and progression of events.

The only work on the sound I did was on Friday, which time I spent developing new musical ideas with the granular synthesis of various Pop-songs and sounds. I also sampled my brother’s toy piano into Kontakt, which is the chime-like sound motif.

Understandably, given the previous information, the connections between audio and video on all of the newly completed portions of the animation is tenacious at best. I couldn’t really concretely develop the soundtrack until I knew the progression of images, and I can’t now concretely develop the editing until I have the soundtrack more tightly written around the current progression of images. Developing image and sound simultaniously and in conjunction is a difficult thing!

I watched my work of the last few days for the first time in real-time today at the rough cut critique session. Obviously there are issues with editing and thematic progression which just don’t work, conceptually and stylistically. I will be working to fix these, as well as developing the synchronization of sound and video in the latter portions. Humble thanks for all of the many kind and excellent comments and criticisms on my project by my fellow classmates, they are invaluable as I continue to develop this project.
(more…)

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For the past 15 hours pretty much straight (with a brief jaunt over to see how Chloé’s chessboard animations are going), I have been chairbound in front of my computer, compositing, tweaking, and aligning. I have everything pretty much polished and finalized up to 2:15. Unfortunately, I did not anticipate the brute-force labor that this process entails; it is taking significantly longer than I had anticipated, and I have by no means been slacking. In all likelihood, at the rough-cut screening, I will have everything in place roughly, but in place. It will be good not to spend a great deal of time to get something perfect, only to realize it should be changed later, anyway.

The After Effects project is getting rediculously complex, though I strive to keep everything in order. I have a base composition, which has nested compositions of each edited scene, and some complex backgrounds. Each of these nested compositions in turn has compositions of their own, each composition being an element of the scene composited together. Often there are nested compositions within these compositions, out of necesity. Then, on an average of 4-5 levels deep of nested compositions, there are the actual edited footage files, each clip of course occupying its own layer within its composition. My 1 GiB of RAM is being clocked for all it is worth.

If interested, view the screen capture behind the cut of me rotoscoping scale and position keyframes for the wire-tv zoom-out shot with the children.

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Here is the rough rough cut that I showed at the critique session today. The file is an MP4 video file (24.9MiB), which you can easily download and view with VideoLan Client or Quicktime. I would very much appreciate anyone who downloads and watches it to give me scathing criticism on structure, shots that are out of place, compositing style that really doesn’t work, audio that doesn’t match visuals (in both mood and synchronization), and any other sorts of comments (including interpretations).

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Please keep in mind that all images and sounds after the pullback from the thrusting to the reveal of the children watching is very very very rough. I just threw that together this morning to give people an idea of the direction I was going. Therefore, comments on the awful compositing and unsynched cuts/movements of the end parts will be particularly not useful to me.

Thanks ahead of time!

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I have decided to scrap my project, which is entirely too much work, and really just isn’t working. In its stead, there will be a 10 minute video quite similar to the following, but likely more seizure-inducing and horrible.

just kidding.
In all seriousness though, the compositing goes well, and very very slowly. Approximately 18 hours of working on the first 1.75 minutes in the last two days.

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Yesterday was spent fiddling with After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Live, tweaking all of the stuff I have done and making it better. I also experimented a good bit to finalize the process of inter-operating between AE and Premiere. Dynamic Link is nice, but boi do I wish I had 2GiB of ram instead of 1. I have been settling for doing initial edits in Premiere, and then importing the project into AE for compositing/effects and positioning… and now animation.

Yes, you read correctly. I am animating my animations. Here is an After Effects ScreenShot showing the graph-editor on the lower right, with a graph of the time-remapping of the layer with the barbie walking through the forest-like terrain. Basically I am time-remapping her walk-cycle so it appears that she is dancing to the music. This works, and doesn’t really detract from the goodness of the original animation, because the original animations sucked and was very herky-jerky.

I will certainly be doing things like this alone in my room for the great majority of the forseeable future. I would suddenly wish that I were merely editing video for my project, but I guess I’m just an Ascetic at heart.

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Here is the roughly edited sequence from my class critique session last Thursday. It is represents the summation of my work up to that point: about 2 minutes of soundtrack relatively complete, and 1:30 of video edited and composited roughly. In the first portion of the sequence of this sequence, the audio was created to synch with the video, and in the second portion the reverse is true.

I have been rather exceedingly busy. Last saturday and sunday, I had a fabulous time helping Chloé out on her project along with Brad. There was multitudes of exciting pixilation and exhilarant subject-matter, and not a few gigglesomely delirious early mornings. Woo! Every spare moment of my time will now be spent on editing/compositing and soundtrack, and figuring out what I am doing next year at Evergreen.

roughly edited sequence – MP4 format

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Here is the soundtrack so far:

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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.

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