Although I am not completely satisfied with the travelers in the station I will keep it like this for the moment. Leo van Hengel, artist and a friend of mine , saw it and suggested that masses of people normally move in streams. And he is right. This is perfectly shown in one of my favorite films ‘Koyaanisqatsi’.
The shot I am talking about starts at 3:23.
If you compare it with what I have done there is obviously still room for improvement.
Filed under General
This one was meant for tuesday, but not yet posted:
Beside Chase the ‘flat’ film we will also develop a 3D, or stereoscopic version. We have a 3D television in our living. There is hardly any content available, but it’s great for testing 3d animation I have made myself in my studio. Unfortunately this still only works with glasses. One day we will hope to get rid of those, the production of 3D content will benefit strongly from the absence of glasses. I found as astonishingly simple example on how to develop 3D for small screens. Without any modification for iPad or iPhone the user get’s the impression that icons are popping out of the screen. The technique cleverly uses the build in camera to track the position of the eyes and uses that information to determine under what angle one is looking at the screen. Beside the film we trying to develop a game for iPad. This would be a great way to immerse the gamer further into the game. Read more about it here.
This has nothing to do with Chase, but sometimes one is easily distracted from making a film.
One of the first things I do in the morning is feeding our chicken. With somewhat sleepy eyes I overlooked our messy estate. I saw an animal within the fence of the donkey meadow that didn’t belong there. When I opened my eyes a bit wider I saw it was a newly born baby horse. I knew that one of the horses on the neighboring meadow was expecting a foal every day now. But how the hell did it end up in our meadow, behind our part of the fence, with it’s mother on the other side? The fence is heavily protected with electric wire. And the poor thing couldn’t even stand up yet, let alone jump over the fence. The donkeys found it a welcome present, they weren’t hostile at all, normally they chase (ah, you see there’s always a link somewhere..) every illegal animal from their grounds, but not now. So instead of working on Chase as I planned to do, we spent the morning with the horses and I made a lot of pictures, some of them here. You will find the complete story by Liesbeth(I am afraid it’s in Dutch): Een kado op maandagochtend | Van pipowagens en animatiefilms in Frankrijk
Filed under General
More footsteps. Already with 4 different walks it becomes difficult to hear and see which step belongs to which sound. But overall I guess it’s improving. Or am I getting used to jumping rabbits?
Here with 3 passengers
And here with 4…
Filed under General
Oscar suggested to interpret the crowd in the station as if they were wind vibrating sails. An interesting suggestion, but I doubt if that will work, it might be too far away from what you would expect. (I am open for suggestions and ideas, by the way, don’t hesitate to mingle in my affairs!). I think part of the problem here is that there are to many things moving at the same time to be able to judge what’s happening. So I animated just one, and I made the footsteps less expressive, Now at least I can judge it better and I think this one is an improvement. Any comments?
Now I will multiply them, I am curious to see what happens then..
Filed under General
I am frustrated.
The travelers in my station scene look like rabbits hopping around. It is a shot in which I want people walking, rushing, lingering in an organized chaos equivalent to what you expect on a railway station. Problem is that I don’t want to animate my triangles like real people, I am looking for something that catches the feel, the movement, the timing. Without rebuilding people with triangles. If I would it would be a bit like pointillism, imitating real live views with dots, at the time a very clever experiment. But not worth redoing today with triangles.
Right, I missed myself here. Because of family circumstances I couldn’t write for a while. But I am back and animating!
I was in the Netherlands to work with Erik Stok, composer for Chase (and almost all my films, except Forecast). We worked on the last and longest scene, the train scene. Erik made a chunk of music for the train and I thought it needed something extra. So I added the sound of a train horn on top of Erik’s trombone. He is not always happy with my extra’s. But flexible as he is, he took it up and made it much better then it was. Normally sound effects are added at the end of the animation process. But because Chase is almost abstract I need a lot of sounds in an earlier stage. Without them I am not able to judge if a specific movement works out. Without the sounds you sometimes don’t know what you’re looking at. In this case it was even more important to work with the horn effect, because I wanted it on top of Erik’s trombone integrating it in his composition.
Filed under Music
