Archive for the 'Filmmakery' Category

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YFIAS Episode 2 On Track for Late October/Early November

Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 12:13 PM on August 20, 2011 in Filmmakery. 2 Comments Tags: . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/9f

Principal animation of Your Face is a Saxophone Episode 2 is almost halfway finished. My lovely assistant, Erica Frohnhoefer, had to go back to college this week, so I’ll be on my own from here on. But I’ve got a good bit of momentum going, and the episode should be online by the end of October, or the beginning of November at the latest.

Just wanted to post this since things have been quiet for a while. I haven’t had as much time to produce video diaries as I’d have liked, but a few weeks ago David Lanz was down on Long Island shooting some footage of us working, so there’s some material ready to be edited into one as soon as I get the opportunity.

I’ll be taking a bit of a break from animation from August 28th to September 3rd, as I’ll be in Washington, DC helping to document the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline protest. It’s okay, though, because it’s for the environment and stuff.

UPDATE: Actually, I won’t be in Washington. Hurricane Irene screwed up my travel plans.

    Speeding Up a Slow Mac with Ice Packs

    Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 10:07 PM on July 22, 2011 in Filmmakery. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/Nq

    It was hot out. Our Macs weren’t quite able to cope. So we put ice packs on them.

      Dialogue For YFIAS Episode 2 is Done

      Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 7:26 PM on July 14, 2011 in Filmmakery. 0 Comments Tags: , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/df


      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.

        There’s Too Much Motion Blur

        Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 6:12 PM on July 7, 2011 in Filmmakery. 0 Comments Tags: , , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/VA

        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.

        Freeze-frame of Eddie and Blake in a cubicle

        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
        Comparison of 360 and 72-degree motion blur shutter
        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.

          A YFIAS Review of Apple Motion 5

          Published by Zacqary Adam Green at 10:20 PM on July 5, 2011 in Filmmakery. 2 Comments Tags: , . Short URL: http://plankhead.com/gG

          Remember how much trouble Apple Motion was while animating the first episode of Your Face is a Saxophone? Well, now Motion 5 is out. Here’s our experience: