After the meeting with the BBC, I wanted to do some small concepts of scale & reference for example. How the presenter can interact with the earth & the props and how big he will be in comparison. I used the render of the stars that Thomas modelled.
We had a meeting with our clients, the BBC this week. We had a presentation ready to show & explain our ideas to them, get some feedback, some constructive criticism and continue forward in the right direction. We went through the presentation a slide at a time taking turns explaining our concepts, afterwards we went back through them and discussed them, critiqued them.
They explained some more ideas to us, kind of like projection mapping, the idea I had initially. Projecting streets of the cities that are relevant to the Brexit news stories and having them launch up behind the presenter.
They were happy with our ideas and told us to continue with them. They asked us to do some animations to have examples of what it will look like, its scale, if any of the props are animated etc. They also said to gain a bit of narrative, something more specific to a certain news story, we also discussed the 1 year anniversary and how we could implicate that into our environments, that we could possibly use it the week they are reporting the 1 year story.
Our presentation is below
What ensues is one of Pixar’s most conceptually self-reflexive episodes and from the very beginning, abstract thought is designated as a danger zone.
“The abstract thought room” turns out to be a vast, empty, seemingly endless white space where the rules of gravity do not apply, as demonstrated by a lot of geometric structures hovering in the air. This is unusual for Pixar or any other commercial American animated feature and is therefore implicitly coded as otherworldly and unsettling due to its lack of definition and concrete detail.
Which basically means it makes kids uncomfortable and is dissimilar or even contradictory to pixars style & animations.
Abstract thought is not simply a spooky place, however. It quickly transforms into an active physical threat to the characters’ bodily integrity. Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong undergo several rapid changes in visual design.
In that sense, abstract thought is portrayed as a destructive, uncontrollable, and terrifying force.
The terms in which the characters verbalize the threat of abstraction holds the key to Pixar’s approach to animation. Bing Bong shouts that he is lacking depth. Joy is sorrowful of her two-dimensionality. Sadness warns that they need to get out of there “before [they’re] nothing but shape and color.”
Pixar literally address their style; Abstraction is the antithesis (opposite) to Pixar’s creative philosophy. As Sadness points out, the Pixar manual advises against going there
In Pixar– abstraction remains off limits, while two-dimensionality is increasingly unwanted and dangerous.
It is aesthetic suicide – not to mention a marketing one. Pixar are, have been and will forever remain commercial animators, not abstract ones. They are 2 very different techniques, forms, modes of animation, with different audiences. It is important not to blur the line between the two or things can get messy.
I read an article about 3-D animation for Yuan’s class and the topic was is it possible for 3-D filmmaking to be sustainable as a commercial venture?
Kara Lynn Andersen the author of the article explores some common objections, suggesting that the key to sustainable 3-D might be the animated feature film.
She quotes Rick Mitchell’s argument that because the best 3-D film processes are too expensive for most theatres to install, 3-D production will remain centered on the less satisfying processes and therefore fizzle out. This is akin to saying that television will never catch on because its screen is smaller than the cinema.
With 3D TV’s and the games industry producing 3-D games, this increases the demand for 3-D in general. With the VR production still very much in BETA stage of production, Video games employing first person perspective trigger simulation sickness in some people – but this has not stopped the games industry from releasing more sickness-inducing games, because they sell well.
It is not the everyday realism of seeing in three dimensions that we do every day. It’s something that pretends to be like it, but offers a different sensation.
Thus, live-action 3-D production has been centered primarily in the less realistic genres: science fiction, thrillers, horror, fantasy, and animation.
By sidestepping the questions of realism and purpose behind the effect, animated films provide 3-D images that are simply fun.
So after the meeting we had 4 or 5 days to have concepts and ideas ready for the group meeting. I had went away to refresh on the Brexit situation but there was no new info to gain:/ I have followed the News story for months and know the current status that Britain and the EU currently reside in. I just needed to start thinking creatively, I had my notes from the meeting and a few Ideas swimming about in my head. Hopefully I can combine them with the groups Ideas on Monday.
Alright so in the meeting the director//manager had said
“Maybe they’ll be a story that includes Britain & the EU, Republic and Northern Ireland, we won’t know haha”
So I had immediately thought that we could model an earth that the News Presenter could walk on, he could walk from Republic to England, to the coast of the EU, wherever! We could have flags sticking out of the countries to represent them, even for the younger audience or less informed. He could walk over to the EU, says his lines and take a star off the European flag.
The Council of Europe gives the flag a symbolic description in the following terms; Against the blue sky of the Western world, the stars represent the peoples of Europe in a circle, a symbol of unity. Their number shall be invariably set at twelve, the symbol of completeness and perfection.
When Britain left the EU, they tarnished that symbol of completeness and perfection.
I was conscious of how it would look on the TV, this presenter “walking on the spot” around the rotating earth below his feet, thought it might look a bit strange so I considered the use of a flat plane earth. Perhaps a bit easier and still has the same effect. I was also mindful about the fact that the land on the earth is green and having that projected onto a green screen could be problematic, so I decided that we could just do the land white or pale blue and still obtain the same effect.
I too thought that by doing a form projection mapping or VFX that we could transport the presenter to whatever location he needs to be in in relation to the News story but IDK, I wasn’t really feeling that idea much and thought that we could definitely do something cooler than that, lets be honest.
So we got put into groups for our new project that includes us working with a client, exciting stuff. The uni kindly “babysits” us while we work with a client just to get us used to the process before we go off on placement next year, before we go off into the industry!
Our Group consists of Myself, Bethany, Megan, Rosie & Thomas. We were paired up with the BBC again! To do a virtual reality project, this is pretty awesome stuff like, I’m quite excited, I have to admit!
We had our meeting with them today, Megan Thomas & I had to go down to the BBC NI Studio and meet with them to talk about the VR project. We were given our visitors badges and brought up to an interview room to converse about the project. A studio manager & director both came in to chat with us. The conversation began with a quick slideshow presentation on their VR equipment, and shortly afterwards we were given the brief; Brexit (Britain’s exit from the EU). Basically they told us that they can’t predict the future, they don’t know what News will happen and what follow up information about Brexit that they’ll receive for their next News Piece about it. So essentially we had to take the Concept of Brexit, if we weren’t already updated on the topic we had to brush up and keep on top of the Brexit News. He told us that the News Reporter (Mark Simpson for example) stand on his mark surrounded by green screen and he is immersed in an environment on out TV Screens that someone had created on Cinema 4D // Maya. So we had to immerse him in something that we make to do with Brexit so that they can use our “work” for their next Brexit Piece.
Riiggghhhhtttt Eoin? But… How?
We have to create something that they can use in relation to any possible News Piece. They explained some Ideas that they had, the concept, what we need to to, what we need to do it on, when by, and to have fun with it. After words they showed us the BBC News Studio where the news is done and the Green Screen that will evidently be projecting our project and immersing this news reader in our environment. We got an Idea of what we had to do, where inspired and ready to go do some work. Sooo… yea. Let’s get brainstorming.
We all got split into groups and all asked in our groups to pick an article that we would like to do a presentation on. After reading some of the articles and the titles that sounded interesting, we settled on an article about Miyazaki;
The study aimed to look into the textual aspects of the 3 movies to see how these stories are rendered as Interpretation-Friendly Objects and to describe Hayao Miyazaki’s Persuasive Artistry.
As simply as I can put it, Miyazaki engages you into his mystical worlds that are rendered imitations of the real world. This is what grants him access to these audiences around the world. We experience the child heroes’ journey’s with a number of setbacks, setbacks that we experience with the character, that resemble challenges in our own lives. The journey and happy ending infuse the audience with an optimistic desire to make a better sense of the maturation process and difficult aspects of their own lives. Watching his films, the audience projects their own interpretations on screen, relating it to themselves and their own lives in different ways. Archetypal (standard) stories or mythic narratives are metaphorical texts distanced from the reader–audience’s present reality. Although distant, these stories reflect universal human actions, compelling characters and an imaginatively habitable world.
Here is the article if you care to read it: miyazaki_article
Alec gave a class today on PhotoBashing; basically it’s like taking images you want from a source on the internet and “collaging” them together on photoshop or gimp etc to do a quick visual concept of your idea. Rather than doing a digital masterpiece on your Cintiq, you can do this easier method of creating ideas. You can incorporate maya and 3D models to give it that extra bit of dimension to the piece. The more you do, the more attention to the details, the better it’ll look obviously.
Alec gave us all the Zip file and it had the project set up etc, he included the photoshop file and the original maya model. He just went through his process quite quickly, used his “example” to show us and example of PhotoBashing and showed us a few photoshop tips and tricks, an example of texturing and how we could apply that exact method to creating more realistic textures on our 3D models.
After he was done he told us to have a go, mess about with his or create our own. He had already showed us him beginning to texture the castle and I had kinda followed along with him, so before our break I thought I would just finish that for as long as I could.
Quite basic like, it was just a wee muck about. I applied texture to about half the castle, drew in a couple windows, put in a door and modelled an N-Cloth Assassins Creed flag, rendered out the still and put it in the photo for a final “castle” touch.
It’s a cool concept, one I can use if i’m ever feeling lazy or particularly bold with a certain Idea.
duckinthesobriety 