Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Nice to Meeteor You_Title_Designed

First Look on the title~
I struggled on my title for a long time because I can not find the right font that fits...
The other day, when I was at a Japanese book store, I happened to noticed a typographic book then I took a look just for fun. And I saw a sketch that the word looks so nice with curve and circles. I told Dustin, that is it! That is the feeling of my title I was kept looking for.

Dustin designed this font for me that turns out really good for my film title.

The magic is how to make it moves with animation. When I looked at this title, I was picturing the circles on every end of stokes is a bubble that comes out from the box in my film. They will all have a type of personalities and make people feels that they are alive. While I was still planing about the animation, Max Hattler was brought in as a guest speaker one night for our seminar class. He showed one of his film, a very large increase, in which bubbles are spinning splitting, and merging. I watched that film before and I totally forgot about it at that time. I grabbed Dustin's arm and yelled quietly, "that is my bubbles! I want my title has that feeling!"

After three days, I got this.
This is the rough animation of the title.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

When The Sun Finally Went Down

This is a interesting shot. The difficult part is to set up the light. I need to set the lights at proper spots where they looks nice and real when they are changing.

The changing of lights is controlled by the DMX box on which I need to set key frames that make lights change. After checking the light effect on almost every frame(every 10 frames probably), I can sit aside and rest when the Dragon is taking pictures along with the changing lights.

After the light finished changing, the sun went down. There is a silent moment and then the cat will be back to alive. I want it be subtle enough to confuse part of the audience. I was hoping that part of people can not notice the ear moving in the end.

The cat head was made by resin and hard foam. So the ears, of course, can not move at all. I cut off  the ear that needs to be animated and "transplant" a new ear made of soft foam with wire inside. No one can notice the material of two ears are different after I covered them with fabric.

The cat has tie down hole only on the feet. To secure his body on the ground with laying down pose, I used about 12 bug pins to "nail" him down.