It was hot out. Our Macs weren’t quite able to cope. So we put ice packs on them.
Monthly Archive for July, 2011
My latest post for Falkvinge on Infopolicy, about why even the most robotically sociopathic person should be for equal rights and opportunities for all human beings.
Most people feel that it is their moral obligation to help those who can’t help themselves; we help others to have healthy, happy, productive lives out of a duty to our fellow human beings. I agree, but forget morals — helping our peers survive and thrive even makes cold, logical sense.
Evolutionary biology and Darwinian theory might have you believe otherwise: the fit succeed and survive, the weak fail and perish, and by interfering with this process, we hold back the advancement of humanity. But the true evolution with which we need to be concerned is our new stage of evolution: ideological.
Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy
You see that picture? That’s the result of me not thinking ahead.
See, today, Raye Gestwick — the voice of Leora in Your Face is a Saxophone — came to my bedroom recording studio to record her lines for Episode 2. Had I been thinking, I would have had the bright idea to take a photo of her actually standing at the microphone, delivering her lines. But I didn’t, so now all I have is the microphone stand still set up, the mixer still sitting on top of my laundry hamper, after she’d wrapped up and left.
But anyway, now that we have Raye’s lines, Episode 2′s dialogue is completely recorded, and we’re now free to animate every single scene. Animation’s going a bit slower this week because Erica Frohnhoefer, my other animator, is out of town, but it’s still progressing.
Here’s an article I wrote for Falkvinge on Infopolicy, the third in a three-part series on how the theoretically reasonable and rational “profit motive” is actually broken and damaging to society. But we can fix it.
A banker offers you a loan so that you can buy a house located near your cushy new job. You sign, comfortable that your salary will allow you to afford the payments. Months later, your employer downsizes, and your job disappears. With no job, you can’t pay back your loan. But the banker’s not upset — in fact, he was hoping for this. As you miss payments, your interest rate goes up. You need a new job to pay your increasing debt, and conveniently enough, the banker is the only one in town hiring. This is the crux of the issue with the profit motive: those who profit can put harmful pressure on others.
At its core, profit is power. Whether it takes the form of having many coins, being owed many debts, or something else entirely, profit is a measure of one’s ability to get other people to do things. By giving a merchant money, I can get her to give me her product. By reminding my friend of all the favors I’ve done for him, I can get him to do me a very large one. I gain these abilities through profit.
As I’ve tried to drive home, this is a perfectly reasonable thing to desire, and a perfectly natural thing by which to be motivated. But today, sometimes profit enables us to make people do things that they don’t want to do. Is this a necessary evil, or just another fixable bug?
Continue reading at Falkvinge on Infopolicy
Principal animation for Your Face is a Saxophone, Episode 2 has been going on for about a week now. I’m working with Erica Frohnhoefer to A) split the workload, and B) bring her animation talents to the table. Already, the character animation from both of us is looking far more expressive and dynamic than the pilot episode.
I’ve also worked out a much more effective lighting technique, using primarily directional lights rather than point lights — it gives us some nice subtle shading without the headache of positioning a bunch of points. We’ll be using spotlights here and there to cast shadows, but for the most part we’ll be using directional and ambient lighting. You can see the results in the freeze-frame below: subtle, and nice-looking.
Speaking of subtlety, I realized that the pilot suffered from a bit too much “LOOK WE HAVE MOTION BLUR AND DEPTH OF FIELD!!!”-ing.
The motion blur, I kinda have an excuse for: I only realized what exactly the “Shutter Angle” option did after all of the animation was rendered. Apple Motion defaults to a 360° shutter angle for motion blur, which makes something resembling sense if you’re doing traditional motion graphics. For character animation, it’s, in retrospect, absurd. Observe:
Click for full size
By the way, Apple Motion was being a bitch trying to render out these two frames, so I just ended up taking screenshots of the viewer window. And the frame up top of the cubicle took about 3 minutes to render out to a PNG, even though it took only 3 seconds to render it inside the damn program. Oh, and they completely borked the Render Current Frame function in Motion 5. So, I lied, Apple Motion still sucks.
By the way, Apple Motion was being a bitch trying to render out these two frames, so I just ended up taking screenshots of the viewer window. And the frame up top of the cubicle took about 3 minutes to render out to a PNG, even though it took only 3 seconds to render it inside the damn program. Oh, and they completely borked the Render Current Frame function in Motion 5. So, I lied, Apple Motion still sucks.
Needless to say, for the future, we’re using a 72° shutter.
Depth of field, on the other hand, I don’t have much of an excuse for at all. It was just overdone. We’ll still have it, and still rack focus when it’s dramatically useful, but it’ll actually be at plausible levels this time.
