JOURNAL: gambitt (Jeff Heller)

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  • Pause from AUSA 2002-10-15 13:10:54 Just to share a comment (aka boring rant) about the current situation.

    *clears throat*

    You suck. I suck. We all suck. Thank you.

    Nah I think I'll try and make a legitimate comment this time. I've been having such a blast at these cons with friends and other creators, I really forget this site even exists. The only time I remember is when Nate tells me someone's being a jerk in the forum. That, and entering a new video into the database.

    It's just such a problem when this site has such attention put on one part when it's goal is something completely different. AMV.org is no different without a forum in its goals, so why have a forum? That was a liberty most of us took for granted. In fact, the site itself is something we all take for granted.

    Mods were a good idea, but there's only so much you can take when there are no parental controls and around 15 forum topics, and 60,000+ members, and no crowd control, and is open to everyone. For volunteer work, that is hell.

    Funny thing is, the real fuckups won't be writing journals about this either, unless they really are assholes. They'll see how their idiocy has benefitted for nothing and a fraction may actually change for the better. That's what happened to me, anyway. Fuckups can be redeemed, though. Assholes, however, insist on continually being an unwanted presence.

    Hmph. I hate the forum and yet I hardly look in it. Some of you people really do suck.



    Ok, now onto happier things. Internet didn't come to the dorms this week (Boo) but is rumored to appear next weekend (Yay). So, a bunch of you guys I met at the cons this past season will be getting IMs real soon. ... I feel like ET when I say "Friends..." Oh yeah, a girl I've had an on/off crush on finally got herself a boyfriend. Good, I can get my mind on more important things again (like how I am dying of hunger. Money is low...).

    So AUSA Journal will continue with the next post. 
  • AUSA Journal Part 1: Friday 2002-10-14 22:28:47 Forums are down, but journals live on. Rock. Onward, Sancho.

    This'll be a quick journal since I'm too tired to be witty. Met with Nate's girlfriend's best friend and off we were.

    Rain, accidents, and construction. Oh, and a sniper. All contributed to a 4 hour trip turning quickly (or very, very slowly) into seven hours. Ok, add half an hour on a Burger King line. We finally show up at 2:30AM. Not even tired, but with Nate and Mint drunk, we all go out to use the 24 hour jacuzzi... which was closed. Oh well, we used the exercise room instead. Oh, and the locker rooms.

    Then tried to play DDR before getting kicked out for no badges. Yeah, um, I have no badge at this point since registration is closed... whatever. We all go back upstairs, get some clothes, get the badges for those who got em, then go back down... and he lets me in anyway. What was the point of that?! Anyway, we get tired, go back to the room and sleep.

    Um, yeah, just so you know, another reason for an EXTREMELY short journal is the fact that Saturday was when I did anything. I had such an awesome time, too (shields up from beatdowns from Iserlohn who was basically working the entire con). So, part two: Saturday. Um... fun, stalkers and more alcohol. Don't forget to bring a towel. 
  • Boom Boom Monitor 2002-10-08 16:44:36 And now, my impersenation of my $200 second monitor.

    zzzzzzzzz... sssssssssssssssssssssss POOF. Smoke.

    Oh well, back to the one... 15 incher... fuck... 15 inches suck... 
  • DDR2: Brilliant2U - Gainax 2002-10-06 00:53:24 NOTE: I wrote two other posts tonight under this one. Just scroll down if you're so interested in AWA Part 3 and my effects rant, version #33262.

    So once again my conscience bugs me and I am forced to explain to you all the changes I made to the anime footage used in a project of mine. Which one is it this time, you may ask? This time it's DDR Project 2's Brilliant2U featuring the girls of Gainax. This is gonna be one long post, folks, I did a hell of a lot of stuff for this one.

    Programs used: Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, Illusion and Cool Edit Pro (just for timing).

    For some background, the video is NOT a Gainax tribute, but a display of the backward feminism the studio usually equips their main female lead characters with. Yes folks, this video has a PLOT. Scary, I know. Just look at the pretty colors.

    0:00 - That's the starry sky from Daicon IV. Take that background, put some transparency in there to get rid of the black, rotate it at a wild speed, up the contrast, and put some hue in there for barely noticable color and there you go. That was all Premiere effects. Probably the last time I try that again...
    0:02 - The white flashes that go off from here on are splashes of the word GAINAX. Grey word on white background courtesy of Futura font and Adobe Illustrator
    0:02 - the wheel thingy with the screens on it... yeah, that's Illustrator again. You can't see it in the MPEG, but the wheel has "GIRLS OF GAINAX" inscribed on it. The screens have each section of the video playing on it for each Gainax show. This was the last and most painstaking part of this video. Since After Effects does not import Illustrator files at variable resolutions (even though it should), I had to make a seperate composition at 2000+/3000+ pixels. This is to compensate for the size of the TV screens that the videos would play on in full resolution. Not doing this would have made them terribly pixelized on close-up.
    As the wheel approaches, those flashes are more Gainax splash screens, and then followed by a frame of the show logo. Daicon, Eva, KareKano, FLCL, Mahoro and Abeno in that order.
    0:17 - Ahh, finally, Daicon footage. That's divx source. It actually looks decent in the DV version since I color corrected it and applied some blur to get the obvious lossless look to it. I'm no expert at this yet so I can't say it looks perfect. For this section, though, it was good enough.
    0:21 - Another edit I am very proud of. Simply repeated the bunny girl punching and flipped her around, then edited it so it looked like two punches. This is a hell of a lot more seamless than the "Numb" edit with Asuka's head rising. Practice makes perfect, folks.
    0:25 - If it ain't obvious, Premiere hue effects.
    0:31 - *sticks tongue out* Yeah I used Eva footage. And it's ripped from DVD. In fact, Eva, KareKano, and FLCL were all ripped from DVD, the rest was divx. Can ya tell? Totally upped contrast on all of them, too.
    0:34 - I'm sorry, I can't not do lip sync with Eva footage. It just begs to be done. Especially since in this scene the lyrics of Brilliant2U are "Let's go, here we go." and in the series, Asuka says, "Here we go." and Shinji says, "Jump?" Ain't that almost perfect? Nate and I pondered leaving the subtitles in.
    On every jump, the Eva doesn't just jump, it crashes. I put some Earthquake filter in there to make the jumps better. Also white flashes for effect.
    0:38 - Freaky red stuff. That's the aged film filter in After Effects (start groaning), but wait! I didn't use that crappy sepia color, I used red in the beginning! It later changes to sepia to keep it different every time I fade back to that scene. I love the editing here.
    0:42 - Color emboss and contrast to make edges hard.
    0:45 - No effects whatsoever for Kare Kano. Just color correction. Why? Look at it, man. Does it really need anything?
    0:58 - Color flashes, frame by frame checking and color-changing in After Effects.
    1:02 - After a lot of contrast stuff I used the video look filter in AE for one scene in between Haruko and her ukelele. Also color emboss there to emphasize the red eye. Green HATES red, and so do I.
    1:04 - scrolling DDR arrows on their tongues ;).
    1:04 - Haruko turns her head and what does she say? Mm... I won't tell you, but I think a certain Jhonen is involved.
    1:10 - Thanks Gainax for adding letterbox to your newest shows... why dammit why!?!?! The letterbox is a pain in the ass to deal with, and instead of enlarging everything (which I did contemplate), I instead just put those color borders in. This, again, is also cleaned up divx footage. Mahoro is a boring series to edit, and dark too. Not good enough for a dance video, so this had the most f*cking done to it. I made those DDR arrows in Illustrator, by the way. E-mail me if you want my AI file.
    1:13 - From here on out, Mahoro footage is posterized. Also more color emboss and Leave Color filters in AE.
    1:17 - Now this is all color emboss and Find Edges filter, which has awesome results.
    1:21 - The jiggling Mahoro here? Premiere movement effects, plus a HUGE zoom, and upped contrast. I wanted this scene in there (it was, like, one of the only 10 shots in that series I used and I captured 120+.) so I had to mess it up somehow.
    1:22 - Dance Break made in Illustrator.
    1:23 - The actual dance break is my masterpiece. It's Ilustrator, After Effects, Premiere AND Final Cut Pro. It was also the easiest thing to do if you knew what you wanted it to look like. Prepare for a lot of text:
    The DDR arrows, as mentioned earlier, were done in Illustrator. Nate showed me DDRfreak.com which had the real steps to B2U there so I made another illustrator document to make the greyish guides, and yet another document to spread the arrows apart and face them the right way. Also a fourth set to make the white arrows of the black background. In AE, did a little child-parent grouping with all the Illustrator docs and made the up-scrolling arrows masks of a rainbow gradient layer (three seperate layers since AE only allows 127 masks per layer). Discolored arrows, signalizing half-steps, had 180 degree hue changes overlayed.
    Now the giant white arrow was first done in premiere using giant TIF images of the arrows in different positions. They were all two frames long (one frame for half-steps) and were positioned correctly. The movie of that sequence was then slowed down to fit the music, then saved again. Brought that into AE, color keyed the black out, added bevel to it and lighting effects for shadows, then did some javascript Motion Math (cmpaud.mm) so that whatever level the sound was at, the arrow would horizontally stretch to. Bass beats always get the best stretch, as you can see.
    The Waveforms on top and bottom-right are courtesy of AE. Their changing hue is more hue/saturation effects. Shadow on them, too.
    The backgrounds are two circling movies of DDR arrows with layer blending options on (I think multiply mode) with hue effects. Behind them is an edited piece of background using the scenes with the most movement from Gainax series. Terribly muddled in the MPEG, barely noticable in the DV version, but still a good moving background not intrusive enough to stop you from dancing to the arrows.
    Lastly, the extreme color change is all courtesy of beat by beat matching and setting each change in color by hand.
    1:37 - Each name is made in Illustrator. It's animated in AE. Mahoro's name actually has a radio buzz effect in there for a split-second. The rest is just fumbling with settings in AE. The arrows that scroll over them are the same arrows in the dance break, but not rotated. Just red and overlayed. Red has a HUGE significance in this video, and a lot of Gainax's work has a fascination with red as well.
    1:49 - This part was fun. The static on the TV is AE again, the wheel is zoomed in this time around, and the flashes are DDR arrows, but you can notice that without me telling you. The word screens are Illustrator documents. Font used here? Clarendon. I had to sketch this entire alphabet by hand for a type class here at SVA, took me five hours to do. Why did I mention this? I dunno, sentimental value, I guess. The Maniac is AE's text filter with earthquake.
    2:00 - This is just screwed up. Apparently the background comes in more, the arrows don't have that much background to it, I purposefully made this the hardest thing to dance to. If you pulled it off, I am extremely impressed. The wonderful godsend of a particle program, Illusion, comes in to play here with tiny black and white spots coming towards you like stars. Not noticable no matter where you look for it. Don't even try.

    And that's it! Almost all of it. Took me around two months to do, and I loved it. Hope you like it. 
  • Sleepovers and AUSA. 2002-10-06 00:38:27 Yeah ok, well, no point in keeping it secret since Iserlohn knows (Idiot me, I told him and wanted to make it a surprise), but yeah I'm going to AUSA somehow. How I plan to get there is a mystery. There are three contacts I can ask, but I can't get a hold of one, don't know another too well, and I've never met the third one. Nate's helping with the third one, so we'll see what happens. I'm bringing my Newtype.com Gainax special issue, too, to please the iserlohn god. I also want to bring my firewire hard drive in case someone has something on their laptops that they want to share. I supposedly get to see Puchi Puri Yuushi there (the new Gainax series... drool) so now I really NEED to go.

    In case anyone's keeping track, the plan is to come in Saturday and leave Sunday. Pretty useless if you ask me, but hey, I get to see Nate, Mint, Iserlohn, and some other people who weren't at AWA, so why not? I also think TriEngel's competing there so it would be nice to be there to represent the work. I'm actually seeing the beauty of showing up to cons that you compete in. It's such a bummer hearing that someone won for a video that you loved and yet they did not attend.

    Now, AD brought up another point about effect-filled videos. I'm gonna branch off that, totally agree'ing with his point that it's good to go to straight cuts after doing a lot of effects. My Now You're a Man video proves that. Hey, you people out there who got the NOP CD, whatcha think of that video? Think I should add a Cartoon Network logo or VHS artifacts? Yeah anyway, onto effects.

    Videos with straight cuts are awesome. Particle Man and Spidah! are brilliant and beautiful with no effects. In the same respect, Shameless Rock Video and DDR1's Oh Nick video are fantastic and interesting watches. If people have so much of a problem seeing videos with effects, don't watch em. There's no hierarchy in people's opinions saying that only videos with effects are good because frankly, there are plenty of videos with effects that suck ass. I don't use After Effects because I think people will enjoy 20,000 overlays with hue and contrast settings, I use them for whatever I want in my video that isn't in the anime itself. Glass breaking in TriEngel, sure it's After Effects and Illusion, but I had to watch the glass-breaking scene from Nate's Blade Runner laserdisc fifty times in order to feel confident enough to play around with AE to get the crack right and not look cheesy (remember that, Nate?) And I think it looks great in the video. In DDR, all the color and video effects are there because it's a damn dance video! I had to liven things up somehow!!

    Actually, speaking of my DDR project vid, I probably did a great thing in not putting one single effect in the KareKano footage. I was so happy with my editing in that one part because everything moved so fast and so fluid, it didn't need AE supplement to make it more exciting. So, plain editing won over effects there. Oh that's right, I wanted to post my SUPER LONG making-of-DDR2 post... I think I'll do that after this one. Back to the rant.

    It all depends on context. Split screens are great. But split screens with no purpose suck. No question. Same with overlays. Same with anything! If there's no purpose for it, don't use it! If you have a vision and you think looks good, then let there be no stopping you in achieving it.
    **OFF TOPIC ** This, folks, is why Nate and I work so well together. If Nate knows what he wants, he'll show me examples, talk about it in fifty different ways, and somewhere in there I'll know exactly what he wants so I can figure out how to make it for him. Actually in most cases I ask him what he wants more than fifty times, I'm thankful he doesn't mind answering all the time. It's designer instinct to itch out every conceivable hint from a client if they want something designed.
    Sorry, I had to say all that because I think it deserves to be said. I love that man.
    ** ON TOPIC ** Just make sure that when you do it, don't jump yourself short. Make the effect work perfectly and seamlessly. If you cut short, people are going to notice, you're going to suck. No easier way of saying that. Bad effects suck, and it's easy to make effects look bad, hence why we keeping having this redudant debate.

    Ok I'll stop with the rant there. As for the sleepover bit in my topic, I had my friends Bill and Christine (Bill was at AWA, he's like a Mindwarp cronie, he basically helps with judging for the Mindwarp contest. NO, THIS DOES NOT MEAN I HAVE AN ADVANTAGE OVER ANYONE IN THAT CONTEST. None of my videos have won when I entered them. That contest is legit in my opinion) come to NYC to watch Spirited Away with some friends. It was only Bill's second time in NYC, surprisingly, and I made sure he had fun. From the sound of it, they did, thank god. Spirited Away was such a beauty on screen, so much better than the VHS tape I made... :P We went over a lot of the fun stuff of AWA to Christine and AMV ideas. Had fun talking about that a lot. He's such a great guy. Must have him here again. My friends loved him. Ok, so, I'd better stop typing now as I actually do have homework to do. Hope you enjoyed the AWA journals, look forward to the DDR2 post. I have a TON to explain.  
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