Instrumental Anime Project

[rose4emily]

SONGBIRD: any news on the narrative audio?

PEN-PEN: are you experiencing problems with uploading to my server, or have you just not had a chance to upload the full version of your video?

Most of the images from which the intro and narratives are going to be composed have been slected, edited, and retouched to prepare them for making those video segments. Most of the "news crew" that will be shown in the intro consists of various NERV techs (along with "war correspondent" Kensuke, "editor" Ritsuko, and absentee anchor "Dan Rather" a.k.a. Gendo - not that I've decided for sure that I'm actually going to give everyone titles when I slide their little frames across the screen), while the two "anchors" are Miazawa and Kawashima from Kare Kano. I still need a few more of Kawashima (the male narrator), which I'll be extracting as direct screencaps from Kare Kano - and then I'll be ready for compositing. There is, as it turns out, light at the end of the tunnel.

I haven't drawn the intermission still yet, but I have settled upon definately having Kawashima and Miazawa as the two people in the elevator, with (from the viewer's perspective) Kawashima in the front left of the elevator, facing the viewers, and Miazawa in the back right, facing to the left.

The widescreen version of the intro is going to be the fullscreen version, except played within a 3:4 display on the screen before Wendy/Songbird/Miazawa passes the narration off to Me/Christian/Rose4Emily/Kawashima and the "camera" pans to the side of the studio with Kawashima and the 16:9 screen. I'm doing it this way to:

a) enforce continuity between the first and second portions of the film - as the second portion is not to be thought of as independent from the first and should therefore be made to look as though it is a return from some sort of commercial break rather than the beginning of a new program. Thus, it is not given a full intro, but rather the closing portion of the full intro shown in a smaller context within the complete picture on screen.

b) allow me to complete the project sooner by avoiding the tedious process of creating both widescreen and fullscreen versions of the intro. By using the one version, played in the same aspect each time, I can be assured that I will not have to do any special cropping or rearranging of elements on the screen to make them look good when re-introduced for the second portion of the show.

c) spare viewers who are watching all of this in one sitting from having to sit through the whole of "Step Forward into Terror" twice as a bunch of images are slid this and that way across the screen, especially considering the fact that they just sat through two and a half minutes of elevator music featuring a still image and about 18 lines of text successively fading in and out over it.

The end credits are going to use one 288x288 image per video that will slide horizontally across the screen, revealing the text credits for that video in its wake.

---

TO ALL EDITORS:

I'd like each of you to submit, through either e-mail or the FTP, an image that is:

- a fitting representation of or allusion to your video (consider whether the image could be matched to your video out of all of the videos in the project by someone who was otherwise unaware of their association).

- visually "clean" and saved in the PNG format (BMP will also be acceptable, if you don't know how to save/export your image as a PNG using whatever program you happen to be using - I just prefer PNG, as it is both lossless and compressed. JPEG produces artifacts that are quite noticable in most anime-style images and only get worse in the video compression process).

- 288 pixels wide

- 288 pixels tall

- devoid of black borders. the background will already be black, and a black border will just make the picture look like its the wrong size. if you want to use some sort of fancy edge decoration, I would suggest doing it in a lighter tone that will make it obvious that this decoration is part of the image rather than something outside of it. I would also suggest that you not use a "fade to [some color]" effect as a border, as it would probably look bad in the context in which the image is being used.

IF I DON"T GET YOUR IMAGE BY THE TIME I AM WORKING ON THE ENDING CREDITS, I WILL CREATE MY OWN. I"M JUST GIVING YOU ALL THE OPPORTUNITY TO CHOOSE YOUR OWN PICTURE.

---

ALSO TO ALL EDITORS: I also think it would be really nice to get a picture from each of you, of each of you, that I can use to "wipe away" the credit text for each video. This would complete the video/text/author association, provide for a nice way to separate each video in the credits sequence, and be kind of cool in terms of giving this project "a face" (or, rather, "faces").

These should also be 288 pixels wide, and 288 pixels tall, preferably done as a something along the lines of a headshot rather than, say, a picture of you striking a comical pose between two middle-aged male Sailor Moon cosplayers at some convention.

If I get very few pictures, I'll scrap the idea and use the same "video representation" image for both the "write" and "erase" portions of each video's credit sequence.

If I get everyone's picture, that would be awesome.

If I'm only missing a couple, I'll probably just fill them in with the blank "mystery heads" you often see in place of missing pictures. Maybe I'll use some Serial Experiments Lain-style "shadow spots" to make them look a bit cooler than the run-of-the-mill "mystery head".

[Otohiko]

Alright, uploading images (sorry, looks like the one for Wasteland ended up in the root folder once...)

I uploaded 3 different pictures of myself, mainly just so you can pick one which would match the others in a pattern better. I don't have a preference among them, so just use whichever one. (If it weren't so small, I would have actually suggested that you use my avatar here...)

Anyways, good luck; hopefully these things get submitted shortly, looks like you're really getting very close here.

[jasper-isis]

Wahoo! Progress! And now I have some questions...

For the video representation pictures, do you want a screencap from somewhere in the AMV or just any picture?

For the pictures of us, would you like a real life photo or some other visual representation (like for example our avatars)?

[Bakadeshi [AuN Studios]]

(If it weren't so small, I would have actually suggested that you use my avatar here...)

I was about to suggest that avatars be used if real photos could not be obtained ;p

Edit: Dang I didn;t see Jaspers post... I'm so glad the edit button is incorporated now ;p Along with Jaspers question, could the image of the video be like a poster we create advertising the video? Or you prefer an actual screencap?

[Otohiko]

Edit: Dang I didn;t see Jaspers post... I'm so glad the edit button is incorporated now ;p Along with Jaspers question, could the image of the video be like a poster we create advertising the video? Or you prefer an actual screencap?

Well, at 288x288, I think it's obviously not gonna be a standard cap - like rose4emily said, probably anything that can represent a video visually will do. Since it's for the credits, a poster with text is probably no good, but a poster type image should be alright. It's probably best to keep them simple though, you know, not to clutter things too much.

Here's what I did for mine:

Ararat
The Wasteland (note the cleverly-faked sky extension )

***

Using avatars in credits might be a good idea, too. Although it sort of makes no difference in my case right now

[jasper-isis]

Okay, here are my pictures in 288x288 png. I couldn't connect to the ftp (maybe I had the wrong address?) so I uploaded them via Imageshack.

Forbidden Memories
Surrealism

Picture of me
OR
Picture of me
OR
Picture of Jubei-chan - in case we decide to use avatars instead.

______

Ahaha... DWP, I looked at your Instrumentality website. Gotta say that I love the blinking bold red letters.

[rose4emily]

For the pictures of yourself, I think photos would be best. I suppose a portrait in another medium might be cool, too, if you have a great painting or drawing or such. I'm avoiding avatars because they often change, would seem rather arbitrary to anyone who doesn't frequent these forums (or, for that matter, to those who do), and, half of the time, are rather goofy or ugly (since they are often used as much as a visual gag as a method of personal identification). Hence my thought to use the Lain-spotted blank heads for missing persons instead.

For the video representation, you could do a cropped screencap from the video if you can think of a scene that really screams "this came from [your video here]". Otohiko's caps are good examples of this. You could also do a poster-type of thing featuring images from or related to your video. This might be a good idea for the Ghibli/Myazaki videos due to the phenominal consistency of Myazaki's visual style - and resulting difficulty the viewer might have in placing a sinlge Ghibli screencap in one Ghibli video as opposed to another. I'll be using a "poster" type image based on the 13'37" image on my own website's AMV page, as an example of a composited image that captures a far better description than could have been obtained from any one frame of that video. My "poster" happens to be a bit simplistic, but I'm sure you get the idea.

---

I'll put up the character and set images being composited together for the intro soon. I'd have done so already - but I've been busy producing a whole lot of pencil drawings for a short animation I have to do for Intro to Animation. The theme, of all things - Death and ReBirth. Well, I can't tell whether I've drawn Death, Birth, or both at the same time - but I've just spent about seven hours creating the source for about 15 seconds of footage. And I still haven't shot it under the ACME (yes, it's really made by a company called "ACME") crane. When I do, however, I'll post it along with the intro images and my 10-second "Vampire Fish" cutout-movie so you can see at least part of what I've been up to on my end.

No, I don't plan on putting Vlad the goldfish or my weird death animation in the Instrumentality film. I just think they're kind of cool, as newbie animations go. At the very least, they're teaching me the kind of patience I need if I'm going to stop making crap AMVs and start making good ones instead. I've never really had much in the way of patience, but I've definately had to develop some as of late.

Speaking of which - I just love Jasper's sig. So sad, but so true.

Maybe tomorrow I'll actually get a chance to do the Flash compositing of all of the character and set images and finish the into so I can prove to you that I haven't just been sitting on my ass all of this time.

---

It looks like I need to find a new FTP server app when all of this is done. It shouldn't have even been possible for Otohiko to drop a file outside of the "inbox" - yet it seems to have happened, despite the whole permissions system. Makes me wonder what other wonderful security holes that thing has. I should probably try hacking my own system sometime, seeing as how I'm pretty good at finding security problems when I'm actually looking for them. Not now, though, too much else going on.

[Bakadeshi [AuN Studios]]

Genius idea for the computer security and anti-piracy people, though:

Run a little routine every time the application starts up, and perhaps on other events as well, such as saving a document, that checks to see whether the computer is attached to the internet and then checks the application's key against a central registry if the computer is online to determine whether it is legitimate. Have it throw up some nasty Big-Brother style message and then uninstall itself, leaving marks all over the registry or file system to show that it was there. Then the pirates wouldn't be able to get away with just putting some serial number in a box through a "telephone registration" procedure - they'd have to stay off of the internet entirely while the program is running. Just an inconvenience, but I think it could be a very effective one. It could be made even more effective if certain key application features are tied to the internet, but this would actually inconvenience legitimate users on laptops or without internet service. I think Microsoft might have had something like that in mind when they put half of the MS Office help on some online resource rather than packaging it with the suite for local storage and access. Unfortunately, very few people actually use the help, and those who do tend to get very angry if they can't get to it when they need it. Consequently, I think my first idea is the best one, as it wouldn't hinder paying customers, and would throw a major hurdle into the path of illegal users, or else force the crackers to learn some real skills and alter the obfusticated internals of the application without breaking it (something that must be nearly impossible with the complex and already buggy applications being produced today) rather than just using decade-old password generating utilities like the programming pansies they are (awaits retribution from angry script-kiddies, too bad for them I don't use Outlook for my E-mail and randomly open .vbs files ).

I doupt your the first person to think of that, I think the problem here is that this presents a whole area of poential Privacy breaches that could result in angry customers and lawsuits that most venders probably want to stay away from. I for one would be dubious to the idea of a program searching my computer for information and sending it over the internet, even if its just a key. Especially without my permission, I like to know whats going on on my system ;p (One of the beauties of Linux actually)

But... You ever notice that whatever steps software and music/movie companies try to do to eliminate Piracy always end up inconviniencing the real consumers while barely even phasing the Piraters? THey always find a way around it, while the real consumers always suffer ... case and point, I had to resort to using pirating tools to rip and copy my own ligitimately bought copy of a CD because it would not play in my portable mp3 CD players due to the copy protection. (It apears this particular CD player reads the CD like a computer would since its also an mp3 player)

And yea it would seem some people are bored enough to read through your long intelectual rants ;p

[Otohiko]

Yea, the FTP is sort of funny in this regard; I use SmartFTP, and at first it seemed to connect, but didn't show anything in there. But since it kept doing 'NOOP' on the server, I figured it must have connected, so I dragged a file in there... and, just as it uploads - the folder structure decides to show up. I wonder if that's just my connection, or is it set up a little oddly?

Maybe that's why people say they have trouble connecting, when they actually are connecting but not seeing a folder structure. I'd give that a look...

[downwithpants]

rose: About ice cream, rochester is only 2 hours from ithaca, so if you're ever passing by that void of sunlight we call ithaca, let me know and we could work something out. On the other hand, i have a friend at U of Rochester i've been meaning to visit. furthermore, it'd be awesome if we could all meet at a convention that we submit the project to.

A newsroom set up might work, but I'm hoping the narrators' presentation will be more conversational than formal. That's how the narrator in the original Disney's Fantasia presented it, even when he was tackling technical and historical musical topics, and I thought it worked pretty well.

i'll send my pictures sometime after tuesday when i return to campus. i'm at home now for fall break.

song had recorded 2 monologues when i asked thursday night. hopefully she's still making progress.