Reflection

     Four years of e-Communication and here I am sitting in my last class on my last day as I write this reflection. I'm still trying to figure out what happened and where the time went. I remember filming for the first e-Comm promo video from my first year like it was yesterday. I remember making those first connections and meeting new people. Time flew by, but that time didn't fly by in vain.

     The amount of things I learned during my time in e-Comm cannot be written down on a single blog post, so I'll stick with the main bullet points.

Deadlines: Deadlines are a must and you have to be responsible for your own time. If you let something sit there without doing any work on it, nothing will get done.

Communication: You cannot be isolated and introverted if you're going to advance anywhere in any media field. You have to build relationships early and effectively and be able to collaborate with anybody-no matter how little you two get along.

Take Criticism: Criticism can hurt but it's always a good thing. Nothing would ever improve without critique, so it's important to know how to take it. Rarely will the intention be to hurt you, but even if it is, take the notes with grace and be able to react well to it and make adjustments based on the comments.

     Deadlines: The past two years, I have been largely responsible for my own deadlines, but it's not as easy as circling a date on the calendar. I have had large projects sit and stew while I sat idly by until I saw that date come up quickly and I panic and spend hours and hours working on them for several days at a time trying to finish.

Communication: Planning Route Sixteen was not an easy task, and it would have been much harder doing it on my own. Thankfully, it taught me how to properly collaborate and communicate with others to put out the best show and projects that we are/were able to.

Take Criticism: I've entered projects into e-Magine the past two years and each year they tore into it. Thankfully, though, I took their notes and rolled with them. I improved the project that didn't place Junior year and got it placed by Senior year.

     An obvious weakness of mine is procrastination/distraction. It is a little too easy for me to blow off a huge project so I can slack off during the hour until it becomes too late to make something the best that it can be. However, this wasn't for nothing. I was able to understand my weaknesses before something majorly important came before me in college. I learned what I need to do to fix this before it becomes severely problematic.

A strength of mine is my communication. The last 4 years have taught me the importance of communication, and I have been able to make a lot of collaborative projects because of my communication skills that I have acquired.

     I figure I will be able to keep doing freelance animation in college even though I'm not going to be studying it in school. I will be able to use my communication skills to land jobs and be able to work well with people once I enter the professional field concerning my degree.

     If I have one regret, though, it's that I didn't squeeze everything out of e-Communication that I did. I too often used it as an excuse to jump on the computer a few hours a day, and I wish I would have spent more time doing what I came here to do instead of what I'm supposed to leave at home. If there was something to change, it would be my work ethic and mentality towards e-Comm.

     e-Communication was easily one of the best decisions I've made in my life. It brought me to a school I love with some of the most creative minds in the school district with opportunities that I didn't thing were possible. All in all, thank you e-Communication for helping me become the person I am.

Route 16

Route Sixteen

Concept:

     The object was to find an alternative to the normal demonstration that occurred for the seniors. In the past, seniors were to stand in front of their peers and teachers and professionals in an auditorium with their work in the background. There were flaws in this method and the major question that was brought up was: When will this be useful for e-Communication students after this?

     The answer was simple: it will not be. Companies will rarely ask for a formal stand-up presentation of a portfolio, so training students to present this way seemed arbitrary.
With this in mind, we quickly determined that the best solution was to make the event more of a fair than a presentation. Each student would be allowed to have their own table and talk to potential employers/family/friends at their own pace/leisure and be able to take a more individualized approach.

Planning:

     For the five major strands e-Communication has (Animation, Convergence Journalism, Graphic Design, Video Production, and Web Production), a student leader was chosen and I was honored to take on the leadership role for the Animation strand. We began to meet almost four months before the event to plan every small detail.

     First on the table was a theme. This process took roughly a month alone just for the concepts to build on their own before one was narrowed down. Several of the ideas were more professional such as Expose, Reveal, etc., but ultimately, we decided that e-Communication was not supposed to be formal. One idea that was thrown out was Journey, and instead of sticking with that name, I used a small idea from that to build the main theme: Route Sixteen.

     To build off that, we just wrote down the things we thought of when we heard Route Sixteen. The main ideas were road maps, interstate signs, roads etc. This, of course, was all pertinent to the graphic design leader, Jess Richards (https://www.behance.net/jessicarichards1022). Soon thereafter, she had the logo and color scheme available, and we were very impressed.
     After the logo was done, we got right to work on the website and the animation. I was asked to take on the animation of the logo for the website and show of the night.
     Having this task, I immediately began sketching concepts and ideas that I could make later depending on how much I liked it. My first goal was to have everything sort of fly in on its own (left), but because I couldn't get the logo in separate pieces, it didn't work out like that. So I started thinking more about how I could use the car at the bottom of the logo. I thought about having it just drive to the right with a pan through a forest or road, but it didn't seem like it was enough, so I put it around a circle and had it spin around until it hit the sign and the circle around it would fade. I still felt like it was a little boring, so I added some scenery to combine my first landscape idea with this one. Initially, I put way too much in it and had it do too many rotations so that it was difficult to look at and it strained your eyes. So i got rid of a lot while still making it look full and slowed the rotation speed until I got the final result on the left.



     After I was done animating, we still had a lot to plan before the show. We took straight to Pinterest and saving ideas we liked until we came up with our plan: Every student would be given a gray tablecloth over their 4'x4' table wit ha nameplate with their "stop" in the show. For example, I was the 4th stop, so my nameplate had a number 4 on it with the hexagon from the original logo. Students would also be given their own computer to display their work over their 4 years in e-Communication and Graphic Design students got a backdrop to hang up some of their other work. The endorsed students also got a sign to signal that they were endorsed and students were encouraged to bring something extra that was pertinent to e-Communication and important to them. Once everything was done, the planning was complete, and we just had to wait for the show to begin.

Execution:

     On Thursday, April 28th, it was time for Route Sixteen. Even though the event didn't start until 6:00, our doors were opened at about 5:30 and people began going around at that time. Parents came, professionals, former students, and many more just to witness the spectacular event we put together. Even though the planners were presenting and participating in the event, it was awesome seeing all of the work we put into it come together into one beautiful night.

Most people that came were interested in just about everybody's work because of the diversity of said work across all 50 something seniors. Everybody participating put a lot of work into it and, as someone who helped to plan it, it meant a lot that others cared as much as I hoped they would.

As for myself, I had my family come and even had a few friends come surprise me after they both said they were busier earlier. After boasting the e-Communication program, it felt great to walk the walk and prove to them how great our program truly is.

The Ed Sullivan Show Presents

The Ed Sullivan Show Presents:

Since the beginning of the school year (August, 2015), I have been working on a project modeling the Beatles' most recognizable instruments from their first string of performances on The Ed Sullivan Show. This includes Paul McCartney's Hofner Bass, John Lennon's Rickenbacker, and, of course, the iconic 4 piece Ludwig Oyster drum set of Ringo Starr. 

The project originated because I wanted to make some changes to the drum model I sculpted last year (left) and make it more realistic. Some notes I received were that I needed to have more faces on each cylinder to smooth it out a little bit, make everything more proportional to each other and so on. When I learned I no longer had the .mb file I did all of my work on, I had to start from scratch, so I started exactly where I started last year: the kick drum. 

The kick drum is the basis for everything else and made it possible to accurately size everything in the project. Once I had the size of the bass drum, I modeled the cylinders for the 3 other drums in the set before moving on to more intricate details such as the clasps holding them in place, the stands, etc. Once the basic drums were sculpted completely, I began drawing up the stands for each of the drums and cymbals. The main concern with the first project was that the stands for the cymbals were only realistic at the base, and the shortcuts I took everywhere were noticeable. Keeping this in mind, I very carefully made sure every small detail was perfect before animating the next. After the drums, stands, and cymbals were done, I got to focus on the drum pedals.

Initially, these weren't supposed to be a big deal because they weren't originally supposed to be seen because the drums would be in front of them in a museum style. Of any single piece of the drums that I sculpted, or any of the instruments for that matter, this part took me the longest as I spent about 3 weeks alone sculpting it to perfection. Thankfully, it was not all for none as I ended up changing the design and they presented after all.

Once the drums were done, I was able to move on to the guitars. I started with the most recognizable of the bunch, Paul McCartney's Hofner bass. I began by laying down a reference image and tracing the body of the guitar with the Create Polygon tool. After this, I manipulated the points one final time before extruding the body to give it volume. For the neck, I originally used a rectangular prism, but it didn't take long to realize how non-effective it was at looking clean, so I replaced it with a cylinder and cut the cylinder in half across the length of it, and it looked perfect. I would do the same for all of the frets and moving the bottom vertices out to give it a little bit of shape. Once all three pieces of the bass were finished (head, neck, body), I sculpted the strings. The strings were just cylinders that I manipulated to bend and twist how I needed them to twist to look accurate. 

There was not a whole lot different that I did to the Rickenbacker, other than instead of making it a left-handed instrument (as I did with the Hofner), I made it a traditional right-handed instrument, added two more strings, and that was about it aside from smaller details about the actual body itself. The process remained the same regardless.

Once I finished the three instruments, I realized I did not have enough time to add the fourth instrument of the Beatles, George's Gretsch guitar, so I took the cut and sought to rebuild the stage from their second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, and then I worked with appropriate lighting to give it the same effect as the night they performed live for America.

But what good is a tour of the Beatles' instruments without a little bit of Beatles music? With this in mind, I edited the very famous, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Beatles!" quote from Ed Sullivan himself with a remastered version of their first song they played that night, I Want to Hold Your Hand and trimmed it down to just over a minute by replacing the second chorus with the final chorus and cutting it short.

After this, I added a few cameras with a few theatric angles and strung it all together in After Effects once they were all rendered out appropriately. To the right is the final result that I entered into eMagine, the local media festival in the Kansas City metropolitan area my high school hosts. 

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.

Fighting In School

Only so much freedom may be assigned to a student before they begin to completely fall off track. First Quarter, we, the students, were assigned to create an animation that was done originally and to our own taste. This was not limited to any one certain style. We were granted the opportunity to explore anything we had wanted to. For me, I had chosen to sculpt and model my very own city 3 dimensionally. 

Again, only so much freedom may be offered to a student. For the second project of the semester, we were given the opportunity to work with stop-motion. (Stop Motion -noun -A cinematographic technique whereby the camera is repeatedly stopped and started, for example to give animated figures the impression of movement).

The students had been herded into groups that shared similar ideas and concepts. I had initially come up with an idea revolving around chess. The idea was that the chess pieces would battle and display the progression of war. However, the popular consensus in my group was more of a free-running theme. I decided that ultimately, this idea was more fun and easier than mine.

Then we (my group and I) began to storyboard. Before there is any storyboarding, an idea must be processed and toyed around with. The plan was to allow a fight scene between two characters over something menial and follow the lines of a floor. We had thought of many places to shoot including several hallways, outside and even a theater. Eventually, though, we elected to do it in our school's smallest gymnasium because there was scarcely any traffic through there.

Storyboarding didn't take very long as we saw exactly what we wanted to do when we walked through the Gymnasium and took a few reference shots. Our storyboard wasn't quite a storyboard, though. It had merely been a sketch of the basketball court with a bunch of arrows that would direct our path. On the actual storyboard, though, we sketched out the live action that preceded the stop-motion.
 As for the quarrel that initiates the fight sequence, the cause had been debated. A few ideas had been tossed around, but everybody's favorite had been that the fight had been sparked by a character not sharing his bubble wrap with the other character.

Once we were storyboarded, we collected all of our gear (tripod, camera, crane for aerial shots, and the bubble wrap) and headed towards the gymnasium. To our dismay, we soon discovered that the gym would to be available during 7th hour because that's where cheerleading practiced. If that wasn't enough, we later found out that the weightlifting class typically inhabited the gym during 6th hour. That left us with the conclusion that it would be now impossible to do our video as we had storyboarded it.

We didn't have enough time to lose any. With two of our group members traveling to New York for a week, we had to start shooting immediately. Eventually, we decided to use a hallway as it had some differentiating tile colors that we deemed acceptable. 

We got right to work. My friend Travis and I were the actors with Sam positioning us. Ian worked the camera while Noah typically took care of our stuff. Spencer assisted Ian when he was with us (which was in 7th hour). We finished shooting in roughly 3-4 days of actual shooting. Immediately afterward, Ian and Travis traveled onto New York. For several days following that, Spencer and Sam both had missed school, as well. I was on my own.

Altogether my role didn't call for me to help too much in the editing process, Sam had asked the group to clean up a few pictures that had a tripod leg in the shots. With everybody gone, I took it upon myself to edit them. It took me about 2 hours in total because Photoshop is slow. Below are a few examples.

This was the original picture. As you can see, the tripod leg is VERY visible in the bottom of the photo as well as another foot of the tripod just left of it. These took about two minutes to clean up each, but there were over 60 to fix.

As you can see, I cleaned up the tripod leg along with most of their shadows. 

However, this wasn't the worst framed to deal with.

This was a real difficult frame to deal with because I had to fix both the tripod legs as well as Sam's legs. I endured through it, though, after about ten minutes, and finally cleaned up the frame to look fine. The only unfortunate result was a little black speck where the tripod leg was. I couldn't find a way to get rid of it cleanly, so I left it there in the hopes that nobody would notice if it went by at 12 fps.

I'm under the impression that the main goal of this project was to practice working with other people on animations because in the real world, riding solo and doing projects alone requires a lot more effort and time, so the more people helping you, the faster and more efficiently it will get done. In hindsight, I wish my group and I had checked to make sure the gymnasium would've been open every day or near every day rather than cling to the hope that it would be vacant for us. To make this lesson applicable to the real world, make sure everything can be guaranteed before diving into something headfirst. 

To have never worked together before, my group and I really clicked and we really fell into place. The roles of the project were split up quite evenly and the work distribution was crafted just about perfectly. If I were to do this project again (which I will be doing next year), I think my group hit the nail on the head with distribution of work. Everything was organized and everybody understood their role.

As for what I'm taking away from this project in general, I feel it's dire that one must storyboard and have a developed idea before starting a project. Some smaller projects it may be okay to jump into, but when it comes to big assignments, such as the last two I've done this year, storyboarding is vital. 

Overall, this was a fun project and a nice break away from the 3D world of animation. I would do this again if I had the right software at home to do so. All in all, to the left is the finished project below...or so we thought. 

After unveiling the previous video to the rest of our class, it was brought to our attention that a few holes existed in our project. One such hole was that there was no explanation as to how we ended up on the floor despite just being on the bench in a hallway. We took it upon ourselves to fill that unexplained gap by going back to the hallway that we shot in and shot a few more clips. We added a few seconds to show that we were thrown onto the floor in a running motion after we had pulled each other to the ground forcefully while throwing the Bubble Wrap ahead of us. 
As well as it turned out, it was a very slow, painful process because my colleague and I kept forgetting to bring from home what we needed; I kept forgetting, along with Travis, the clothes we wore during the scene. Eventually, though, we managed to finally bring what we needed and got the shooting done in a day. Editing would take several days more including the credits. Ian worked out all of the kinks on the credits as Sam would continue to make sure the editing ran smoothly. To the right is the true final result.

Check out other great blogs by my groupmates:

Ian Gash

Sam Howell

Travis Howell

Spencer Lindsey

Noah Stafford

Quarter I Project - Overall

Creating an entire city from scratch was not as easy as I thought it might be. I didn't expect it to be easy, by any means, but I didn't anticipate how much work would go into everything once the city was sculpted.

Conception

The purpose behind the animation was to initially take a major city (i.e. Detroit or St. Louis or Milwaukee etc.) and find a way to make it unique. That plan fell through soon enough as I realized how hard it was to take an entire city and build it up. It didn't take long to just take several buildings from cities and other small, generic details from other cities and build them up into one city. A few buildings I modeled, for example, was the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center from Detroit, Freedom Tower from New York, and Willis Tower from Chicago.

Planning

I didn't do a ton of planning. I think this is where my plan fell apart from the building. I just laid down the streets and started sculpting immediately.

Creation

Creation of such a big project was definitely overwhelming. I decided to start at the very center of the city and work my way outwards. I began with the GM Building from Detroit to serve as the city's tallest building and centerpiece. Simply creating most of the buildings took roughly a month (including texturing). Then I had to worry about lights and settings. I deemed a mountain bowl would be suitable for the city. In reality, building a city in the middle of a mountain depression would be a very bad idea, but this is animation, where anything is possible. After that, I took another week and a half adjusting lights. The final few days I spent attempting to render everything out. Maya is not very receptive when it comes to rendering projects with a lot of frames, as you can see below.

Self-Critique

Rendering was not a dear friend to me. At first, I had a plan to let a camera run through most of the city to see almost every detail. That worked for about three days before I started to mess with its home key. When I set the home aside from the middle of the camera to the middle of the city (to get a 360 shot of it), I thought by setting keyframes, the axis would be unaffected. I was very wrong. When I tampered with the home axis of the camera, it inflicted devastation across the entire project. Instead of going back and trying to save the dying horse, I did the quick thing and added a new camera that moved slower and had much less detailing. It works so I can turn something in and still meet my deadline (don't get me wrong, it's still good camerawork), but it's not exactly what I had anticipated. Then the rendering process turned out to be very slow. On top of a slow render, I returned to school from my absence in which I left my project to render, I found that only about 1,150 frames had rendered. This is under a fourth of my entire project. I thought I'd try again to render everything out in Maya. Maya wasn't on the same page; Maya and its renderers would act like they were going to work, but in reality, they simply quit working, as shown above. In general, I never got to self-critique my final result because there was no final result. This also goes for the class-critique.

If I were to do this project again, I would definitely account for everything in my timetable. I would've rearranged a couple deadlines and moved different deadlines to different days etc. I didn't even think about how long the camerawork would be and how long it would take to render at all. That was merely poor planning on my part.

Upon next quarter, maybe, I'll be able to redo the last portion of it as I saved some 86 different files in different times in case something like this happened.

Overall, it was a great introduction to true, free-willed animation. I can't wait to do this over the next 7 quarters and hopefully in college, too.

Quarter I Project - Fifth Deadline

My last deadline was sort of absorbed by my fourth. With time on my hands, I knew I had only a little bit to do. What wasn't anticipated, though, how time-consuming these little menial acts could be. What I needed to do was get the lights to work. Then I had to create some artificial light via sun/moon respectively. Then I had to time the streetlights to go on and off depending on how the sun acted.

I decided I was going to start with the streetlights. At least, the base principle of them. Sooner than later I realized how bad of an idea it was. At first, I programmed only one light with keyframes to turn on at frame 600. 

I didn't know how my sun was going to get there in only 600 frames. Another thing I didn't account for was how keyframes aren't duplicated like an object. I had to sit down for roughly 90 minutes and make sure every streetlight had the exact same keyframes and intensity etc. 

 It took me the entire duration before I realized I had been setting the keyframes wrong. When working solely with objects, one only has to click "s" on the keyboard to set a keyframe. This does not apply for textures and intensity and all of the little details within. Rather, I had to go back again and set keyframes for every light by right-clicking the "intensity" icon (shown in the first picture) and click "set key" (shown below).

Once I had finally finished the streetlights, it was time for the moon and Sun. The moon was easy: all I had to do was set a very soft, but noticeable, white light to give a realistic sense of how we see at night and set it constantly. It was also nice because the directional light I used was stationary.

The sun was not so forgiving of work. At first, I had made it a 24 hour simulation, or a full rotation around the project. The dilemma that lies within this idea was there would be very little time for actual light to be shown on the city. Maybe 2/5 of the project would happen in the sunlight. So I started the sun right above the "x" and "z" axes. Then I made it finish after 7200 frames on the exact opposite side of my map. Once that was done, I made a new directional light that I paired with the sun so no matter where the sun went, the directional light followed its cue. 

I was finally almost done with my project. I had to do only two more things: create a camera path and a sky. The sky seemed tricky enough as it was and I need a camera path first. So I decided to start from frame one on the highway and make my way through my city. We'll see how it goes.

Quarter I Project - Fourth Deadline

The fourth deadline I had assigned myself was to have all of the small details finished. Being proactive, I finished this last week. This gave me the time to try to get a running start on my next deadline, texturing. This is technically my fifth deadline, but I remind myself to add some smaller details to the buildings as I go.
Think hard. Almost every major city has a sports team. Baltimore has the Orioles and Ravens, Kansas City has the Chiefs, Sporting and the Royals, Pittsburgh has the Pirates, Penguins, and Steelers, Detroit has the Tigers, Red Wings, Lions and Pistons, etc. Every city promotes their team(s) somehow. I decided to add a sports team into the mix despite not having room enough for a stadium. I began promoting the Cayuga Aces.
That sort of brings me to the name of the city: Cayuga. Cayuga is Shawnee for "starting place." I thought this was fitting because this was my starting point in attempting to make a career out of animating.
Anyway, this was the sign that I designed:

The colors weren't too hard to fit. I just though gold and silver sort of coincided nicely, and it would break from the stereotypical "red and black" color scheme of playing cards.

With Cayuga as the name of the city, every Bus Station needs a sort of introduction and a "welcome." In Photoshop, I made a banner that I later incorporated into a "welcome" sign that I threw on the Bus Station. You'll notice also that the building is textured with a custom brick texture. It's not perfect, but it saves me from distortion. Later, I will bump map everything to give it the realistic grooves. If you can't see the bricks, here's another picture that's just a little zoomed in on another building:

I also just noticed that the only texture on the patios was "Lambert1," the default texture. So to save me from some trouble, I just clicked on the patios and added the texture I added to the Crayola Building. After all, a lot of buildings in the same city are made by the same company who uses the same materials, anyway:

As you can see, it's a bit grainy, which all realistic concrete is.                                 One more major building left untextured was the parking garage, which, actually, is two different buildings. I just created its own texture and put that on all of the walls and sides then took all of the levels (where the cars' wheels would actually be) and applied the street texture from earlier. Once I'd done that, I took the street hashes and duplicated them until I had a few applicable parking spaces. Once that was done, that was the major texturing portion.

One thing that proved to be a challenge was the scenery. When an image was rendered out, there would be black on the outside of the city. I needed something to fill it out. The simplest solution (in my opinion), was to close off the city with a mountain range. Of course, if this were real life, it'd be a terrible idea to build a city in the bowl of a mountain range because of flooding issues. However, this is only an animation for a project. The first part of the project resulted in this:

I needed a way to get into the city, though, for effect. So I added a bit of a "highway" in the outskirts of the inner range. This is shown below. After that, I had to make a tunnel through the mountains instead of lowering them altogether. It seems a little tough at first, but all I had to do was difference the road (made a little thicker) and the mountain. Then all I had to do was take the edges from inside the mountains and connect the vertices on them to make a tunnel.

The little box around the city is where the highway is.

I figured because I actually had enough space, I could actually model a rough sketch of the baseball stadium for the team I'd promoted, the "Aces." When it was all sculpted out and textured, this was the result: