Objects At Rest

explorations in audio and moving imagery

Author: Grant

  • Show me your movie poster…

    I decided to do a quick post of independent stopmotion animator projects with movie poster style marketing images. Send links for your project’s movie poster or others that I may have missed. My general rule for posting these is that the image has to take the form of your typical movie poster, teaser poster, or teaser card…web page banners and production stills don’t count. 😎

    Completed Projects

    Geralds Last Day
    Gerald's Last Day
    In the Fall of Gravity
    In the Fall of Gravity
    Man Drawing a Reclining Woman
    Man Drawing a Reclining Woman

    Teaser Posters and Projects in Production

    TICKS
    TICKS
    Let Sleeping Gods Lie
    Let Sleeping Gods Lie

  • 3D Stereo Photography Test

    3D-stereo-test1

    3d-stereo-test2

    Inspired by Isomer’s 3D clips on youtube and his thread on the SMA forum I made a quick pick to test 3D. I used my home-made dolly and move the camera 1 inch for the second photo. I also added the white dots since that helps me (an maybe others) to converge the two images first and then shift your view to the actual photo. Makes me want to try animating something to see how steady the dolly cam would be moving it back and forth hundreds of times.

    UPDATE: Strider flipped the left-right images for the version on the bottom and sent it to me. Thanks Strider.

  • 2008 Independent Animation Review

    Really cool animation-related news that took place in 2008.

    • Karl finished My Uncle’s Dental Health. Congrats Karl! I’m very much looking forward to his latest project (using binder clips – brilliant IMO) called Saint Ignatius the Beneficent.
    • Justin and Shel finished Gerald’s Last Day. Can’t wait to see it since they get a gold star for behind-the-scenes coverage with their blog, photos, and video postings.
    • Ron finished In the Fall of Gravity which I definitely want to see. OMG, he is also tinkering with 3D…check out is youtube channel!
    • Shelley continues with the Halfland project creating sets and details of beauty. Another gold star for production coverage with her tweets and blog.
    • Michael completed more of his Amberson’s series and also worked on the Mythic Journeys project…which looks fantastic!
    • Jeffrey continued to make progress on Unearthed which has great cinematography and lighting among other things. Check out the clips he’s posted thus far. He pushed through with his creative work in spite of mother nature’s decision to send more liquid wrath in his general direction!
    • Sven had his Monster Month book release party and also continued with creative animations…teasing us with experimental “landscape” animations…like that leaf or that ball…I want to see more! Look for his Let Sleeping Gods Lie project to pick back up in 2009!
    • Mike continued to provide instruction and share knowledge in animation/film via his blog and the forums. Now, if we could just see some animation…just a little bit…with those puppets!
    • Tak apparently continues to get contacted about Death of Matriarch screenings. He did mention another possible project that he might do which would be really…really…cool.
    • Justin held a fund-raising event for his next project Ticks. I’ll be very interested to see how that turns out. The teaser clip intrigues me. You can see his other films online!
    • Don finished three stopmo films in 2008! Storytime With Pram, Barrier, and Ether B.
    • Thank the stopmo gods that Lio finally got RSS feeds for stopmoworks (at least I only found out about it in 2008). Now I can catch up on his rants easier by using Google reader!
    • I finished Vitruvius and the pixels are resting silently on hard drives while I reflect on my three animations to date (Man Drawing, Sword, and Vitruvius) to determine what directions I want to pursue next.
    • If you finished an animated film or are starting one in 2009 or have news that I overlooked let me know so I can add it to the list.

  • Tesseracting: Gabriel Shalom’s Hypercubist Cinema

    After watching a pretty amazing Adobe R&D video on vimeo, I browsed through the comments and stumbled upon this:

    “There is totally a better word: Tesseracting. Because what you are developing at Adobe is a prototypical system for frameless, hypercubist cinema. I write a blog on the future of cinema and your tool fits nicely into my forecasting of the end of the celluloid-influenced paradigm of flat video frames, transforming them into hypercubes. -Gabriel Shalom”

    The Quantum Cinema blog is now in my google reader…I’m quite excited!

    Bonus link:MIT’s Center for Future Storytelling

  • Semantic Structures and Storytelling 2.0

    I found another post on the web about the impact, or influence, of technology in filmmaking, videomaking, and animating. In this case it is the ideas borrowed from the semantic web that could be used to enhance traditional narrative structures and possibly change the way people consume-create media.

    This approach lends to the portability of the character’s representation across multiple instances, types, and modes of story delivery.

    Mike Brent recently posted the link to a very interesting blog called “storyfanatic” which, if you read it, will eventually lead you to Dramatica which is story creation software. Makes me wonder…does Dramatica support the creation, editing, and exporting of metadata structures?

    The potential for innovation is very real if one were able to take a screenplay and export semantic structures and metadata as well. Screenplay files wouldn’t just be destined for printing on paper anymore. Subsequently, the support of editing and authoring software for video being able to embed that metadata similar to importing subtitles or other elements and being able to sync things up with timecode would be needed. If not in the NLE then perhaps have the metadata encapsulated in the typical MOV, AVI, FLV or other media container files.

    I’m viewing this as a platform to remix my own projects. In that sense this model would support transmedia projects or a new forms of serialization. But, the reality is that the same platform would be available to the users or creators of any content for co-creative transmedia.

    Possible workflow in the future?

    • Create content (ie. text, audio, video, animation, etc.).
    • Create metadata (automatically via the content creation stage above or manually).
    • Bring content and metadata together in editing (ie. enhance media and semantic components).
    • Author media deliverables with metadata channels embedded (visible or hidden).
    • Author or user based post editing, remixing systems arise being able to search, find, index, collate, and remix media from any “smart media” files. From mixing entire projects or specific nodes of data deep within a project,