Audio Piano Tests

I did some piano tests (mainly to learn how to best hook a piano up to a mic) i couldnt get the audio files onto my blog but they are in the Blog Data files on my hand-in disk under: blog_data > data > audio.

Tree Test

Instead of having Disney trees i decided to have tress made from textures of paper and have them cut down by loggers using scissors.

Although they are still trees it changes the shift from natural beauty to world resource. I wanted to use a paper texture as a reminder of what trees mean to the production of modern living and for a more physical feel then the rest of the animation, textures may be used in other places but not over used.

Short Render

Character Concepts

A few character concepts I haven't yet uploaded to this blog.

Tree Logger

TV Family

Dino

Chicken

Petting Zoo

Pig Boss

Pig Newsreader

Animatic

StoryBoard

StoryBoarding

Storyboarding is a long process that for me feels longer then actually animating the same content. I still haven't come to a final board but will have to start animating something before finalising this to give a feel of workload and length. At the start i felt this was a 1:30 to 2 minute project but i can already see parts that are filling out. May have to do an animatic that i don't really have time for but it would save time to cut content in the animatic then the final animated sequence. As alway with animation projects i wish i had more time.

3D Projection

Me and Ben have been working recently with 3d projection, these are some videos that he found and i told him i could make. we have mapped some chairs in a 3d world just using the projector in university but came across a few snags, mainly from the machine we where using not having any programs on it at all and without internet access. we got round that evenly and i showed ben how to mask objects onto a 3d object and animate it like these examples.

We would both like to take this further but i am not sure if it will help my project in anyway, still it is something i am interested in learning more about. Maybe something interactive would be pretty cool. Maybe 88 boxes in different shapes and sized in a pile with colours projected on them in the colour scale/table i created, then have each assigned to a key on a digital piano?

Process of Storytelling

[An interview about my project and the process of storytelling]


"That’s really interesting thanks. So, tell me about your final major project so far?"

I want to make an animation that questions the idea of being different. Everyone wants to make something different, it is how people try to get themselves noticed. I however, want to make something then draw attention to what you are really seeing. My main idea stems from thoughts about the process of representation in that we can find form in things like TV static. The differences are quite minimal but as human beings we interrupt information through mediums and convert it into the characters, emotions and environments we see on screen. I guess my grand gesture is about the conversion of screen based mediums and how, in a digital age, we unquestionably accept what is on it even if we interrupt it wrongly. I'm interested in how people find narrative in sequences whether it is intentional or not. Animation fits this type of approach perfectly.

TV Static

TV scene - rough sketches

The audience to the Disney Deforestation, TV is reduced to static and still they watch. Phase-out of TV for shot entrance, pan/zoom out of window to stage left for exit.

Disney Deforestation - Stage Setup

2.5D test of a few different trees and perspective with zooms, pans and animated objects at different depths.

Disney Deforestation - Tree Cutter

Tree Cutter general design - Disney deforestation opening

Character design for the tree cutters at the beginning of the animation opening sequence.

Character Design

Im still not sure about the colours, they will change a lot over time.

Crunchy, Thirsty and Mr Milligan - All animals in the petting zoo, the zoo is a representation of university life, the outside world being the working world.

Teef-Rex - As much of a main character as you may get, in the first sketch, Him trying to put on a wacom glove.

Officer Balloon - Does nothing, is just a balloon with a hat.

Chicken - Reports a crime to the officer.

Cowboy - The antagonists, enters scene from right to left just like a western. Steals from the chicken.

Research and Development

Work Adventure:
A plan to get some work done.

• Character design.
• Character profiles.
• Short review of what I am trying to achieve and basic plot.
• World profile.
• Story-line (general happenings).
• Script.

Sketch Ideas

These won't make sense, im just making bullet point ideas to re-jog my memory.

• T-rex wacom glove
• Chicken crimes
• Balloon Face
• Disney Deforestation
• Angry Short Batman
• Deadpan Jet Horse/Taxi
• Thirsty - Elephant
• Crunchy - Squirrel
• Mr Milligan - Hedgehog
• Cowboy Bully
• News
• Gibberish Talk
• Information Swapping
• Multi-View
• Static TV Show
• University petting zoo
• Pig-pen
• Inanimate War

Structure:

1. Disney Deforestation
2. Static TV Show
3. T-rex wacom glove
4. Deadpan Jet Horse/Taxi
5. University petting zoo - (Thirsty, Crunchy, Mr Milligan)

1. Cowboy Bully
2. Chicken crimes
3. Balloon Face

1. Pig-pen
2. News
3. Gibberish Talk
4. Information Swapping
5. Multi-View
6. Inanimate War

Restructure:

1. Disney Deforestation
2. Static TV Show
3. T-rex wacom glove
4. Chicken crimes
5. Deadpan Jet Horse/Taxi
6. University petting zoo - (Thirsty, Crunchy, Mr Milligan)

1. Cowboy Bully
2. Balloon Face

1. Pig-pen
2. News
3. Gibberish Talk
4. Information Swapping
5. Multi-View
6. Inanimate War

Miscommunication and Meaninglessness

All information has to go through a medium. That could be a number of things, from the very obvious like sound travels through air in waves or relative high density to the ambient air around it. To information being coded into a human cypher for emotions and experience, much like what you are looking at now. The written word in all its forms is a substitute for something else humans can experience. Like love, pain, caring or even just the colour blue. The medium of language is a lot more complex a medium then something like sound. Its a hybrid medium, it will go through a lot of physical mediums as well as conceptual ones.


Experience > Thought > Movement > Sound > Electrical Conversion > Interpretation > Reaction.


This on a very basic level is communication using voice from one person to another.

Experience; drawing upon things that have happened in the past, how to communicate as well as how not to, this makes more sense when you have things you should not say in context.

Thought: Converting this into words that best suit what you are trying to say and then converting that into muscle movement such as the jaw, vocal cords and diaphragm.

Movement: Literally the movement of those muscles to push air past the vocal cords to create vibrations of low and high pressure that are then tweaked by the mouth and jaw.

Sound: The finished product of the person sending the speech. Sound passing out the mouth, nose and body towards the person it is spoken to.

Electrical Conversion: Sound converted into electrical signals that are then interpreted by the brain.

Interpretation: The brain interprets this information and lays it upon experiences of language and life to understand what the other is saying.

Reaction: The cycle continues.


Its quite a complex way to communicate and yet we can even do it using written words as well as sounds, which are even abstracted from the spoken noises.

(Note to self: Get to the point.)

Mosaic Inspiration

One of my friends showed me this site and it got me thinking about how video is displayed to an audience. the traditional manner is similar but not the same as how we experience time, one event after the other in a constant flow. Some people such as Quentin Tarantino have experimented with this by creating pockets of narrative and sewing them together in a non linear fashion.

This site takes any youtube or vimeo video and streams it in a number of different ways. The way displayed below is mosaic, it divides the video into about three second clips and places them into a grid in the window randomly. Once the grid is filled it divides each three second window into a further four windows. The audio of the clip is streamed as a single ongoing track over the top.

This adds something else to the animation, it takes away from the narrative where you cannot see what is happening at that point in time and dulls any audio cues to the visual but you can view the entire video as a whole in three second clips.

Music by - Cilla Jane                                                                                                               Animaion by - Adam Philips

Video Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiWnWtl8070&feature=channel_video_title

Mosaic Video Link

http://yooouuutuuube.com/m/?yt=wiWnWtl8070

Ideas so Far?

My ideas can be split into three different types on animation.

Abstracted - Such as changing information around and feeding them to different senses. The input sound to output colour idea for instance. Maybe as a live interactive installation. This will highlight how much of the information that we absorb is actually meaningless without human interpretation weather it be conscious or unconscious. In reality this information is as meaningless as the next without a couscous brain to interpret it. Hence the title 'An Animation About Nothing'.

Sketch - Shorter sketches making up roughly a total of three minutes of animation. Breaking the fourth wall by being aware of its medium, on screen viewing and its process of creation. Maybe repeated scenes but with edit cuts so the scene has different meanings too? A script will have to be written up to include all of the ideas i have gone over in this blog which may be difficult but i would like its underlining message to be: ceci n'est pas une pipe, or rarther; ceci n'est pas une animation.. ..de rien.

(Note to self: Remember the third idea before i forget it completely - Something to do with editing scenes from an animation that makes sense and an easy to follow narrative to something else.. not unlike Tarinitino come to think of it)

Audio Visual Information Swapping

With the idea of information interpretation in mind, and the idea of different senses that interpret infomation within different mediums, what would it be like to swap over this information but still have it relative to the visual spectrum or the human audio bandwidth. I get the feeling i may just end up with static and high pitched screeching.

Although if i make if a full screen visualisation to an audio track it may not be so harsh on the senses. All i would have to do is make it a little more relitive and have a single input (such as sound) into a single output (such as colour). Such as this;

(100 Hz = 380 nm) (1,000 Hz = 740 nm) or vice versa. Then simplified into colours within flash. 


(After making this table based on the parameters of human hearing and visible light, i think it may be better to tone down the sound input to just something like the scale of an 88 key piano. The human hearing is a lot broader then the human eye in this sense.) 


EDIT - I've made the scale of the audio input to the rough scale of the human voice (male and female) this is a smaller scale then a piano (4kHz~ - 25Hz~) and of course the human adult ear (20kHz~ - 20Hz~) but should be adequate for the user.

It may even be possible to have a live feed input using a mic into a flash file with a bit of actionscript to make the audio input variable to something like a colour on screen. It may be like a synaesthesia simulator.


Im sure it would be possible to mix in a visual to audio converter as long as you changed the visual to something like a black and white image, but even then you would only be able to take a horizontal strip of that image to convert into audio, and when idol, if the screen is picking up a static/constant amount of light it would just emit the same frequency noise and would most likely be irritating. The audio to visual colour idea i much more peaceful.

Information Editing

We are beings that really think in movement, we always live in anticipation of what the very near future holds. We even read words in that way, i bet you already know most of these words before you even have to read through the whole thing, that way you can make a prediction and move onto the next.

We weave narrative into pretty much everything.

Information editing we come across this all the time, most of the time we are unaware of it because it comes within a medium we can already read and, if we are unable to read it, it will usually have some relevance or link to the real life experience of it. (This is why language and the written word is so difficult to learn).

For instance; Film editing from shot to shot in a conversation scene.


(note to self: finish this..)

Simplification

Simplification is a very useful tool for an animator, not only does it cut down on workload but it also communicates form and even attitude of a character in one of the the simplest ways posable.

A good example of good simplified character design is Simon's Cat, made by Simon Tofield.

Nothing you are seeing is a cat, yet we read it as a cat. You can say that about both of these pictures. You could even say it about a real cat sat in front of you. You're not seeing the cat, you're eyes are just converting photons into electrical signals which are then processed and interpreted by you're brain. The cat was only involved as a reflector of the photons, it only gives its information away by absorbing certain wavelengths of light, what is left we interpret as colour and, in turn, other things like texture when your brain relates to what it is seeing and calls upon memories of the other senses.

Human interpretation is partly conditioned by culture. So it comes as no surprise that Western cartooning is different to Eastern. However all of them have something in common, that is they are all simplified versions of objects, animals or people via the human mind. We can understand the two dimensional medium of pencil and paper (or in the case of Simon's Cat, graphics tablet and computer). We cant expect a real cat to understand a cartooned illustration of a cat as a cat.

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

What i would like the rooting message to be about, if you can call it that, is that what we see on screen, what we hear from speakers is nothing. Nothing but an interpretation of the brain, a medium that carries human only compatible information. The real question is; how do i convey this on screen? Its like breaking the fourth wall but also being aware that the wall itself wasn't ever there.

The Rene Magritte Painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe captured this perfectly. How can i convey a simalar message using an animated medium. Maybe by using animated clique and braking it apart? Introducing the viewer to a world that feels plausible on screen then becoming questionable by abstracting? Becoming aware that it is an animated short is usually something that is avoided or embraced as a medium of representation. How would i go about changing an audiences view about what is on screen without spelling it out to them by literally writing Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

Kid's Story - Animatrix

Looseness of hand is a lot more commonly practiced in life drawings and takes more of a back seat in animation, but if animation is about what you read between the frames then why cant those frames be free of a perfect form. In the one of the Animatrix shorts 'Kid's Story' the very free handed drawing style in the chase sequences are amazing to look at and add so much to how you read the animation. It's like a real motion blur, unlike a post edited film, animation or even game. This way your eyes (and brain) work in the same way they would if given less information about things like form and space placement. It's something i am interested to study as i feel the post produced 'motion blur' of today has it all wrong. This is how we use our own ways of interpretation best, to make moving imagery move more 'realistically'.

Starting Somewhere

For my final year studying Animation in university i am thinking up ideas and eventually (hopefully) creating a three minute animation about the subject of my choosing.

To be original these days you have to really think outside the box, or maybe not even think about boxes. For my final animation in my three year degree i want to make something different (just like everyone else).

I am in a spiral of different ways of thinking; 'what can i do that hasn't ever been done or seen before?' or 'why do i need to be so different, why not be more straight forward if others are trying to be different?'.

I know what i like in animation, i will try to follow those and research around techniques in a medium of my choosing. Digital 2D drawing is something i would like to primarily use however, I can change medium if my ideas need it.