week 7/8 progress

Pardon my lengthy post ahead as I did not have much progress till now, and this will help me present tomorrow so i’ll… dump my things here….

Two weeks ago, i hit rock-bottom. I thought I had a direction to go to after the coincidental good results during week 7 where I had accidentally created a zoom-in effect on the flowers which were really, really pretty. However, I lost that file and had to redo all over again (I still have the video below though) and that was when I hit rock bottom.

I felt that I am trying to rush things too quickly as I was aware that I had a dance concert coming up next week (not relevant but I think that was one of the reasons haha) and I just wanted to catch up on my studies, and particularly such a heavy project like MAN so I do not fall behind (actually I am already am for some modules – particularly drawn animation).

I had an initial concept in mind where there is a garden with all sorts of flowers i can find from paint effects (with literally trees and all), but it didn’t work out so well no matter how much i tried to arrange them in the way i want, unlike the last time i did it.

These are some stills i captured while documenting my process. (AND MY HANDWRITING’S RIDICULOUS??? IM SO SORRY??? AS WELL AS MY SKETCHES WITH ALL THE BOUNCING BALLS??????) Some of the comments were for week 7 as well though.

These were…. OK but i didn’t like how structured it was. I wanted it too look more random and the colors more in harmony. If i were to arrange them randomly, It would look chaotic And i didn’t like that. Also it looked empty. I wanted to make use of all the space in the media wall. Right now the negative space with the flowers was perhaps 50-50. Not nice at all, not nice.

This was the progress for week 7. I liked how the colors blend well together. Perhaps it might be because the arrangement in week 8 did not take into account the color wheel. Maybe it was because there was too many flowers.

I took a step back afterwards and looked at my inspiration again, Jennifer Steinkamp. She might not have done it using Maya (which no one was sure of, even her portfolio does not state much), but I can at least study how she plans her works, her flowers and colours used, though there was some difficulties that I have thought that I would have encountered.

Taking a step back

So i went back to look at Jennifer Steinkamp’s work again, probably for the entire of week 8? Since i wanted to observe even further.

I wanted to have this clustered, close-up effect like Rapunzel. However, her work is in portrait while MAN wall is in landscape. The first thing I have to think about is, how do I plan to make it a landscape?

Make 1 and duplicate in in aftereffects
- This was one of the ideas that would be easier to execute, but it would ultimately lack in vairety???? So i would need variety at the beginning
Draw many more and make do the close up thing at the end
- This was more ambitious but the effect would be nicer. But I don’t have to sleep when it is rendering. I’ll relive those 3D Production days again!!!!
Do a separate film as the second part of the clip and transit it from the first close-up clip.
- Which really, to be honest, does not sit well with me. I tried doing that already but it looked weird.

–edit: ok i found a landscape one though the height is still larger than the MAN wall’s and the ratio is more like 16:9 in contrary to the MAN’s

Rapunzel 13, 2010.

From there, and the book I have studied, I have observed that the flowers were arranged NOT from the same plane, but rather, DIFFERENT PLANES. The values of the y-axis were different and not a zero all the time, hence creating a variation in height. Also, she has only used i think a total of 2 types of flowers for each installation, unlike me where i used 1381748234815374239372643294234 flowers…. no wonder I hit a dead end. Ina also told me to use lesser types of flowers.

Here is a close up i took from my book. There were many variations made by her, and I love the magical effect it has even on just the book.

During the remaining time i had, i was playing around with different type of 2-3 flowers together. The featured image was one of them. It was an improvement but it was lacking.

Research 2.2

I do not have mental ray on my computer 🙁 And i tried rendering. There was a problem and all my images can’t be displayed.

This is an example on flowers growing and flowers swaying across the wind. I haven’t had a sketch or an idea on how i want to arrange them so this shall do for now??? I will get to it as soon as possible.

Settings – flower growth

Reflection/Things to note:

Some flowers disappear after it grows.
Also, the branches and leaves become really thin after i added in the flow animation for some reason. Need to play with the values more.
Try out with more flowers.

EDIT here is a rendered version which was then exported to aftereffects

Sample of flowers growing and flower influenced by the wind.

Now i have to figure out the arrangement of the flowers

Research 2 – Painteffects

Handsome guys are colourful but it’s definitely flowers over boys for MAN… MAN!!! omg!! (pls ignore me)

After consulting with Ina on Monday, I have decided to explore further into flowers and how i can incorporate it into my topic. With that, I have decided to play around with Maya Painteffects

And then I FORGOT TO SAVE and now i have to redo ;_;

Aside from that, she also introduced me to Jennifer Steinkamp, an animation artist who makes use of Maya Painteffects to do her installations. She is very famous and has experimented with various items in Painteffects such as plants and paint (oil and acrylic)

1. Daisy Bell

These were made by varying a few values (such as wind speed or type of wind, as well as the appearance of the flowers (petal colours, no. of petals etc)

2. Loop

Made with paint fluids or fibre brush, drawn into a loop with an addition of a little turbulence. to make it have a ‘vine’ feel.

more visual references!

(Disclaimer: This is a visual reference post and I’ll add more when I find more. I will compile all here)

More ideas of what I can do to influence others when they see new colors being mixed around;

These are more to computer work than actual filming. After consulting Ina, she gave me more ideas

Maya Paint Effects
Touch Designer
Real Flow (but thousands of DOLLARS)

(i confess that my computer has too many tabs and that’s why i am compiling this post so I won’t lose track of what i have saw)

Emotion Study, Experimental animation, 9: 27 min, 2010 | Ina Conradi (yay!!)

If i remember correctly, this should be done with Aftereffects and Realflow. Reminds me of my first 2D assignment…

(Realflow looks like maya i can’t..)

SPLASH | Paulo Wang

Cinema4D, RealFlow and Aftereffects.

Is there a way to just use Maya and Aftereffects to produce the same thing?
Should I use TouchDesigner to make it interactive?

hello my friends

It’s been one/two years since i used OSS… let’s use it again!! Haha.

*<s>also might come back to edit after monday</s> i am back*

*guys in class please spare me i am nothing but a tiny human i came here just to learn*

Introduction

After a week or two of brainstorming, I consulted Ina and gave her a (very) (super) brief idea of what I wanted to do for this project. (i only thought of it on the spot) Since i love to paint and the only thing i (can) (barely) do is animation, I shall be going along with mainly the idea of illusion.

For the first week, I was (too) carried away with looking at the pretty effects and colour combinations marbling can achieve, as well as this sense of surrealism that it gives that i had totally forgot to create a base idea for my project (sigh elaine why..) But i am learning step by step… sorry guys for my lousy presentation.. ;_;

After thinking really hard based on the things i have pinned on pinterest during Monday, i decided to play with the idea of colour psychology.

Colour Psychology

Quoted from Wikipedia:

Colour psychology is the study of hues as a determinant of human behavior. Colour influences perceptions that are not obvious, such as the taste of food. Colours can also enhance the effectiveness of placebos.

Colour psychology is used in many things, such as marketing, branding and even poster designs. They are used to change perceptions in the minds of the consumers so that these producers can entice consumers to buy their products.

It was known that some colours give and represent certain emotions to people (e.g red for anger/power, blue for melancholy, serenity and yellow for happiness.)

Of course, colour combinations were used as well. It was said that similar colors are more well-received by people, as they create more harmony, while colors of high contrast attracts attention.

For this project, I have decided to play along with all sorts of colour combinations, and use animation to potray how these colours respond.

Inspiration – 1

Here is one of the videos that I happened to see while doing my research.

The Color of Feelings – Thomas Blanchard.
- This is a dream-like sequence where the creator plans to evoke our emotions by using colors as an analogy to emotions. They mix and eventually harmonise and co-exist together.

Execution method

From this video, Blanchard said he has used various unorthodox ingredients such as milk, honey and cinnamon to create such dream-like sequences. (time to spend some money and steal some food from the kitchen….) In order to create such effects, the items must be immiscible to one another….

Development 1

One of my initial ideas was to use Maya to animate and model a few simple polygons that moves when new colours are being added in, and then getting more and more chaotic when even more colours through more mediums like resin (aka emotions are added in). However, after presenting, Ina told me that it was okay but at this rate, it is going to be just a simple 30 seconds film.

1 | 2

Of course, since i wanted to take this class to learn many more skills that are useful for my animation works, I wanted to explore the ways that i can convey this idea more efficiently and easily (?), so i looked at how other artists uses paint or mediums that were similar to it to execute their works.

(Moreover, there are some people that are doing this already so i am hoping i don’t clash with the others!!!)

Inspiration – 2

https://vimeo.com/80355401

Dvein | Visual Arts

(for some reason OSS does not let me add this video.. but anyway!!)

(you can start from 1 min ;;)

Execution method

Dvein creates landscapes through CGI and probably coloured paint/water. This does not involve colour psychology. However, I felt that this idea was suitable to bring about emotions on people. Landscapes can bring ambience that soothes the viewer’s eyes and acts as therapy for them.

Development 1.2

CGI takes a long time to render (excuse me Maya). Moreover, it is complicated and it is not as easy as it seems to be.

Alternatively, I can do a mini-landscape through clay and film it while adding my own animation and touch inside, while combining the methods used for Idea 1 to save time.

However, that being said, I felt that CGI would definitely be a better method to convey the idea of colour psychology. Thus, this idea definitely needs more development and I would (actually) want to try doing this. It is useful for animation and I can learn new skills…. killing two birds with one stone! *prays someone will teach me* I hope I don’t bite more than i can chew…

Inspiration – 3

This is a 3D high frame rate experimental short film by Noah Shulman.

In their website, they talked about how they did this video (cries at the equipment they used omg so gorgeous yet so expensive) They mix acrylic and many other paint with a high vicious liquid (probably water actually I just wanted to sound more atas but i failed) and film it mixing around in a fish tank (how do i get a fish tank, or i can just stick with something else..)

Development 2

I loved this idea, though this would be a little hard to execute as I need a large area to film over (I had considered tupperware but it was quite tiny and hard to do). Moreover, the….. equipment….. is damn expensive (THE PAINT THEY ALL BROUGHT LIKE WHY I HAVE NO MOOLAH???? PLS GIVE ME ALL UR UNUSED STUFF THANKS!!!!!!)

Though all of these… expensive….. stuff……. I thought that adding animation into it would be a good idea!!!! I felt that this idea has potential!!

Now onto researching for more ideas…..