8th Week of Classes

This week I learned how to use Garageband and I had a refresher of Audacity. I ended up later helping out a friend with amplifying mic-sounds and getting rid of background noise.

I hope to better my music skills so that I can make rad beats in Garageband and Audacity.

I am very frustrated at nothing because this week has been hella rad.

I am glad that I have no school on Monday! I needed a break~

(❁´‿`❁)*✲ﾟ* This is super funny. ^-^

Article Response: Making "Frozen"

Article

Learned

• Disney based Frozen off of an old movie from the 1940s called Snow Queen about the healing power of love. 
• "The theme didn’t change…it shifted from romantic love to fear versus love.” That is an interesting concept and I didn't know what the movie Frozen about.
• “It took about 30 hours to render just one frame; that’s 4,000 computers rendering one frame at a time." Geeeeez. I never knew rendering such a short area of film would take so long.

Opinions

• The only really important things to read are at the end of the article for learning reasons.
• The rest of the article is cool for facts to know just to know them. 

Question

• How many full hours of rendering was that one castle scene? It doesn't say how many frames each computer rendered, but it does mention that each computer rendered 1 frame at a time.

Article Response: Animating Creatures

Article

Learned Stuffs:

• Female character-rigs were rare at some point? I always hear about males being harder to draw.
• Comparing unique creatures to real creatures helps you figure out the correct physics for your creature.
• Using more characters with more contact time makes for a more impressive portfolio.

Opinions:

• I like the writing. It is simple to understand and gets straight to the point.
• I like how it had a lot of examples for movies with creatures in it.

Question

• How much time did they spend just getting all the info that they have?

Week 7 of Class

This week I re-learned how to do the proportion for percentage stuff and things. Is over of is percent out of 100 or something.

I hope to learn better techniques of animation that will cut the time of work down.

I got frustrated with Flash crashing as much as it did.

°˖ ✧◝(○ ヮ ○)◜✧˖ ° This is just perf.

Article Response: "Get a Horse!"

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Learned Poo

• They used tobacco and tea leaves to create the browned look on paper.
• They would beat tables with chains to make them look more worn out.
• They used old sounds from older Mickey Mouse stuff and added it into the newer one to make is sound older too. The hissing and popping helped make it seem authentically older.

Opinions

• I think it's cool that they are working so hard to make something seem so authentic and old.
• I liked how they author write this out. It is very easy to know what it is they are taking about.

Question

• How long will they be showing this short for? I am strangely interested in watching this.

Article Response: VFX Jobs

Article

Learned Things

• I didn't think that VFX was used that often. Like, little changes in scenery and adding a crowd of people to the background and stuff. I figured they'd just hired extras or something.
• I figured they used like fake blood bags or something like that for like, simple wounds. The Walking Dead uses a lot of VFX.
• Knowing technology and art is good for that kind of thing, but not exactly needing to have mastered one helps. I am not exactly great at the technology side of things, but I figure that's something I can work on.

Opinions

• I like the author's non-boring attitude and typing and stuff.
• This VFX stuff sounds like something I'd like.

Question

• What are good colleges for this kinda thing?

Class Things Week 6

I learned this week that I had nothing to worry about going into the physics lesson because I had already learned that stuff like, a couple years. It was all basic.

I hope to learn how to put expressive actions into a character. I don't think I can explain it very well, but like, each character behaves in each way, and good animators can exaggerate these behaviors using the characters even basic movements.

I didn't get frustrated by anything this week.

(/-(ｴ)-＼) In behalf of Halloween being this week, have a music thing. 2spooky.

Article Response: 10 Tips to Natural Lighting in Shots

Article

Mastered Things

• "By positioning your actors in a way that places the sun to be behind them to hit the back of their heads, you are essentially doing two things. First off, you’re protecting their face from taking in all of the sunlight which will not only make them look bad, but also cause them to squint. And secondly, with the sun behind them, they will naturally have a backlight that will separate them from the background and create a nice rim around their heads, with nice even lighting on their face."
• "Blue hour is the short window of time after the sun goes down (or before it comes up) where the sky is still colorful, but the sun isn’t visible. And Magic Hour of course, is the hour leading up to sunset or just after sunrise. Both of these times of day are ideal for shooting as the natural quality of light outside at that time of day just can’t be beat"
• "This really does go hand in hand with choosing the right locations as if you choose a perfect location, the art department may not need to work as tirelessly to ensure you still get the light that you need, or conversely if you’re stuck with a location that just isn’t working, they may be able to save the day."

Viewpoints

• So many things learned in this, especially on the first page. I'm not much of a video production guru, so the stuff about everything is just really mind-blowing and I wouldn't have thought of any of it.
• Magic and Blue Hour sound like a pain to film in. Can't you just, like, green screen that in? That's probably just my lazy brain doing lazy things though.

Question

• If it's actually harder to film with nature's lighting, then why wouldn't you just want to do it the easier way? Is the heightened cost of electrical lights all that much more?

Article Response: Proto-GIFS

Article

Egdumacated

• "Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau is widely credited with inventing the phenakistoscope in 1832 as part of a study on how the eye perceives illusions." Rad.
• "Richard Balzer’s love affair began about 40 years ago, when he saw his first magic lantern — an early image projector invented in the 1600s." The 1600s is a loooong time ago. 
• "The device consists of a circular disc that spins around a vertical axis. Plateau and other artists would draw a series of still images around the disc’s center and cut equally spaced slits around its edges... The slits effectively acted as shutters, keeping the images from blurring together and resulting in what appeared to be a fluid, looped animation." That's a lot of work.

Thoughts

• Those all look really creepy and dark. What were they thinking of back then? People being eaten by creepy creatures seems to be a constant in that article. And the devil loosing his head is also spooky.
• That all seems a lot harder than what we do today. Today we can just click a button and see the last frame (or more than just one frame before) and draw from that. They had to kind of guesstimate based on a the frame to its left, which would've probably been hard to overlap and see.

Question

• How long did it normally take to make one of these phenakistascopes?