Objects At Rest

explorations in audio and moving imagery

Category: Animation

  • 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,

  • Story Cubes

    I made some story cubes over the weekend as a creative project.

    story cubes

    Story cubes seem to be used for brainstorming stories or narrative content. You roll them out and based on the icons that are showing formulate some kind of story. Since they are physical blocks it adds a tactile quality to the activity which is nice.

    Searching further on the web resulted in screen shots of the illustrations on story cubes. I found a set for purchase called Rory’s Story Cubes which unfortunately appeared to be sold out. So, I went to Michael’s and got 1 inch wood blocks and a small basswood box to make my own set of cubes.

    The cubes on the web seem to be in groups of nine. But the box at Michael’s would hold sixteen blocks. So I made nine blocks and then added six more blocks with generic shapes and colors. I suppose the extra cubes could come in handy for added brainstorming. I was planning on painting the cubes white and using a marker to draw the icons but decided to use my wood burning tool and just stained the wood.

    It was a fun creative diversion from animation and perhaps it will help when generating ideas for future projects.

    Sources:

  • Filmaking 2.0, Content and Metadata

    In my previous post I was pondering the impact of technologies on content in film-video productions. While searching for more examples of emergent or disruptive ideas regarding film-video making I ran across the Future of Cinema Debate on YouTube.

    It’s worth a watch, specifically for the ideas offered by Arin Crumley on the idea of metadata which he explains starting at approximately 03:19. His suggestion is a perfect example of the impact of technology on content which I referred to in my previous post.

    The moderator also touches on the concept of storytelling in new media not being so much an evolution of content but instead a mutation of content. I quite like the idea of content-hybrids or content-mutation.