Text Sequence details

My text sequence is coming along, I've finished scanning in papers and photoshopped most of them but now I'm in the process of animating, playing around with camera movement etc.

I'm thinking about using motion blur in my animation to really show the length and density of those columns of text you see in papers. A sort of bleeding of the ink, a rush of so much information and knowledge in such a small space.

Change of plans. Yet another new idea

I think I've finally settled on an idea for Brief 4. My text sequence will be quite different to what I was thinking about doing before. I've had the idea of manipulating newspaper advertisements and classifieds columns into saying the lyrics of a song by Radiohead called Fitter Happier.

The song isn't a very exciting or particularly melodic song (read: not at all), in fact it isn't so much sung as the voice is generated. But the lyrical poignancy of the song makes me feel the need to portray it in video form.

Fitter Happier is a slightly depressing ballad about consumerism, capitalism and the blue-collar working life. The mechanical voice that "sings" it is fitting with the lyrics themselves because they describe somewhat mechanical human beings - people that exist simply to better themselves or need to better themselves, for more money or power.

I believe newspaper advertisements and classifieds tie into these themes quite well as they're all byproducts of consumerist living. I hope to juxtapose certain imagery with the text to better align with the song's meaning.

For example, for the line, "No more saturated fats or microwave dinners", I am thinking of making it manifest inside a Food Recall section of a newspaper.

So currently I've been scanning in newspaper pages and then editing their text on Photoshop. I will be using masks in After Effects to animate the text spelling itself out on the papers, and probably pan the camera around, showing different areas of a newspaper per line.

In other news:



This video doesn't directly relate to my idea, but I love the use of sand and slides to create a unique visual aesthetic for a title sequence - especially for a movie as fuzzy and baffling as Memento. Very nice stuff.

New brief, new idea

The last brief is about creating a Text Sequence in After Effects (or stop-motion etc.) At the moment I don't have any solid ideas for how I want to create it (though I'm thinking of doing more camera-movement to accentuate urgency), however I do have some ideas about what text I want to actually portray.

An idea I had was to use the lyrics to the song Discipline by Nine Inch Nails. I like the power behind them and how they're sung and I believe I could really make the words kind of, attack or discipline each other while they're being said.



I quite like the use of the camera/3D layers in this video. Especially the way the text is represented as small when the voice/sound is distant and large when it is louder. Also, the way the text bounces and flexes could be useful for my Discipline idea, only perhaps I could make words bounce and push off each other.

More transitions

So far I've been in the process of finding the signage imagery for my Transitions piece. There are a few sites with pages of decent vectorised signs. Now I am in the process of importing them into photoshop and cutting them up into layers of body parts to animate in After Effects.

I have also been experimenting with 3D and cameras in After Effects and I am going to look into animating the camera to sort of, follow the transition of the male figure into the female figure's sign and then into the baby figure's sign, etc.

More animated street signs:



Though my brief won't be including any video manipulation, animation of my figures in the signs might look something similar. Though I hope to make my movements a little more realistic and less, well, cartoony.

Transitions

So I've been thinking about ideas for my Transitions piece, and I've decided to move away from the utter insanity of Cyriak's animation style and into a more subdued but still intriguing approach.

One idea I've had was to follow the Transition of a person coming into the world and growing up through animated signage. I'm thinking the first scene will probably feature the male and female signs of public toilets, perhaps animating the two figures walking out of their individual frames and into each others' arms or something.

The animation inside the signs for the figures might look something like this:



Of course, the "stepping out" of the figures from their signs will require techniques like masking, but I think the real difficulty will be to try and make believable motion for the characters.

One of my favourite internet animators

The next brief is "Transitions", an After Effects orientated project. I was going to look around for videos made with After Effects for inspiration when I remembered I already knew one artist who works almost exclusively with Photoshop and After Effects - Cyriak Harris.

Cyriak is an animator in the UK that produces some very strange, Gilliam-esque animations. They're often extremely funny and extremely irreverent. He plays around with British celebrities, animals and often makes monstrous concoctions by combining the two (often with machinery as well). A brilliant example of this can be seen in his "Moo" animation:



Hilarious, bizarre and very well animated. Cyriak's work is a combination of clean photoshop compositing and After Effects compositions. But not all of his animations have been as lengthy as Moo. Cyriak initially used After Effects and Photoshop to create short, loopable GIF animations, often posting them on forums online.
In this video, Cyriak has compiled a whole lot of these GIF animations into a magnificently odd 3 minute video (with music composed by Cyriak himself):

More visual fictions.

My visual fictions piece is coming along reasonably. I've decided what disaster(s) will be occurring in the background: gargantuan hands. Hands of different "gods", if you will, crashing down on the earth, destroying the landscape or creating something new.

The foreground will be made up of humans and animals. The humans will have their backs to the "camera" or audience, watching these events take place, seemingly nonplussed. The animals of the foreground will be facing the audience, frightened or alarmed (perhaps they are the sensible ones).



(Surreal Scene by Reyes Designs on DeviantArt)

This image has a very nice mood to it. It is lit with rich yellows and purples and contrasted heavily - but not damagingly so. In terms of composition, the moon is amazingly large which almost makes me want to portray the moon falling in my brief (though I might restrain myself on that) and the Eiffel Tower sprouting out of the clouds is quite a nice touch.

Mostly I just enjoy the feel and atmosphere of this image and would like to give my Visual Fictions piece a distinct mood to it to keep it from being bland. I am thinking overlays of light and dark "blotch" layers might achieve this. I shall have to do some experimentation.

I have been using the 3-dimensional sculpting and painting program ZBrush (http://www.pixologic.com/home.php) to pick holes, cavities and create icy and firy materials for my god-like hands in my brief:




This allows me to get the exact style I want for these devastating limbs without having to rely on somebody else's photographs and textures.

I will be further manipulating these renders in photoshop and seamlessly compositing them in the background.

Visual fictions

I quite enjoy this image if only due to its sheer irreverence and intricate randomosity found at the center of it.

And indeed, perhaps what I am looking for in my Visual Fictions is randomosity - to a degree. I want to hear people say "what the hell?" when they see my brief. Not an annoyed "what the hell" but one with fascination, intrigue or simply confusion.

So far I've been gathering images of beaches, mountains, buildings, cities. All of these will make up my final composition somehow. I'm trying to figure out the story behind this image, but I doubt I could ever honestly make it sensible or believable. I want to portray a disaster - or many disasters - occuring in one part of my image. These will probably occur in the background, while the foreground will be composed of observers. Possibly people on a beach looking out to sea, only to find the sea is on fire or asteroids are crashing into it, etc.

I do not want to make an image that exists merely as parody or ironic humour. I want to produce something artistic, bizarre and realistic - to a degree.

Some ideas for visual fictions and awesome images

The next brief is "Visual Fictions", one that is photoshop-based. I enjoy using photoshop much more than illustrator so I believe I will enjoy this project perhaps more than I did the last.

There is a photographer named Joshua Hoffine who takes some truly frightening images of childhood fears manifested in reality (monster under bed/closet etc.) but they are not digitally manipulated in any way, all of his photos feature actual sets and models with subjects wearing makeup. Images of his works can be found here. This is one particularly awesome piece:



Though these pieces may not have been constructed in photoshop, I have no doubt that they could have been. After all, there are some amazing photoshop works out there (especially on a site like Worth1000.com) like, for example, this:


(Passengers by bpkelsey of Worth1000)


For the purposes of this brief, it isn't necessarily our goal to set up elaborate photographic scenes of advanced set design and modeling. But we can emulate it using Photoshop and a variety of images.

I have decided to go for a kind of surrealistic collage for my Visual Fictions brief. But I will not focus so much on complete realism but rather hyperrealism.

Processing and some great art

I just found this on the net:



I really enjoy the folds and wood-like patterning of the disjointed and somewhat impressionistic "waves". Its a piece of generative art by abstract digital artist San Base with more of their works here. Some really nice textures, tones and shapes at work here; kind of what I am trying to achieve for my brief one but in a more minimalist and flowing sense.






These are some of my latest Processing experiments. I quite like the dripping stick aesthetic and I am trying to implement it into illustrator for Brief one. Again, I am looking in creating a flowing, but almost geometric design.

More Processing

So far I've been working with Processing to try and make a generative aesthetic for my Brief One. The programming language is relatively easy to learn (quite like java) and you can do some amazing things when you add 3D capabilities to it, allowing you to manipulate many shapes in 3 dimensions.

I've come up with the likes of:






I'm still working out how to export out as vector (to use in illustrator) but I am quite enjoying Processing and if I still can't find a way of exporting out to vector I might just try live tracing png images of what I generate.

Generative art

I've been interested in generative art for a while and I've recently discovered this site which has some really nice pieces: Unlekker.

Some of the works have really nice, blooming designs - aspects of shapes growing and sprouting like flowers.

I am particularly interested in the likes of Unlekker's Gasworks project: http://www.unlekker.net/proj/gasworks/index.html#

Click on the View Project link to check it out in motion (it works using Javascript).





These images have been made using a program called Processing (http://processing.org/), so I've decided I want to try my own hand at creating some generative art and seeing if I can utilise it inside Adobe Illustrator for Brief 1.