Everything I can See from here & With any sort of Certainty

 I like how this one keeps breaking apart, the shapes drift a little bit and go from being a person or a cityscape to just being abstract.  (found by animation garden facebook)



and this one's been everywhere. I just appreciate that they are using a different shape (and actually using it kicking with the ball) there's no reason we are constrained to landscape rectangles. (although there is a psa for vertical vids)
Everything I Can See From Here from The Line on Vimeo.

Kong puppet shaping up

Okay time to start just posting.

Me and my coworker (Steve)spent a week just doing little tests, just to get a bit of handle on stopmotion. I wanted to post some of them, but the decent ones are still on his iphone. But here's one.

I jumped in and started modeling my character. I wanted to wait until I had him all finished, but it's going slow, so now I'm just throwing up the progress I made so far. (I was pretty pleased with how the sculpting came out, but still I wish I could just get straight to animating)

Super super thin sculpey on top of tinfoil, I'm a little worried about the weight, that's why it's so thin. It's maybe 10 inches tall because it's a giant gorilla and I needed it to be big so that the humans won't be too tiny to animate. So hopefully it works out. Also just ran out of epoxy on the final foot, so one foot is epoxy covered in sculpy and one is straight sculpy, so we'll see if that works.


I was going to paint it blue, but with the funny head shape maybe I'll break with tradition and make Kong an orange orangutan. Planning on making it in post mainly desaturated sepia tone anyway, so not sure how much it will matter.

So the pupils, lids and eyebrows will be soft clay on top. I just finished last night baking the replacement mouths. I had almost finished a set, but then when I looked at them I realized they were pretty tame and lame, so I did a second round of sculpts trying to exagerate a lot more, and will use the original pass as inbetweens to smooth out the big jumps. Part of the idea is that with moveable muzzles I can maybe get a little more flexible feel into the face by translating them around the head. 

okay, so next step, wrap the body in foam, and try Jon's dip fingers (phew liquid latex smells terrible, like ammonia.) And then take these quick mock ups into papagaya and break down my x sheet for singing. And of course gotta make the humans.

Spectral Motion

there's something super awesome about real world effects

Spectral Motion Demo Reel from Spectral Motion on Vimeo.

Breezeblocks - Alt J

This video is awesome (kind of violent though) because it weaves the viewers preconceptions so strongly into the narrative and then kicks you with it.

Serial Movies

I watched TinTin yesterday (which I had been reluctant too, because it just threw out Herge's awesome graphic style, and then TinTin's voice bleh) and there is no denying that Spielberg can craft a really fun movie.  It had me thinking about how Lucas and Spielberg just recreated the old serial movies they watched. So I went poking around and found this fan site that says that they went and watched all 15 episodes of Don Winslow of the Navy for inspiration before hashing out the story.  The site says that after their week of day long story meetings Lucas had divided the story up into 60 scenes, each two pages long, and had outlined 6 cliffhangers. So a peril turns up every 20 pages and every 10 minutes the hero is in mortal danger, the danger had to be as real as possible and required the hero's cleverness to escape. Had me trying to pin why Indiana Jones is so fun, but Avatar left me 'meh' and answer I've come up with so far is that Avatar characters feel generic, Indiana Jones the characters are cool and fun to hang out with and feel more developed.




Talking about the Last Crusade it's mentioned that Spielberg storyboards everything, and figures it out on miniatures, which saves a lot of money having it worked out ahead of time and makes it easier for all the different departments to do their jobs.

When Sean Connery came on he really looked to put in as much humor as possible, and as much conflict between Jones Sr. and Jones Jr.

The tank chase was mentioned as being different from most action set pieces because it had more story in it, characters evolved during the chase, we saw Sr. strong for the first time and we see Indy at his weakest.

(makes me think of Lost's approach of couching everything in terms of character.)