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.