Research - Movement in Objects

Cubes









Different methods of expressing emotion through movement.

Spheres





A starting point for thinking about animating my characters.
I want to use the exaggerated squash and stretch with my sphere.
For the cube, it needs to be lazy and dopey, and it will have beveled edges so movement will need to be emphasized throughan almost 'over animation.'

this last video illustrates different weights of sphere. From this it has given me an indication of how to promote emotive energy within an object.
I feel that a sphere with erratic, light, bold movement will define the sphere as excitable and hopefully curious.

Character Design sheets - The Winkle Picker

Archetype Research

Archetypal Superhero - Research

Looking at descriptions, my idea of an archetype may be different. Longer publication series also have the potential to fall into more than one archetype. For example, the green lantern evolved from being a gimmick and a gageteer, to being a superman and a gageteer. Batman has been most of these.

2 Fisted Vigilante – He has a mask, his wits and a desire to do good, usually with his fists. He fights crime in the most literal sense, shooting it, punching it ect. Examples: Zorro, the Phantom, sometimes Batman.

The Vigilante Detective – He doesn't fight crime, he solves crime. He looks for clues, elicits confessions, and does everything we expect cops to do, but instead of a gun and a badge he has his mask and his wits. Examples: The Sandman, Batman, Sherlock Holmes.

Hero From the Past – One of King Arthur's knights, an Amazon princess, or a wizard. They may not actually be from the past, but their methods and morals usually harkens back to a better time "when justice ruled." Examples: Thor, Wonder Woman, Vigilante, Captain America (Lately, when he was introduced he was quite hip.)

The Superman – The guy with all the power, faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. He doesn't always have a lot of powers, but even the one power separated him so far from humanity that he can laugh off attempts by the local police force or even the army that tries to stop him. Examples: Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, the Martian Manhunter, The Flash.

The Outsider – An alien or a member of an ancient race, a mutant, ex-con or sometimes just a foreigner. This character just doesn't fit in. He is the one people society looks down on or is afraid of. But he wants to make the world better so he fights crime. He is often a Superman or a Gimmick as well. Examples: Martian Manhunter, the X-Men, The Hulk (sometimes), just about any alien super hero who is not a hot chick.

The Gageteer – Whether by his own invention, a powerful patron or just dumb luck, this guy has the right tool for the job. Power armor, sleep guns, a utility belt or a magic sword. Without his special weapons he is just a guy like everyone else, but when he has them he can take on the dark forces that threaten men. Examples: Iron Man, The Sandman, Starman,

The Gimmick: This guy only does one thing or has a very limited range of abilities. They are almost always tied to a limited theme. He flies or turns invisible. He can read minds or he is a super computer genius. The specialist of the super hero world. Sometimes he is so powerful even with the one ability that he is also a superman, but there is (mostly) just the one ability. Example: The Flash, Hawkman (mostly early years), Oracle, Spiderman, any of the Fantastic 4.

The Million Dollar Man – He is not a Superman, but he is better than most men. Olympic level athlete, smarter than the average bear, rich beyond compare or a master martial artist. He may or may not be supernaturally powered, but he is no so far above the curve that a couple of thugs with pistols aren't a threat. Examples: Batman, the Green Arrow, Nightwing, Captain America (although he has also been a superman.)

Meta Archetypes- Most heroes also fall into these archtypes in addition to one or more of the archtypes above:

* The Avenger – He doesn't want justice, he wants blood. Criminals are subhuman and need to pay. Ex. Punisher, Wolverine.
* The Protector – Some people fall through the cracks and need looking after. This guy watches out for them. Sometimes because the system has failed. Ex Zorro.
* The Boy Scout – Truth, Justice and the American way. Even criminals have lives worth saving, and you should eat brush your teeth three times a day. Basically, this hero is good to the point where it borders on stupid. Ex. Superfriends version of any superhero.
* The Champion – This hero upholds ideas, but not to the extreme of the Boy Scout. The ideals change, but are generally considered noble and upstanding ideals. Superman

Baf/No Baf - Not a review - One Aspect of the negative side of gaming.

This last week we were invited to a games conference in Bradford that i opted not miss out on. After the event i have been thinking about the pros and cons of making the decision i made.
Having been doing this course for a couple of months now, i am beginning to notice definite divides in approach and outlook amongst the people i am surrounded by. The weighting, as far as i can tell, is far more game and fantasy orientated than i expected, with care and attention being taken over doodles, character design, cartoons and comic book imagery.
I have no interest in this anymore. I stopped playing games properly a few years ago and have no inclination to go back to them. Not saying that i didn't enjoy my time with video games, the motivation to have them envelop me just isn't there anymore. Time for this, as far as i'm concerned, is not expendable. Having just played Res 5, to my mind in present context, playing a video games is metaphorical masturbation. There is no greater purpose. It is similar to the guitarist that only plays in his bedroom. It only benefits short term, and it only benefits the gamer. Its not giving back or enhancing peoples lives (in the hunter/gather sense of existence), seemingly the suits at the top operate on ego, games operate on ego, who can be one better than the rest, who has the most MONEY and who has the slickest presentation. I used to love it, but its all based on something that means nothing.
Take The Burning Man Festival for example. The concept of a progressive modern society that is created in the desert for a week or so each year... This also is an exercise in similar technological fallacy, however there this sense that its bringing people together to enrich and shape their existence for the better. Not to see which sweaty pizza fiend can create the best warlock or gremlin, but a synthesis of technology and humanity, people coming together to make machines and ideas something so much more than circuitry and plastic. People/humanity breath life into machines/mechanics, almost creating progressive, spiritual commune in which this ideology is given meaning and context.
I consider myself a dreamer, and a geek, my reality is fantasy (its all the same anyway) but i fail to see any benefit in this aspect off escapism any more. Its surely about being able to bring these ideas back from imagination land and using them to help progress humanity in reality. How many people can you aid playing a video game, how many lives are actually aided by war simulators, gore and violence?
The only positive i can see is that video games are a platform for people with quirky personalities to act out there twisted little fantasies, ensuring that slightly fewer people don't actually go out and buy a WW2 costume and a rifle and start shooting Germans or in a GTA sense, become a vigilante.......
All of this imagery combines in the collective unconscious or noosphere, as well as conscious being, clogging up space using the time/resources for ideas that help people, positive vibrations and global progression.

Having said all that i will be playing Mario Kart tonight and wasting some time with my freinds, but we will be together, enjoying each others company and enjoying shared experience, not holed up in a bedroom on my own basking in my own ego climbing to the top of some pathetic, unimportant score board just so i can say to myself
"Yes, Im the king of my own castle, in a kingdom that consisting of me, me and me."

Happiness is only real when shared!

(A train of thought that became more exaggerated as i wrote and got more frustrated with the topic.)

Influence and context

Modernity
by Cameron Chamberlain

Modernity from Cameron Chamberlain on Vimeo.

Heavily influenced by Mondrian, modernism and expansion. Simple colours and geometric's provide a minimalist context within which expansion is still apparent.
Also in recent thoughts on expansive communication networks and connectivity, it depicts a "growth of a city, and its daunting nature."
Interesting use of audio.

Normal Block & Ball animation from Nick Amlag on Vimeo.

In thinking about animating in 3d, im realizing careful attention needs to be taken over action and reaction. The physics of objects needs to be carefully considered and how one object interacts with another. Everything must have elasticity and move at speeds in context.

Exercise - repeat

Research - Bouncing ball

Illustrates fundamentals of time-line in animation
+ Ease in, ease out technique in Pencil.

Research - ease in ease out

Frames eased in and out over time!

Beginning to see the potential in Pencil. Really for 2d animation you need little else.
Still having difficulty being able to use tablets. Its an unnatural motion i feel.
Finally progress is beginning to emerge from confusion and perseverance.

MOVE! - Reworked concept and characters... In fact, new everything!

This feels better and hopefully simpler to create. I like the concept as its closer to what i want to be getting into further down the like.
Influence and research into colour theory and the psychological response to colour. This will hopefully allow me to translate emotion through colour as well as animation techniques emphasizing any specific feeling.
Research into symbiosis of sound and visual - John Cage....
.....

Move! - Characters - Thoughts After Maya

In creating these characters and attempting to recreate them 3d, the realization that they are still too complex to work with in Maya. I want to get rid of facial expressions, simplify forms and create a more abstract concept of narrative through action. concept is sound and will write it into context and research at a later date.

Downloaded the Maya demo to cover the rest of the time till deadline so progress can be made around the clock.

MOVE! - Initial character designs + storyboard

This runs from from bottom to top. (editing)

Disconnect

Western Mystery Tradition
Part of the magic and mystery of western earth-based traditions is a belief in the inner temples and teachings of Spirit and evolved humanity that exist within and beyond all time and space. Some of the western traditions include mystic Christianity, Druidism, Egyptian mystery, western magic, Qabala, Sufism, alchemy and the Knights Templar, etc. Shamanism Vs. Religion

Over the last three hundred years, westerners have become disconnected from nature, community, family and spirituality with the advents of the Age of Reason (thinking disconnected from being) and the Industrial Revolution. Religion, for most people, has become a mechanical and external process, a passive process, like television in which the seeker watches a priest, a ritual, and waits for something to be done to or for him or her. This dysfunction is a relatively new phenomenon, only about three hundred years old.



Western mystery traditions tend to value visualization over words. Our current model for culture and education is limited and biased to modes of talk and intellect. Up to 90% of our consciousness, such as body awareness, intuitive awareness and emotional intelligence is not being fully exercised under the regime.

Methods for participating.... meditations, guided journeys, shamanic journeying, breathing work, chanting, psycho-drama, spiritual theatre, ritual, dream work (including acting-out dreams), creative processes such as drumming, art, crafts, literature, music and poetry, dance and movement.

One must develop all three - mind, body and spirit and exist in all three - ultimately, they are one.

Move project - 1 - Time - Deconstructing a process.

Just finished off the initial stages of creating characters and story boarding for the MOVE project, trying to fathom how a traveled from point 0.0 - 0.1. Seemingly i have no concept of time or action from when i started my creative process. Time, in a materialistic, modern context, is linear construct that allows me to document this process, and yet somehow, this illusive concept escapes me whenever i enter a creative cycle. Throughout creating music, thinking in an abstract manner, faith, art... life, design, time takes on an archetypal image. Sand flooding between my fingers. More volatile than any river rapid terrain. An irretrievable zen that offers no sympathy.
However, if time is thought of as cyclical and infinite, there are infinite variables of potential that can manifest themselves in reality, if the right motivation is in place.
Working from a subconscious flow, i believe, a more natural, authentic outcome can be constructed, free from the restraints of day to day activity and thought cycles. These actions obviously still influence, but using alternative methods, it will influence at the balenced level its supposed to, not because your mind is flooded.
Calming the mind, whether it be through music, art, creative action, meditation, martial arts, drugs, prayer or/and faith.... allows the mind to work as one. Reducing thinking to a singularity or (zen), opens up these realms, free from time and ego, filled with cosmological signals, perfect syncratic geometry, patterns and foreign information. A realm where you stop questioning and thinking, because you already know... and start just being, existing, as one, mind in harmony with the soul, free to roam and digest all the beautiful information you are observing.
The important bit, in attaining these valuable bites of knowledge, is that after the experience, these should be documented and exposed for all to see. Whether this is in writing and telling stories, art work, songs, dance, a devolution of ones ego is needed in order to share this information to benefit other people. There are many similarities between the artist and the shaman.
Alternatively, Its the comic book adaptation of using your powers, (knowledge gained) for good instead of evil.
Round full circle - during this project i had no concept of time due to this creative process, and now i come to document it, i find myself working backwards from 0.1 - 0.0.

One other observation to do with time and the sensation felt through the creative process - promoting the positives in stories, myth and legend.... 'methods alternative cultures'..... Is.....

Ive noticed that if you do something, anything, and its a SHARED, positive, happy experience at the time, time as your 'doing' is reduced to what feels like nothing (an acceleration). However the MEMORY of that event lasts for a lifetime.
If your doing something you don't enjoy, the time appears to take forever, and your memory of it fades rapidly.
Its an obvious ratio. But when thought about, actually means something. Lessons can be learned without physical evidence. Myth can teach values that would take science and rational decades to arrive at.... If only a harmony could be reached???



"This is not necessarily the truth,
this is what Wittgenstein would have called
an exercise in searching for that which is true enough."
The Great Timestream Bifurcation
Terence Mckenna

Hofemann (Inventor of LSD) Letter - Steve Jobs of apple!

Steve Jobs has never been shy about his use of psychedelics, famously calling his LSD experience "one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life." So, toward the end of his life, LSD inventor Albert Hofmann decided to write to the iPhone creator to see if he'd be interested in putting some money where the tip of his tongue had been.

Hofmann penned a never-before-disclosed letter in 2007 to Jobs at the behest of his friend Rick Doblin, who runs an organization dedicated to studying the medical and psychiatric benefits of psychedelic drugs. Hofmann, a Swiss chemist, died in April 2008 at the age of 102.

He specifically asks Jobs to fund research being proposed by Swiss psychiatrist Peter Gasser and directs Jobs to Doblin's Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Doblin and Hofmann were close; Doblin gave the doctor his first tab of ecstasy in the '80s when it was still legal, he says, and Hofmann loved it, saying that finally he'd found a drug he could enjoy with his wife, no fan of LSD.

That Jobs used LSD and values the contribution it made to his thinking is far from unusual in the world of computer technology. Psychedelic drugs have influenced some of America's foremost computer scientists. The history of this connection is well documented in a number of books, the best probably being "What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Pers..., by New York Times technology reporter John Markoff.

Psychedelic drugs, Markoff argues, pushed the computer and Internet revolutions forward by showing folks that reality can be profoundly altered through unconventional, highly intuitive thinking. Douglas Engelbart is one example of a psychonaut who did just that: he helped invent the mouse. Apple's Jobs has said that Microsoft's Bill Gates, would "be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once." In a 1994 interview with Playboy, however, Gates coyly didn't deny having dosed as a young man.

Thinking differently -- or learning to Think Different, as a Jobs slogan has it -- is a hallmark of the acid experience. "When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," Kevin Herbert told Wired magazine at a symposium commemorating Hofmann's one hundredth birthday. Herbert, an early employee of Cisco Systems who successfully banned drug testing of technologists at the company, reportedly "solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead."

"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain," said Herbert. "Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used.".........................

Gilmore...... doubts, that a strict cause-and-effect relationship between drugs and the Internet can be proved. The type of person who's inspired by the possibility of creating new ways of storing and sharing knowledge, he said, is often the same kind interested in consciousness exploration. At a basic level, both endeavors are a search for something outside of everyday reality--but so are many creative and spiritual undertakings, many of them strictly drug-free. But it's true, Gilmore noted, that people do come to conclusions and experience revelations while tripping. Perhaps some of those revelations have turned up in programming code.

And perhaps in other scientific areas, too. According to Gilmore, the maverick surfer/chemist Kary Mullis, a well-known LSD enthusiast, told him that acid helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction, a crucial breakthrough for biochemistry. The advance won him the Nobel Prize in 1993. And according to reporter Alun Reese, Francis Crick, who discovered DNA along with James Watson, told friends that he first saw the double-helix structure while tripping on LSD.

Define and outline positions within a company of interest

HUM
-
Hum is a music production company based in central London.

Wherever you are in the world, you are sure to have heard some of their award-winning scores. They have created music for global commercials campaigns featuring the world's biggest brands, TV On screen identities and worldwide news stations, as well as incidental TV and film music.

Co-founded in 1989 by composer Joe Glasman, Hum continues to be a vehicle for his musical output.

On this site you can not only hear examples of scoring to picture, but also explore audio showreels by genre: from Abstract textures to World music.

Positions.

Joe Glasman - MD, Composer

Aston Brooks - Music, web and IT technologist

Rob Mac - Research and music licensing

Bridging the gap between music and sound effects to startling effect, they are specialists in building 'sound worlds' - where projects acquire a unique character and life through sound texture.

www.hum.co.uk