Beatles and Graphics and Thirds, Oh My!

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.

Home is Where the Heart Is

          In a dystopian society, a house uproots from its foundation and embarks on a journey. On this adventure, he meets a new friend of old age that needs one last adventure in life. The two houses, one resembling a small 2-floor home from the 1920s and the other a more modern, San Diego style home,  trek across the world (presumably North America). Their journey takes them across mostly suburban areas in the beginning of the short. Luckily this was the case for them because the older house was using a tree branch as a makeshift cane until he put too much weight and broke it. The younger house appeared selfish as he ran ahead into the near neighborhood, but the audience realizes it was to help his friend because he came back with a pillar from a grand, victorian house. Following him on his sprint back to his friend was a dog who very cleverly took on the shape of a doghouse.

They appeared to be heading north as the next full scene took place on the bank of any icy pond where we see the main character fall in love with a trailer home before she vanishes behind the glaciers. The protagonist is clearly upset, but he continues with his new friends. We next see the two and a half houses crowded around a fire in what appears to be a desert. However, the fire is about to run out and the protagonist sees that the old house is shivering, so he selflessly tears off more of his own wood to contribute to the fire in order to keep the old house warm. The final scene exists when the house seems to have found his destination in what appears to be California and the three look out upon the ocean at a beautiful sunset. The doghouse begins barking after everything seems right, and the young house knows exactly what's wrong after the new makeshift cane snaps under the leaning weight of the aged house. The young house understands and begins walking down the shoreline (likely towards his old place of rest) with the doghouse following him.

["CGI **Award Winning ** Animated Shorts HD: "Home Sweet Home" - by Home Sweet Home Team." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 14 Dec. 2015.]

         This work was very professionally done. The animators who worked on this paid attention to every minor detail and spared no expense of effort; the lighting was fantastic, everything was almost hyperrealistic. The motion of each object was smooth and seemed very natural with appropriate use of physics and went along with the very nature of the outside world.
         The creators of the story taught a very touching lesson using houses as their actors and made them so relatable that at the end, the viewer feels empathy for the main character. It may seem silly to feel pity for a fake house on a computer screen, but that's the power behind the animators and their storytelling ability without uttering a single word on screen.
          An element I would like to take is the hyperrealistic settings the animation uses surrounding the communities. It also tells a magnificent story that any good animator must be able to do.
       

British Invasion + 50 Years

     The British Invasion began over 50 years ago with the Beatles taking over the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 and sweeping the United States. Shortly after came British icons The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and dozens more. The Beatles are arguably the most iconic of these groups and the pioneers of the British Invasion.

     In paying homage to the British kings of the 60's, I underwent a project to design their instruments and recreate their designated Museum in Liverpool, England. This is not going to be a short project, but rather take what could be an annoyingly long time. I am up to the challenge, though, as I began the project with what I knew best: Ringo Starr's classic Ed Sullivan drum set.

     I started with the 4 piece set because I designed a drum set last year and knew my way around it in thanks with the critiques I received from judges at the eMagine media festival last year (right). As you can see, it's not too bad upon initial inspection. However, it needed a lot of work regarding details: a lot of it was out of proportion, the drum cylinders aren't very cylindrical, etc. I used these main critiques from the judges to improve my set this year (below). I began with the bass drum, moved on to the hi-tom, low-tom, snare, and all 3 cymbals. All in all, it took about a month from start to finish, roughly as long as it took me to build the first one. I shortened my time because I knew the project already and I knew my way around it and could do it more quickly. I lost that time back by going for detail and perfection.

I gave myself a few minutes to relax before moving on to the second most iconic Beatles instrument: Paul McCartney's "Violin Bass": the Hofner. Designing the stringed instruments will definitely be harder and take more time than the drums because there's more complexity to them and more details I have to pay attention to as well as the fact that I have yet to animate a single one prior to beginning this project. My goal for the Hofner is to have it done by December 1st. After that, I'll jump right into the design of John Lennon's Rickenbacker style guitar and I want to have it completed by February 1st and then I can finish it all out with George Harrison's signature Gretsch Duo Jet Guitar by March and hopefully have built the room and other little pieces of memorabilia into it by then and have only the camera work left to submit to the eMagine media festival a month later. However, this time line should be skewed because once I design one of the guitars, the other two should come quicker with practice. Once completed, this will quite likely be my proudest work as an animator and I cannot wait to showcase it to the world. 

The Beatles and the White Room

          I have two goals I want to accomplish by the end of this semester: I want to get a large chunk, if not finish, done with my upcoming eMagine project and start a collaborative project with a few other members from the e-Communication program.
         As for the eMagine project, there are a few things anybody should know about the context of that phrase. EMagine is a media festival that students around the greater Kansas City area can enter their works or designs in one of four major categories: Animation, Graphic Design, Video Production, or Web Design. I have aspirations to enter the Animation category in the same sub-category I entered last year; I want to win the top prize in the Mechanical animation category. My goals are to have a sort of Beatles Hall of Fame theme this year.
          The Beatles are arguably the greatest band to have ever lived and are statistically the most successful band to have existed despite only recording for 6 years. I want to pay homage to the Fab Four by constructing a Hall of Fame featuring their biographies, their most famous instruments, and other miscellaneous Beatles memorabilia while the camera goes through a bit of a walk-through to a Beatles song that has yet to be determined. Short term, anyway, is to do the major instruments of each of the Beatles. I am currently about 70% of the way done with Ringo Starr's famous Ludwig drum set that was featured during the Beatles' early years including their performance on the Ed Sullivan show.
          This shares top priority with my other collaborative project.
          As for the collaborative project, a few friends from the e-Communication program and I want to construct a short film that includes at least the aspects of mechanical 3D animation as well as video production. We had the idea that somebody would wake up in a white room (or any other color) with no clue of who they are, where they come from, or where they are. Their only communication will exist with the loudspeaker that resides in the room. The audience nor the main character has any idea whether or not the voice on the other side is a friendly face or a ferocious foe.
My part in that would be to construct the actual room and work on the cameras inside the room and oversee the filming in the Media Room at Olathe Northwest, which is essentially a giant green screen. We want to finish this by semester and also submit this to the eMagine festival in April.

On top of all of this, I plan to keep my interests in graphic design to design my indoor soccer team's crest and other various projects. This will remain on the back-burner until everything else is done, though.

Causing an Explosion in School

The final project we had the privilege to work on was to film over a green screen and apply it into a real life scenario. I worked with my colleague Travis Howell on a project that kind of resembled building an airplane as it was flying.
We had the original idea of filming ourselves on a green scree and import ourselves to make it seem as though we were walking down a hallway. Because we had a couple weeks to work, we decided to take it one step further and animate the hallway ourselves.
I went into Maya and started thinking: what exactly would you find down a school hallway? The answers were fairly simple: lockers, trash cans, bulletin boards, doors etc. I started by making a simple box that would eventually serve as the hallway. I only used it for a few minutes to animate the original locker that I would later duplicate many times to give the illusion that there were a plethora of lockers that stood down the hallway. As soon as I sculpted the first locker, I duplicated it many times and as soon as there was a basic layout, I hid the layer that contained the hallway and began going to work on more specific aspects of the lockers.
Once I had textured and put in all the little details of the lockers, I brought the hallway back into the project and began thinking of what else was missing. Naturally, I thought of a trashcan.
The trashcan was a simple build; all I had to do for the trashcan was to build a cylinder and delete half of a sphere and combine them. I decided to take it one step further, so I added a quick illustration I did of a fairly generic high school name and elected to put it on the trash can.

The next step was to animate the doors, and Travis Howell was in charge of those so he gave them to me and I had the ability to import them and simply jut them into the sides of my hallway. Next, I had to include lighting, so I used an ambient light and it lit the hallway perfectly. I would eventually change the lighting in After Effects, but it effectively did what I needed it to do for the time being. The final product was this:

The next step was filming. Travis Howell and I went down to the e-Communication studio which is essentially one large green screen. We filmed multiple shots, but stuck with one shot specifically which was just an over-the-shoulder shot of me "walking" that we would later stick into the actual project. After we took care of the filming, we dragged the footage into a new After Effects composition which already had the hallway shot ready to go. One problem we noticed right away was that when I went to remove the green screen, there was just enough of a green reflection on parts of me that I became a little transparent when I was walking. Thankfully, I had help in correcting the problem by darkening the footage and playing around with a lot of borders. With this finally taken care of, I added an adjustment layer because of a new direction I decided I wanted to take the project.

Because the camera I used to zoom through the hallway seemed a little quick, I got the sense that my walking had to be urgent, as if I had to rush to do something. I decided the lighting needed to be a little moody to fit the scenario.  Below are the "before" and "after" shots respectively.

I decided to add an explosion behind the double doors at the end of the hallway which would resolve to the viewer why there was a sense of urgency in my walking. After I threw in the explosion, I added a few softened glows to emphasize the brightness and illumination of the fire. Afterwards, I knew that an alarm would be necessary, so I went to ismfilms.com to find a few sirens that I threw in. After that, I took a new Matte layer and constantly changed the velocity to make it look like there was a red siren behind me.

For the end of the project, I knew credits were necessary, but I didn't want to be obnoxious about them because the clip was only about 25 seconds long. I added the title "Union High School" to fade in after a black background layer faded over everything except the siren while keeping the alarms going off. After the title fade back away, I gave two simple names: Sean Lewis and Travis Howell. I had the idea that that would be all that was necessary to give the sense of hopelessness rather than cheer. Below was the final result after two renders.