It could be a bit of an understatement to say that I've been kept busy during the first semester of the school year. On top of my normal school work, I was consistently commissioned by the Video Department for several projects. While they were not difficult to do, they took a while to make.
WORD FROM THE HALLS
The first project Video gave me was to do a short animation to introduce a new segment they were going to be bringing into the weekly news called "Word from the Halls." They asked me to allude to the web show "Jamie's World" by referencing its logo (right). It wasn't very difficult to do. The only things I had to do to replicate it was find the same (or in my case, a similar) font and figure out how I wanted the logo to come in and go out. I settled on the font Eurostile. After I had my font, it was time to figure out how to come in and act while in the frame.
For the circle, I wanted it to fade it in before any text came on so all of the words had direction and layout. For the text, I had this idea for everything to come in from a different direction. For example, "Word" would come from the left, "from" would come from the right etc. There was a decision to make, though, before that: should the text be visible outside of the ring or not? After a bit of hemming and hawing, it was decided that the circle would have an alpha layer inverted so none of the text would be visible outside of it and just float in straight into the circle. "Word" would come in from the top, "from" came from the left, "the" came in from the right" and "Halls" came in from the bottom.
I looked at this and still thought it looked too simple. I asked help from my instructor, and we came to the conclusion that everything should overshoot its target just a hair and then bounce back to give it a little bit of vibrance.
Originally, I wanted the text and circle to vibrate a little bit to give the illusion of several hand-drawn images cycling through each other. However, we tried several techniques to pass this off, but every time, it fell through with some disappointment. My teacher and I ultimately were okay with just the circle shaking enough to notice, but not enough to be dominant.
Cleverly hidden was a very subtle e-Communication logo. e-Communication is the program that I am a part of and, unfortunately, has not acquired a very terrific reputation the past few years, so I try to brand everything I'm proud of with e-Comm so as not to have our work confused with others'.
Above was the final still frame result. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but multiply the one picture 150 times over for the 150 frames in this 5 second video, and it becomes worth 150,000 words.
VLOGS
The next assignment the Video Department handed me was more of a private project. It was for the same purpose, the other purpose being for our weekly news, but the catch was that I had a lot less time to work on it than I had with the Word from the Halls. I was approached by two juniors and they told me they needed the clip by the weekend...less than two short days away.
With such a short deadline, I immediately began sketching up ideas for the animation with my instructor. Once we had come to a solid concept, I quickly got to work. My goal was to have the V and the L blown up all the way as they were the beginnings of the names Victoria and Libby -- whom were the main organizers of the segment. After their names were introduced, it would pan out and spell out VLOGS.
With this idea in mind, I found the right font and blew up V and L. Next, I spelled out the rest of the names "Libby" and "Victoria." Once I sorted out what colors and outlines everything should receive, the next mission was to scale it all down while simultaneously fading out the names. To do this, I arranged their pivots to where they would scale down to. Once I had done this, I scaled both of them down at the same rate and faded them at an equally fast speed to give the illusion that, by the end of the very short transition, they were never there. I still felt the video felt very forced and not smooth at all.
To remedy this, I also faded out the pink lettering of the VLOGS text to turn into a solid black to match the background. It still seemed like something was missing. I played around a little bit and decided being specific was the best road to take, so I added a simple block-lettered "Northwest" above VLOGS and spaced it accordingly to match VLOGS.
It wasn't long before the final result was finished. Unlike the other project, I did not sneak any e-Communication imagery into it, but settled for what it was.
BEHIND THE SEASON
Aside from my personal project, this has been the biggest assignment I have been given all year. Behind the Season is a project from the Video Department in which they recap the season of any given sport. The primary activity that I was assigned to was the football season. This was a big project, and I wasn't quite sure how even to start. Fortunately, I was given a logo to base everything around.
My instructions were a little loose and were along the lines of "make a room in which the Behind the Season logo is in the background but dominant. Given these directions, I opened up After Effects and immediately began working building a room of sorts. This wasn't exactly hard as I build four different planes, one for both walls, the floor, and the ceiling. After I had the walls, I converted them all to 3D layers so I could manipulate them to replicate the sensation of actually being in a room.
The first trial I ran, I put the logo on the walls and moved it across the walls. Unfortunately, the purpose of the model was to host interviews for the segment, thus making the animation too competitive for attention (right).
I figured I had to take a different direction to make it a little more subtle in the background rather than the dominating version I originally created.
Once I had the walls set up the way I had wanted, I brought the logo I was given into the room and converted it into a 3D layer. After this, I pushed it pretty far back into the corner while still retaining its dominant feature. The easiest part was done.
Unfortunately, the most difficult part had to come at some time. The difficult part is trying to configure lighting to work well with the components in the file. Originally, I started with a simple ambient light. It didn't work well and the shadows were too thick. I had to delete the light and try again. This time, I worked with a few point lights. It seemed to go okay, but it still didn't seem to pop at all. I talked to my instructor about it, and he suggested I bring in some spinning lights.
At first, I had no idea how to go about this. I started with small objects and added a white texture to them to give the illusion of spinning orbs. My instructor and I both agreed that this looked sloppy and flat. With this criticism I tried again, and this time, I brought in some optical flares. To be specific, I brought in 6 optical flares all exactly alike one another. Once I had the flares the way I wanted to, I set them up in the way that I wanted. That way was to spin in some way by or around the Behind the Season logo. I set it up to spin around the Behind the Season logo at a slight angle to sort of give it the spotlight effect. I had to add another light just so the way the optical flares moved, nothing would be dimmed or blacked out.
The only problem they found was that they nixed the room idea. This was in no way a project-stopper because I removed the walls and replaced them all with a black solid layer.
After I had figured everything out, I was asked convert it into an introduction. So, I inserted a box that would sift through and reveal the sport by the end of it. It wasn't hard, all I had to do was give the box an alpha channel with a matte and didn't let the name of the activity start its sequence until the box had already moved into the appropriate place.
Once I had rendered it out, I, along with the video department, was very pleased.
This, little did I know, was not the only affiliation I would have with the Behind the Season project because less than a couple weeks later, I was, again, approached, and asked to make lower thirds for the same project. Similarly, I was given no direction and was essentially on my own.
As any good artist does, I began by sketching out ideas and I kept coming back to the same idea of diagonal edges because I notice ESPN has the same sort of concept. I began by drawing different models of how to make it work, and my final design was simple but complete. It began with the sketch on the top left (in the image on the right) before my instructor thought it would help to have the description box there for any extra information the Video Department may want about the subject. I originally dropped a simple box down underneath where the name would lie, but it didn't match the style of the rest of the third, so I duplicated the original box and moved it down to make sure the diagonal lines on the ends were continuous. The last adjustment I made was to move the edge of the description box over a little bit to match the off-set style of the boxes on the right. Once I was happy with this design, I opened up After Effects.
The first thing I did was to shape the size and position of the original text box for the right-most box. Once I had that, I duplicated it, scaled it to make it bigger, but shorter than the original. I did that again for the text box. Then, I duplicated the text box, moved it down and made sure the design matched my sketch. After that, I adjusted the colors a little bit so the boxes grew consistently more gray the further away from the name box you grew. With this, the first (and easiest) part was done.
As I said, the easy part was done. The next part was jazzing it up a little bit so it wasn't so plain. Because it was still a part of the Behind the Season project, I thought it would be neat if there were similarities between the original animation I did and the lower thirds.
I had to think of what I could do to draw the similarities between the two animations and then it hit me: the lights. I wasn't sure how I was going to use the lights in the lower thirds, but I had the determination to find a way. I thought about using the lights around the overhang at the right. Ultimately, though, it looked the best where I would end up putting them: the left. Instead of trying to completely recreate the lights that would circle the thirds, I went into the old animation and pulled the lights directly and went back into the thirds and placed them there. The only problem was that in the original animation, the lights only formed a semi-circle. I needed them to form a full circle.
To remedy the full circle conundrum, I brought a circle into the After Effects file, made it a 3D layer, and scaled it down to the size I wanted the circle to be. I then used it as a guide to set up the lights in a circle. Once this part was done, my lights were left like the image to the right.
Of course, I couldn't leave the lights exactly the same because there were a lot of extraneous elements of the optical flares that would make them too flashy and too busy for the purpose they were serving. With that being said, I went into the optical flares' settings and adjusted and tinkered with them before settling on a soft orb with a bright nucleus that would orbit around the staff. After I had done this, I had to give them motion, so I had them rotating 360 degrees every three seconds.
I couldn't just leave it still, though, so I needed to move the objects a little bit. I started everything out to the left off-screen and moved the name-text box into position first and smoothly let the other two boxes behind it move into place without a break. Immediately after that, I moved the description-box down into place. Once I was happy with this, it was ready.
I rendered it out and gave it to the Video Department because they were going to overlay it with text.
Needless to say, it was sent back. The Video Department told me that they couldn't overlay the text the way they wanted, so they told me to put the names and descriptions on them all myself. At first, I was given about 15 names to work with, so as soon as I found the right text, I plugged it all in and rendered everything out before my instructor told me that the font on the bottom needed to be a little bit different than the font on top. After a hefty sigh, I went back and re-did everything before running them to the Video Department.
All was well until they told me they needed about 10 more names. Thankfully, at this point, I had the same file and I just had to plug in the names and render it out and it took me about an hour and a half to finish. The final result was one of my proudest works to date.
THE BEATLES
Although this has been taking me all semester (due to all of the projects above), I am proud to be keeping 3D modeling in my life by taking my project with the drums last year a step further and modeling the Beatles' key instruments. The main instruments were based around the Beatles' performance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964. This includes Ringo's original 4-piece Ludwig drum set, Paul McCartney's 1962 Hofner bass, John Lennon's Rickenbacker 325 Capri guitar, and George Harrison's Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar.
Since I've last talked about this, I've added Paul McCartney's Hofner bass to the collection alongside Ringo's signature drum set. Next semester, I'll start the Rickenbacker and the Country Gentleman guitars.
The main goal I have is to eventually set everything up like a museum exhibit in tribute to the Beatles. I am not sure, yet, whether or not I want every Beatle to have his own room or rather just leave it as one room packed with Beatles merchandise. So far, I'm thinking more along the lines of the latter.
As little time as I had to work on this, I am very pleased with what I've been able to do. As I said, I sculpted the drum set and textured it almost spot-on with how Ringo Starr kept it. However, since I've spoken about this already, I'll spend your time talking about my most recent upgrade: the Paul McCartney bass.
Paul McCartney's Hofner violin bass is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable instruments of all time, so it can be concluded that cutting short on this one will not go unnoticed. With this pressure, I was inspired to really put forth everything that I could into it.
Unlike the other projects listed above, this one was a 3D project done in Autodesk Maya. I started this part by first taking a flat plane and assigning a Hofner texture to it so that I could use the Create Polygon tool. I traced the basic body before anything else just to get the very basic part of it done and could use the size as a reference. After I traced it and felt satisfied with all of the edges, I selected the face and extruded it. The skeleton of the body was complete.
The next essential part was the neck and fretboard of the bass. I repeated the same steps I used in the body and pulled the neck out while curving the underside of the neck to match that of a normal stringed instrument. Then, I repeated yet again with the head of the instrument.
After I had all of the major components done, I worked on some of the smaller details. The first things I started were the pickups right underneath the neck and toward the bridge. This, in total, took about an hour to do completely. Unfortunately, I was looking at the wrong model and had to convert it back to the 1962 version in which the bottom pickup was basically touching the bridge and not just underneath the top one. After I sorted through this, I started on the bridge which may have taken an hour or two to finish.
Once I was done with this, I moved onto the tailpiece at the bottom of the body. I started with the piece in which the strings were wound through, moved on to the two bars running down to the bottom, finished the bar that runs across those two bars, and finished it off with the two pieces that hold the tailpiece to the instrument at the bottom of the bass. Once I was done with this part, I moved on to the level controls at the bottom diagonal. I differenced the parts where the actual switches were and added said switches. For the dials, I simply took a cylinder and manipulated it slightly to resemble what an actual dial would look like.
To my dismay, it was not until I began working on the pick guard (and nearly finished it) that I remembered Paul McCartney played bass left-handed. This means that I had to go back and change a lot to accommodate the left-handedness of Sir Paul. To fix this, I took the control panel, rotated it 180 degrees and moved it over into position on the other side of the tailpiece. I had to move some parts around the bridge to make up for the lost ground, but I managed to keep it looking salvageable and, in time, just as good as it did before.
On with the pick guard this time, I repeated the same process I'd built most of the bass already: used the Create Polygon tool and outline it on the reference picture. I made it very thin as it would have been on stage in 1964, and started working on the anchor holding it onto the guitar from the side by making a small cube and extruding where appropriate. The final piece of the guitar was the strap peg on the bottom. I took a very simple cylinder, scaled the bottom vertices down to give it a cone shape and moved the center vertex on top down a little bit to give it the ice-cream-cone effect.
With the body done (except for texturing) I could move on to the finer details of the neck. For the frets, I took a cylinder, differenced the bottom half of them and moved the top vertices in a little bit because the frets aren't a straight cylinder. I duplicated the fret as many times as I needed and adjusted the length of it accordingly.
One of the toughest parts to model was the head of the bass because of all of the little mechanics going on. First off, I worked on the tuning pegs using cylinders and cubes. As for the peg anchors on the back, I, again, traced them out with the Create Polygon tool and lined them up where they needed to be.
For the strings, I used cylinders and ran them across the guitar from the bridge to the tuning pegs and, once they reached the tuning pegs, extruded and rotated the face of the cylinder to wind it up to give it the true sense of realism of being wound like a normal guitar. Once I had done this for all four, I began texturing everything using both real and artificial textures depending on the piece. As for the guitar, I used a pure sunburst wood texture, but for the headpiece, I used an artificial Hofner logo on fake brown. The final result was one I was very proud of and cannot wait to continue this next semester.
