Student Originated Studies: Media

there's this trend that at least cnn is following where they'll have their top story be some fucked up thing about some kid being trapped in a dungeon for a year with all sorts of creepy abuse happening to them, and they'll just have this huge school photo of the kid. It's like "Hey, here's a face to put to all of these stories of sexual abuse, you're welcome". Everything about this feels wrong.

But yeah right now I'm trying to come up with a nice pithy blurb. Something that's as good as I had for "how much bacon can you eat?", which was "alex tripp can eat a lot of bacon".

how long is the mediaworks screening going to be. I thought i overheard that it was going to be 9 hours which sounds ridiculous. Yeah I was thinking of going but if it's 9 hours, no.

 oh yeah nadia i need to give you money still we should figure that out.

 id say more but I have an enormous amount of work to do and its amazing that I even think I can do it so yeah, what am I doing here typing.

so I think at the end of my cartoon at the screening, I will have a bit with my picture telling people to talk to me after the screening if theyd like a copy of the cartoon on dvd. this is if i have enough time to burn dvds. i think this is a good idea.

not much to say on the cartoon. its getting done. on tuesday i will show it missing a scene. but there will be credits and everything, it will be in the form it will be screened minus one big scene. basically, the tree is broken open and everything goes crazy. you wont see that but its important to know about it because of what you will see after it.

i saw this movie "i am cuba". banned in the us for some time because of it being considered communist propaganda but it's really amazing. a lot of amazing handheld camera work, supposedly boogie nights ripped off one of the standout shots but I havent watched that movie in a while. but seriously, get "i am cuba" somehow because its great.

i still havent made a loop of the kidwheel but whatever i will eventually.

oh and I think there should be a site for people to exchange dvd's to be dispersed in random places all around the world. i have a complicated idea for how packages can be compiled with 10 dvds, at each stop one dvd is removed and one is added, and people copy the other dvds and take photos of them placed in random places and get points (point systems keep a lot of internet communities going), and stuff. but I don't feel like writing it all out. but yeah it was all kind of inspired by something john said. does this rough explaination sound at all like a good idea? does anyone know of anything that exists that remotely resembles this?

also I've noticed a bit of a downer element to some recent posts, so if anyone needs cheering up, you might do well to listen to this new caribou track, the leadoff cut from his upcoming album andorra. it is contagiously joyful.

OH. and if youre not doing anything tommorow at 8pm, in sem2 b1105, my roommate brian nicholson is performing something he's been working on all quarter that I've mentioned in here. I'll be helping out on that, it should be a fun time.

i had a whole post written and it was lost cause i clicked on "more information about formatting options". lame.

well so anyways the speech bubbles are out. UPDATE:  actually they're in.  i'm working on them.  anyways, if someone can tell me how to generate a really hokey eye glistening I'd really like to know. jed perhaps some after effects methods youve heard of? I'm not even sure what those actually look like, come to think of it. anyone reading this throw out some examples to jog my memory.

black dice music video for smiling off is an inspiration for my last scene. I'll be using ben steins crazy max patch to generate a background for that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYjA2Juosuo specifically I'd point out the scene starting at about 1:20.

oh and its funny that I didnt see sexual stuff in that one scene where he blows his tounge (you are reacted magnificently and if I get that sort of response from the audience at the screening that alone should make everything worthwhile), but I was so certain everyone would see the tree as being phallic. but yeah the most important thing about the man is that he demonstrates a lack of sensitivity (originally he was going to use his penis instead of his tounge, tho of course not quite in the same manner, but I got rid of that so as to not have any sexual reading of what transpires there to be overly influential to the interpretation of the entire piece). I don't think that having minor sexual elements to peoples interpretation of that will get in the way of that tho.

oh and i thought it was weird that no one commented on how janky the drawing of the kid was for that scene when he collapses and rolls. i attached an image to show that but its too small so look at the one below this paragraph . but yeah thatll probably get crazier. its weird to me that people also were talking about the man not looking that different from the boy. theres a scene in there where i intentionally used paper that didnt line up, so as to have all these weird offsets in this one part where the kid is standing looking up at the man, and yeah, when I see that it almost feels like I went to far. I already have tried going too far with the man and bending him unreasonably far and I don't like how it looks. I'm happy with how the conceptual stuff there has worked out for me and I will write a post about that later.

Hey everyone. So that old title of mine, Panipal Peril, I've never really been to happy with it, and haven't considered myself ready to think of a good one, just waiting for the right title to jump out of some conversation. But my roommate Brian (the man behind "how much bacon can you eat?") managed to blurt out a ridiculous phrase that actually nails my cartoon pretty well: "A Bad Day To Put On The Big Boy Pants". I really like this title.

Animation is continuing. I'll have good stuff to show in week 8. I'm continuing with what I have established and there isn't anything to talk about there. Except I guess in the bits with the speech bubbles. The speech bubbles have "eyes say" and "moustache says" written above them and the balloons are filled with a tiling image of a phrase. I don't have them on hand right now I'll update with that later.

HOLY MOUNTAIN IS ON DVD! If that sentance doesn't mean anything to you, you absolutely must go rent or buy The Holy Mountain by Alejandro Jodorowsky. And if you have seen the holy mountain, then you probably know how great it is that this is finally on dvd looking utterly gorgeous.

Ok so I wasn't sure if I was gonna, but I went and saw Inland Empire. I was surprised, I'm actually figuring it out and stuff. I don't get what all the fuss is about it being all confusing. I think it might've been the intermission, that really helped me from shutting down in the last half.  It is a 3 hour david lynch movie so its far too dense for me to start dissecting right now, but basically it's about taking lessons on living life thru movies/media. And I think it might be doing that in a somewhat tounge in cheek, ironic way in that you shouldnt do that. But I don't want to spoil it for you. It's totally worth seeing though.

Work is going on the animation. I'm a little behind schedule though, but I still think I can pull this off.

So anyways, I've been playing a lot with inconsistency in the character animation for this section I am working on, and I imagine it might be a little jarring. So here I will attempt to explain my reasoning behind these decisions.

In my sophomore year, I found a book of lectures by Karlheinz Stockhausen, I believe it was called Stockhausen On Music. It contained a lecture called "The Four Criteria For Electronic Music", and in it he explained the principles of granular synthesis, and how he believed they should be implemented in music. Basically this is where I learned about that overlap tone phenomenon I talked about in my week 2 post. Basically he talks about how when you have a completely consistent repeating sound, you create a pure tone. However, one you start introducing inconsistencies into the chain of sound, you're adding a timbre to that tone. Think of it like a sine wave.

You all know about a sine wave, right, how it just smoothly goes up and down?

If you change that sine wave, say have it move smoothly except for one tiny little bit where it just drops out, inconsistent with the established flow.

That change would maintain the tone, but the timbral qualities would be quite different.

This led me to some thinking about timbre in general, and how much of it can be provided to recorded sound by analog recording equipment. In music, the power to use this for expressive purposes is embodied in lo-fi music, where the timbral effects provided by recording equipment is supposed to make the music feel more intense and immediate and all sorts of other adjectives. You can oftentimes find digital approximations of recording equipment, but there's just this complexity to the processes that there really is no way to get it perfect, and some snob will always be able to tell the difference.

There is clearly a concrete connection to the series of grains used to create a perceived sound, and a series of drawings to create a perceived motion. However, I feel the better musical connection to character animation would be in the timbral effects provided by recording equipment. The way animation is presented in almost all commercial instances, there is a consistency that is strived for in the character animation, a consistency to the lines. Although there might be stretching and other things which cheat the mass of a character, smooth movement must never be sacrificed. In my mind this parallels the pursuit of clean recorded sound in a lot of commercial music. As I do not have the funds or time to match this work, I feel I must take the timbre that will be a given in my animation, and play with that, make it dynamic, for the benefit of my cartoon's expressiveness.

In my cartoon, the timbre (in this usage it's interchangeable with aesthetic) comes from an inconsistency in the qualities of the lines, and in the proportions of the character. I have been trying to use this to enhance the expressive qualities of my work by combining it with the aesthetic of digital animation. Animation done in the digital environment naturally has what I can only describe as a mathematically perfect look to it. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about. A certain slickness; it's unnaturally smooth.

Anyways, in the beginning I was doing a lot with combining the two aesthetics to varying degrees. A lot of sequences of multiple copies of the same drawing, which would then be animated in the digital environment. Since I was doing these with a grease pencil, this would give the characters a sort of surface noise from the little differences between the drawings. With the movement being done digitally, it kind of creates this blend of the aesthetic where it looks like the digital aesthetic is being forcibly imposed onto the hand drawn aesthetic. As the story progresses and the kid gets closer to the tree, the hand drawn aesthetic yields fully to the digital.

So now that the tree is on fire, things have changed, and the movement for the kid is all done on paper. But I decided for this section to switch to something of a marker pen, which takes away a lot of inconsistency in line quality that the grease pencil gave me. But even with that I still want to kick up the inconsistency in my drawings to drive home the fact that the kid is freaking out for one shot in particular. I don't want it to look unintentional though, and I don't want it to be too much of a shift from the established aesthetic. So what I'm doing is, I'm mostly messing with his head. The proportions (mostly on his head) will start to change and grow, and abruptly reset back to normal (and then repeat in a more extreme fashion). There's actually a little bit more to it than that but I don't want to spoil it.