Week 9: Freezing over

It's getting tight with this animation project, but with my plans set in stone and my goals secured, I can promise myself to get this done in time.

I really liked getting time over the weekend to plan my music out. So far I just need to record and I've got the animation soundtrack set.

Flash is killing me with these freezes through working. Do newer versions have a fix for this?

This week I learned to really think less on the grand scale and use smaller means of artistic employment. Basically, don't draw so detailed and focus on the key motions of the animations.

I think I wanna learn how to, not cut corners per se, but find better shortcuts for the huge movements I try to do.

To close off, I'd like to give a more comical approach with AADudley's "Toons These Days." A three minute animation series about knocking on modern day animations!

Mental connections through Film and Animation

Autism certainly isn't a fun time. With the varying level suffered, autism effects communication and social skills especially in people, making raising a child pretty difficult. My cousin just so happens to have it. But autism does not have to be a debilitating shackle. A parent writes about how animation, specifically the film Frankenweenie had quite the influence on his son.

-Gabe's speech and vocabulary was improved. His excitement from the movies promotion didn't go unnoticed by his parents, and he started to speak words and phrases from the movie's ads. New words began to be compounded into a constantly expanding wealth of vocab, and even physical action got a hold of him. New ideas and actions all inspired.

-Groundbreaking evidence of feelings. What Gabriel's parents were told is that many autistics cannot express or comprehend empathy, let alone grasp the concept of other beings outside oneself, but this idea was completely broken in front of the family's eyes as Gabe expressed a very saddened emotional reaction in a tragic moment of the film.

-Gabriel had an overall breakthrough in mental development through the movie, to which his parents were both amazed by. If one movie had this kind of effect on Gabriel, many autistic children could be soon to follow in a similar fashion through their own experiences in entertainment.

I was very intrigued with this article having a pretty minor understanding of autism, but the evidence presented really speaks to me. If digital media can go to this lengths of inspiration, one could only imagine what kind of breakthroughs can be made in the future.

I do think the hype and advertisements were a major player for Gabriel's enthusiasm for the movie, and I have a feeling it wouldn't be as incredible an experience for his family had the film not been exposed as much.

Would Gabriel had made the same progress through a different movie?

The Future of TVs: A Bigger Computer Screen.

As absorbed as I am in the massive spectrum of media we're dealt a hand with in modern society, television has never been a big player in my life, and now that I think about it, I haven't turned mine on in close to a year, unless you count using it as a big screen to run movies from my laptop. Well, yeah I guess that counts, BUT point being television is a very dormant form of entertainment in my world. Back when I was like six, my parents got a satellite and the works. I had every cool channel at my disposal, and you'd bet I spent a good amount of my time glued to the tube. Well come the following years, my parents decided television wasn't something worth the investment, so they switched to a third party satellite provider, and eventually to $8 ultra basic cable. That's no understatement. We had about 19 channels. And any kid flipping through the first 19 channels you have on cable is sure to be disappointed. This became a bigger problem when I started homeschooling (and I did this for 5 years!) as between lessons I would spend my free time eating and trying to watch TV. Keyword "trying." I had to resort to sitcom reruns, and not even the good stuff like Seinfeld. Yes, I did this for nearly five years (during my elementary school years mind you), and was only brought to stop when I began to understand the internet. That's enough exposition for now though, what I'm getting to is that TV is pretty limiting, even if you have the 5000 channel package. Thus, the internet seems to have found success through that flaw.

-The audience is already there, and it's huge. TV took some time to catch on given the price of investing in a television set back in the 50s, and there were about 3 channels. As for the internet? The expansion was at a similar rate, though for different causes. However in the end, due to how widely it gained connection, when entertainment began to be submitted through, there was already an audience willing to watch. This applies for what's coming in the future. Home computers are being purchased at increasing rates, and the internet is being spread to nearly every home, just like TVs. It's a new wave, and with this audience, entertainment exclusively made for the internet has a dominating market to begin with.

-Production cost and elements are best value. Getting a spot on TV is very hard and expensive to do unless you go on public access or invited to a talk show like Ellen or the O'Reilly Factor. Stations want ratings, and it's a hard game to play. Conversely on the internet, you don't have a business commanding your every step for an astronomical cost. Production can still cost a bit of money, but your space is free. You don't have to beg to get a spot!

-Playing the name game. Famous actors and musicians seem to be opting out for online entertainment. They see this new outlet and are interested in taking hold of it. And with these faces comes a good number of fans, all rabid to see their favorite people perform without having to sit through ten minutes of commercials or buy tickets to a movie. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a favorite example for me. Currently he's constructed his own web show that's built on the creations of ordinary people, like short music clips or animation. How would television networks even hope to compete with a media that promotes viewer interaction beyond texting to vote?

Do I believe this increasing media form will kill television? No. Networks always find a way to hook viewers, and as of now, it's still easier and more available to get a TV and provider than a computer with functioning internet. There will always be an audience.

I do believe though that this may usher in a new type of revolution. One where media is brought closer to the same level as the rest of us. Media where we can interact to some degree and have an influence. It's pretty amazing.

My only question is, will the internet ever become more widely available and more popular of an entertainment form than television? I have doubt, but not too much.

Update: Active Link for the Junk Head video.

Here you go kiddies! Ten minutes of fantastic stop motion action!

Week... 8? Really? 8 weeks?

Man I love this freedom. Just breaking down the walls and doing my own thing is about the best thing ever for an artist.

What I loved this week was getting experimental. I tried all sorts of new poses and camera angles I never thought of before, and stuff I've never even tried in regular art.

I was a little irritated by my slow pace, even if I've already knocked 36 seconds down. I'm planning this to be a minute and a half if all goes to plan. Gotta kick it into overdrive!

What I learned is that any time not spent animating is time that needs to be spent planning. I need to know what I'll do next or it grinds to a halt.

I do want to learn to synch my music to specific actions of the animation, but of course that's something I gotta practice myself.

I found something really cool this week, and I mean REALLY COOL. This Japanese dude spent 4 years making a stop motion film called Junk Head 1. Here's the 10 minute version. The full is coming in a few months!

http://youtu.be/vc2i4pFlqYo

Editing: Making that Perfect Cut

If we had no editing, probably a good majority movies we love would be absolutely terrible. Probably. But, say we're making our own movie. Say we're wrapping up production and now just need to spend time with the computer boys cutting up the tape to get that exact runtime and rating we're aiming for. While still maintaining the story and atmosphere.

-Know the film before you make it. Plan the scenes. When are they gonna happen? Will there be enough time? Can they exist while preserving the other important parts of the movie? These are all questions you'll need to ask in an editing room. If you can't time that explosion right so the climactic kiss will happen exactly 3.8 seconds after to where a voice-over will give the final exposition before the credits roll, well pal, you're out of a job. But we're not in an editing room, we're in a bedroom with time on our hands! So take time to plan. Be strategic! If you can do it ahead of time, you save everyone a lot of trouble.

-First isn't last. If your first draft is the best, you might be brilliant. Problem is, so is Stephen Spielberg, but even he rewrites his work. Like above, you're gonna need to make sure you've got all the contents right where they need to be, but you gotta pass it through the filter if you want it done. Give it another write and compare.

-This isn't about winning. You're putting on a show first and foremost. We're in entertainment, remember? So you're gonna have to make sure your boss is on board and you don't lose your cool. It's easy to do that too, so be careful. If there's an edit your boss says needs to be made, don't be stupid. Listen to him. Your word isn't the only voice of reason. And if you stay in the game without issue, you'll have a result you'll still be happy with along with a good majority of everyone else. I can't guarantee everyone though.

I think editing is quite underrated if you ask me, and it's why a good number of films couldn't perform what they tried to. You're getting these ideas to hit a prime. There's no other way to do that but to get tearing down and rebuilding.

It's a huge issue with ego too. You gotta learn to accept that it won't be perfect no matter what you do and people will tell you what to improve. Take the criticism. It does help usually.

So here's a bit of an open ended question. What movies would benefit the most from better editing? I'll actually try and come back with an answer for that.

How To Write Your Own Award Winning Screenplay!

I'm a pretty instinctive writer if it wasn't already apparent, so I took this article pretty deep in the head. Want to pitch a movie and back it to be visually appealing? You gotta have some of these elements:

-Complexity. Okay Joel, that's a given, but let me elaborate. Your characters can't be 1 dimensional. They need to have a motive, but they need to have realistic (not too much now) reactions and not be based on two or three models of expression. On top of that, this applies to the plot as well. You need multiple issues to solve. A movie with a single obvious goal just won't cut  it.

-Break the mold. Be creative with how you sequence everything. Do all songs have the same structure? Sure, many follow a formula, but there's a countless number of others that are unique. Same with movies. Don't make it expected. Keep your actions and events fresh and engaging without tying it to perfectly come to a close. That's what your generic movies do, and they don't win the awards.

-The setting sets it up for the kill. You know what made the Lord of the Rings work the most as a movie? The setting. Middle earth is a setting you can only get from one place, and Tolkien pretty much made us all know what fantasy literature is, so it can knock out the genre too. Your setting is responsible for what the characters can do and how dramatic the story can be. Don't limit it!

As I absolutely love analyzing movies, what does it for me most is when I see things that weren't anticipated, or structures that break normality. I watched L.A. Confidential last Friday. Excellent film. Had a couple cliches, but it made up with the fantastic amount of originality the writers used. The structure was dynamic and unpredictable, and the twists came out of nowhere. That's quality filming.

We need way more of this theory in our movies too, including low budget or indie movies. It shouldn't be divided over a line with "Famed director legendary score epic masterpiece" and "Cliche cop drama with romance subplot."

Are there any hidden gems that may hold this idea of film making yet to be uncovered by IMDb? I'll have to check back on that.