A Nice Break_Just For Fun

I love those old stage technique! They are so brilliant!

Maybe I will make more in the future.

Shooting Star and Clouds

   I tested shooting star by light drawing. It was so fun to work in the darkness with only a flash light.

    This is the resulting frame of composite light drawing with my footage. It was just a little bit hard to keep the drawing consistent frame by frame because Dragonframe doesn't help any in this situation. The preview pictures in Dragonframe which are suppose to allow people to check animation, are captured before the camera actually work. Therefore, the preview pictures looks so different with the actual pictures taken by the camera, especially when the camera is set up to take long exposure frames.
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 I am fabricating clouds that can be animated, and it is kind of hard.

    On one hand, I want the cloud look cute and puffy, so I picked cotton as the outside material. Because cotton naturally has the perfect ability to let part of the light though and have a soft and fuzzy edge. On the other hand, it is required to be animated, which means the clouds should have some wire or sort of armature inside to hold the shape and allow animator to control it frame by frame.

    I start with the armature. My first thought is wire. I bend wire to loops and some of them are overlapped so they can support each other that they won't be too "soft". And then I cover it with thin foam wrap. In the end, I put layer of cotton on and shape it with a felt poking needle.

    This is very rough animation test of the cloud moving with a turning key. It is kind of fast and it is not a perfect loop. I just want to see if the armature and cotton is easy enough to handle or not. It is okay if I handle it with extra care. 

    To make it easier for me, I tried a different armature: wire mesh.

    It looks cool, but it doesn't meet my need in the end. It is more rigid, stiff and stable when I touch it during the shooting but the surface still move around slightly after being touched, just like the first one cloud test. 

    There is a shot that I need the key turns and clouds be stretched and squashed. So I need to keep trying to make different clouds. 

加油！

Forest_to the trees

The test framing of the forest shot.

    This the shot of the forest where the cat will pull out the key from the tree and then the leaves will all fall off. I was hoping the tree tops won't be shown in this frame so that I can save a lot work of making leaves. But I may make some small branches with some leaves at the lower position in the picture. In that way, It can kind of give the audience of the idea of those leaves. Beside the small branches, I will carve a piece of black foam to create the shadow of tree tops. (Maybe mixing with green gel?)

the bird view of the forest.

There are actually only 8 trees. And in the real fabrication, there might be only 6 of them. G1 and G2 are the same tree in different angle and they will be filmed in two passes. D and F can be the same tree. So do the B and C. It all depends on how hard to fabricate the tree and how much material is available.

This is the plan of how to fabricate the tree.

  The main point, like all other plants on this planet, is fabric. Felt is still the best choice with nice texture. The color will depend on how the fabric looks and possibility of coloring the fabric with paint.

New Semester_New Calendar!

I kind of felt guilty of doing nothing over the winter break but also felt good. It was actually very nice to take a period time away from a project and go back onto it with refreshed mind. This is the schedule for the new journey. 

New semester comes sooner than I felt it should have be. But I totally rested over the winter break and had been inspired by a lot of stuff and I am ready to fight again!

Far Far Away

Long long time ago, far far away from us, in the other galaxy, there is a planet with a wind-up key.

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.

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.