JOURNAL: Bowler

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  • The Matrix is telling me that this steak is juicy....and delicious. 2002-03-31 22:26:34 EK: Please let me know when that vid is available for super-secret download status. Preferrably on a weekday. I'd really like to see how it turns out.

    Pretty much got the demo reel to the 90% finished state today. The thing is like...4 minutes long! It's my longest ever. Sweet jebus and that's almost only from the past year. I threw M7 on it for good measure (please pronounce that "mayzure," which would give me great "playzure" and that rhymes with "trayzure." Obscure reference is go. Thank you.) to show that I'm versatile and all that.

    But I have to say that even though the clips aren't synched to the music (I just don't have that kind of time!), that I did a pretty damn good job for only working on this for about 9 hours (including rendering my clips out yesterday...allow me to reiterate that DIVX RULEZ!!!!) and NEVER having worked in Premiere before.

    O.K. that's a lie. I worked in it once before to make my storyboards a lycareel, using Photoshop effects to fake zip pans and stuff like that. But that was a cakewalk compared to this.

    Premiere started crashing so much that I had to resort to the following:

    1). Import all clips and audio files into Premier.
    2). Ctrl-S
    3). Drop in audio track.
    4). Ctrl-S
    5). Drop in first video clip.
    6). Ctrl-S
    7). Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

    UGH. 5 Crashes later I've got some crossfades and Shaolin Soccer goodness. I need to bring home some more clips of guys getting taken out, some two player moves I did, and even some ::shudder:: baseball moves I worked on. For Variety. Y'know, when you capitalize "variety," even by mistake, it becomes a cheap Hollywood gossip magazine. ::pukes::

    On a GOOD note, I'm kinda jazzed about going back and doing my "This is Your Life" Bebop/Spike video. I *really* enjoy working with the clips and watching the work progress in Premier (I guess everyone does). I realized what I HATE HATE FUCKING HATE is rendering the clips using the useless aps out there. I tried Flask and CladMdec, and I must just be doing something terribly horribly wrong, since the clips I generated weren't able to be seen by *any* ap, and the only way I got anything to be viewable was by rendering out the whole 20 minute ep, which made a useless 4G file. I couldn't even load that up in anything to trim it down.

    Me=dumbass when it comes to making useable clips. If anyone has a good idiot-proof technique (AMV for Dummies!) then please email me and walk me through it step by step. Pretend you're giving instructions for your Grandmother to do this, as I'm evidently an old dottering fool who doesn't get it, and would like to. ^^;

    I guarantee you if you can help me, you will see a fairly ass-kicking Bebop (Spike) vid when I'm done.

    Thank you.
     
  • Like all the colors of a royal flush. 2002-03-30 22:41:18 EK: If I pay you a commission (say...$10 ;D) would you make Bullet the Blue Sky to KoHD? Please? When you did the wallpaper, I thought to myself, "Sweet Jebus, that would make a kickin' AMV." Who cares if the lyrics are sensitive? GO FOR IT. Heaven forbid your AMV be both action packed *and* have a point. I think it rules, and it's one of the best AMV ideas I've heard of in a long time. And I haven't even seen the movie!

    Finally finished rendering all of those clips. There's *definitely* room for some on my website. When I'm done editing this thingie together, I'm going to throw some of them up on the ol' url for all to see.

    MOCAP SHAOLIN SOCCER IS GO! 
  • It's a beautiful day (again). 2002-03-30 14:25:14 And I'm stuck inside (again).

    But there's editing news in this journal entry! Woohoo!

    Let me just say that DivX makes all the difference in the world, but there's some fancy schmancy new QT compression that's just downright SMOKIN.

    I have to put my demo reel together this weekend. I *HATE* emergency demo reel construction, but it seems that's the only way I know how to work efficiently. If I didn't *have* to do it, I wouldn't. I'm just that lazy. So now I'm rendering scenes like a mad renderer what renders at midnight.

    Tuesday I've got a thing with this recruiter that we're all going to go visit. This recruiter is evidently top notch and has placed many people like me at many places like the one I work at. He normally places executives, but he also places people with my skillsets. This makes me have hope for the future. I'm not even talking with him to move. He's a friend of a friend, and is granting us an "audience" to look at our stuff and tell us what we're worth so we can go to the bargaining table with confidence. We're all so damn underpaid. It's the state of the industry, really, when one of my old unemployed co-workers has to take a salary of 30K/year to design characters at Raven Software for Quake 4. 30K/year to design characters for QUAKE FOUR. Like that game isn't going to make frickin' millions. They can't even pay the guy 50K. WTF? Greedy bastards can't even pay people what they're worth. Hell, 50K is too cheap, if you ask me.

    [tangent rant] As it turns out, there's business tomes out there that *instruct* businessmen to low-ball artists. They've figured out that artists love what they do, and would do it even if they weren't getting paid for it. So they instruct the business men to "see what they can get away with, because the artist might even do it for free." Fuck free. I sell out to the highest bidder. Come to the table with your best offer because I don't renegotiate. I go with the client who's willing to pay me what I'm worth. [/tangent rant]

    So I have to throw together a demo reel and a resume, and even maybe a digital portfolio, but I'm not sure what I'd put in it.

    I think this will be the first time in history that my resume is going to spill over onto two pages (and merit it). Hell, the first page alone will probably cover what I do now for a living.

    Sheesh. I wish I had the 500M of space on my website (and the bandwidth to publish it all) my demo reel is going to take up once it's finished. It would be nice for people to be able to download it. I'd even love to just be able to throw up the 120M 1.5 minute FMV piece I animated on for Redcard. C'est la vie.

    Back to more NTSC 640x480 DivX renders.



     
  • And the Oscar goes to... 2002-03-26 22:45:44 So many people. So little time.

    Evil_Genius: Go date Lauren. If a girl comes over and does a mock-striptease, leaves lipstick on your cheek, and tackles you twice during the course of an evening, you have a great collegiate romance on your hands. Especially if she stays up multiple nights 'till 6am just to *talk* to you. I'm so not kidding here. I'm all giddy just reading about it. Reminds me of how I met my wife in college. Ahhhh those were some good times.

    GO ASK HER OUT! :)

    MCWagner: Just wanted to touch on the term: "keyframing, keyframed, keyframe, etc." isn't really a technique, so much as a necessity when animating. Even on my motion capture data that I start out with at work, there's "keys" on every frame. I then create an extra later and start adding more keys on top of those keys. O.K. I'm making no sense whatsoever...um...to clarify:

    In the Traditional drawn sense of animation, you make a drawing, then skip ahead a few frames to the next important pose in your animation, and do a drawing there. Those are keyframes. You then have an assistant animator do the inbetween drawings for you.

    In 3D animation, you pose your character using keyframes, and then the computer generates the inbetweens for you.

    In Motion Capture, your animation is "done" for you at the beginning (after tons of boring data editing and clean-up), with a keyframe generated on every frame (no inbetweening). However, it typically comes in wrong. Guys arms are going through their legs, or if the actor rolled around on the ground, he probably occluded some markers, resulting in horrible data, and it requires you to fix it. Enter the keyframes. Then we add keyframes on top of the mocap data to fix the problems with it. (And the computer inbetweens our keyframes for us).

    So, when I mentioned that the humans looked bad because they were keyframed, what I really meant was that the animators who worked on them didn't do a good job at animating them from scratch (no macap data to assist them). You can keyframe humans convincingly (see any Pixar film with humans in them, except Boo. She was mocapped first and then heavily keyframed over), but you have to be an exceptional animator to do it. Everyone is an expert in human motion; they just don't know it.

    We look at human beings every single day. If we saw Data from Star Trek walk down the street in real life, just about anyone could pick up on the fact that even from a distance, "something just doesn't look right about that guy." So when any sort of human animation is off (*especially* facial animation), we notice it.

    But no one's an expert in Mammoth movement, or what a Sloth should look like when it walks upright, or even a Tiger, albeit a Sabertooth. So when we see excellent quality animation on those kinds of characters, we think "Hey, that looks sweet!" But...the same quality of animation on a human might look substandard. This is probably what happened in Ice Age, which is why I'm a huge advocate for mocap animation for human beings. Why fake it when you don't have to? I hated, nay, *loathed* 3D animation, and downright despised motion capture before I was forced into the industry due to the obsolescence of traditional animation in my area. Now that I've seen the benefits, I sing the praises.

    kyburg: thanks for the kind thoughts. I went and read treeprincess's journal (again, I used to check in on it occassionally). All I have to say is wow. Glad I didn't have your last week, teenpricness. Although Greece sounds nice, and it makes my heart sing to hear people taking a chance on life. I just saw a quick poll of seniors over age 75, and the biggest "theme" that came out of the poll was:

    "I wish I had taken more chances in life."

    Speaking of taking chances...

    If anything, recent events are forcing me to work on my Sin City short film which I will most assuredly get sued for. I watched the Oscars the other night, and all I have to say is THANK GOD THEY FINALLY STARTED SHOWING THE SHORT ANIMATED FILM CLIPS FOR THE NOMINEES!!!!! And I'm happy for the Best Animated Film category, but at the same time I'm pissed off about it. Now animation is relegated to its own category like Foreign Film or Documentary. Fuck that. Animation *is* film. The closest we came to getting a Best Film was Beauty and the Beast. Which is pitiful, because if anything should have been nominated, it should have been Iron Giant. But I'm happy for the animation industry. Maybe this crutch will help prop it up a bit. But I'm *really* happy for the short animated film category. For the past 3 years they haven't showed the clips for the nominees. Fucking costume and make-up nominees get their footage showed (yahoo, another fucking Victorian era film. How innovative!), but not these poor souls who poured their lives into 5 minutes of animation. By themselves. Without a studio to help them. Well, except for Pixar's short and "Stubble Trouble." I found out that a studio in Chicago I've freelanced at a handful of times made Stubble Trouble. Only they have one of their animators dream it up and work on it while everyone else is making commercials, and then during down time they finish it and submit it under the animator's name. Calabash ( http://www.calabashanimation.com ) is the name of the studio, and they're very top-notch. I don't agree with their technique for animating, but the results are phenomenal. I guess they got a ton of phone calls after the Oscars for work.

    At any rate, I think I finally realized my dream this Sunday. I don't want to work for *Disney* per se. I want to be up on that podium accepting an award for Best Animated Short Film. If I finish Sin City and somehow get Frank to *like* it and *not* sue me (or how about get Frank to even *see* it), I'll then have to find a theater to air the movie (you can't be nominated if it hasn't been shown in a theater...go fig), and then get it nominated.

    This could take some doing.

    And time.
     
  • Ugh. 2002-03-26 10:06:07 Stupid lousy emotional rollercoaster past couple of days.

    I really have a shot at being something great at other companies, but Liz doesn't want to go.

    Found out from friend who applied at Pixar that they saw my M7 (he worked on it for me, so it's on his reel), and they liked it. A LOT. Not that I want to work there at this point in life, but if Pixar likes it, anyone else should, too.

    This has to be the single most frustrating aspect I've ever had to face in my life. I've always dreamed of animating for Disney, but even if I was good enough to get in, Liz wouldn't go.

    FUCK.

    I'm mired and anchored in anonymity. Wonderful.

    OH! On a better note (please see rollercoaster of emotions earlier), Redcard is shipping to stores by the end of this month. For gameplay movies with my animations in them, go here:

    http://www.nlgaming.com/bin/showpreview.pl?document=2321.html&filter=ps2

    Sorry they're so damn dark. The game's not that dark; the guy capturing them had his gamma set wayyyyy too low.

     
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