tarulathespider

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Final Project DMSA 3rd Yr (pt.6)

Creating a cartoon from a photo... Unfortunately I do not know how to use the layers properly yet, so I cannot get rid of the darker eyebrow and I can not undo all my steps, and have found that out too late. The maximum was 20 undo’s. However I have learned to change this on the settings, and even though it is  possible to chose untill 1000 undo’s, this makes the program slower, so I went only up to 85 undo’s instead of the original 20. For the sake of posting something, here is my first cartoon experiment using a picture of one of my brothers when he was a young boy.

original

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Final Project DMSA 3rd Yr (pt.5)

With Adobe Flash I was easily able to crop a picture to remove its background to then add another background of my choice. For this experience I chose a photograph I took a few years ago in Portugal of a floor light and trimmed it with the pencil tool. Then add a picture taken from the internet with starts and placed onto the stage, adjusting where it would sit in the library made the stars background image go behind the first image I had cut.

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Final Project DMSA (pt. 4)

Inserting an image in Adobe Flash is quite straightforward. All I had to do was to find one image I want to use, preferably large sized pictures, and drag them into the stage in Adobe Flash.

Next, fading images using the “Create Classic Tween” tool

Next step will be to crop an images silhouette and try to use multiple images in one frame. I have watched some tutorials last year on how to do it with Gimp and bring it to Pencil2 for animation, however now that I have Adobe Photoshop, I reckon I will get better and quicker results.

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot45HZNRyzM)

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RInn7ERY3sA)

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1QRTd9wDjc)

Some experimental animation inspiration

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Final Project - DMSA - Year (p.3)

       Getting Adobe Flash to animate and Photoshop made a huge difference to my creative process because I can do everything I want with this software, instead of having to go around working on several different ones just to be able to make one simple thing! Now I was ready to start again fresh and begin to think about a story to tell. (Sorry for my rambling, English isn't my native language and writing isn’t my forte!)

- Final Project should have a duration of 8 to 10 minutes! But I haven't got my soundtrack made yet so I had to find any song that would last at leat 8 minutes and place it in a layer on the project and name the layer “Sound”. The track would not insert on the layer if they weren't already long enough for the song to fit in. And I found out how to duplicate the frames so that I could import the song into the project and then be able to experiment with it. But now I needed to find out how many frames I needed to fit an 8-minute soundtrack and I’m not good at maths, not to mention I have been suspecting I might be a bit dyslexic. I’m definitely sure I have a low attention span. That was what my teachers always wrote in the papers they sent home to my grandmother… “Andreia is quite an intelligent and creative child but she can’t seem to be able to focus at all/she has trouble concentrating”.

        Anyway, so to work out how many frames I needed… my calculations were: there are 24 frames in 1 second (in this case, but it could be 12 frames or other number depending what I chose); 60 seconds in 1 minute therefore 24 frames times 60 equals 1140 frames. 8 minutes then equals 11.520 frames! and I am still not sure if this is quite right but I stuck to that. Good news is, I was able to insert an 8-minute track in the sound layer and that's enough for me for now!

       A new issue arose when I noticed that after starting to play the track on animation, it wouldn't stop when I clicked the stop button. It just kept on playing the song till the end. How could I sync image and sound like this? I went online to find the answer and realized I wasn't the only one with the problem. After a few experiments I managed to find a way to stop the music, but it wouldn't start playing where I had stopped it. If I loop a set of frames, the loop will only loop the image…the song will keep on playing till the end. I learned that I can stop the music if I press the escape key but when I started it again it will start in the beginning and not where I stopped it.

Test animation without sound:

Test animation with a small sound sample (careful as it is a bit too lound):

So that’s when I had an idea of my own and decided to try making a small track on Ableton, and cut it in small parts. Then I would export each part of the track on its own and import them to the animation in Flash one by one and work on them as I go along creating the animations. This will enable me to start and stop the track easier as it is only a small part of it and work on it syncing with the animation using the loop tool. If I had more than one sound playing they would play at the same time, sometimes, so maybe better to just have one bit of the sound at a time. It worked! Now I was starting and stopping the animation with sound and I was even being able to start the sound where I had stopped it! Okay, problem solved.

       Exporting the animation doesn't seem to be an issue either, at least short bits of it! When experimenting on exporting a long set of frames, it would say I didn't have enough space on my computer. I proceeded to delete old stuff I had on my computer but I still haven't managed to export an 8-minute animation. I will try again after deleting some more junk on my computer. In any case I came up with the idea of exporting the animation bit by bit, say 48 frames at a time and then glue all parts together with iMovie!

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Final Project - DMSA - Year (p.2)

Last year when I was trying to start an animation with a very low budget, or better yet, without spending money at all, and I encountered a few obstacles, some of them were mentioned in my last post, and others weren't. I still cannot recall all of them but I remembered a few more which I will now mention. By the way, my course is called Digital Music and Sound Arts, not Animation or Graphic Design...but I seem to give too much importance to making an animation myself and then put sound on it, and probably I am being stubborn but I just really want to do it :)

- Drawing with the computer mouse: So, I am not a sketch artist or an illustrator but I can draw a bit, however, drawing with a mouse, proved to be not practical at all and all my drawings seemed like very poor attempts for sketches. I tried to draw pirañas and I did, and make them move about as if they were jumping over a bridge. I managed to do a little animation like that, but the fish looked terrible..some were becoming quite disfigured (I can’t seem to find that animation, but I will put it here when and if I do). So I decided to use the drawings of pirañas I had made on paper previously. I took a picture of the piraña but I didn't want to use the whole of the picture, only the image of the fish, so now I had to go and learn how to crop the fish out of the rest of the picture, and it wasn't as easy as I thought because apparently to use it as an object I had to do quite a few things to it, using different software. I cannot recall the whole process, but I think I had to use Gimp. 

Then I had to bring it back to Pencil2 in which I think I couldn't do much to change that picture and with wich exporting was being not even an option anyway as I needed to save the project as frames and then glue the, together with Blender... Confusing...and all this was killing my creative process as at this point I was using 3 different software to create 1 animation! So I decided to take a break off it and do something else. Until I got to the 3rd and final year of my course and I managed to get Adobe Flash and Adobe Photoshop!

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Angus trying out the sensors with the Arduino.

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We decided to use what we’ve learnt in one of our workshops with these high frequency range little speakers, and use them to spatialise the sounds that would be flowing around the space along with the pink noise sound coming from the subwoofer.

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This was the patch used in Max Msp made by Angus. It’s a very good patch and it worked perfectly!

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My main idea revolved around, and was all about using infrasound, but we didn't have the special speaker to be able to make it happen. We had to work with different frequencies. Higher frequencies. So we decided to play with pink noise in the test oscillator using Logic Pro X and we liked the results.

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We made a plan of who was going to work on what. Angus wanted to include an Arduino and a Max Ms patch to the project so that sounds would be triggered by the audience. We didn't want to make the ambience feel to theatrical.

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Practical 7 project started with 3 people, Angus, Jacob and me. During the first 3 weeks we were following up on Jacob’s idea of building a sound sculpture with hanging materials that would resonate somehow. This idea ended up being replaced by another idea as Jacob deferred the year. So we had less time to develop it. The idea consisted in creating an atmosphere, a dark and gosthly one. I wanted to use a little dark theatre that we sometimes see in show at the university, but we found out that those were not built and prepared for the students. It had to be made, which we couldn't accomplish, and so we had to use one of our sound student studios.

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My sound design for this scene from the old action movie Heaven’s Prisoners. 

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         Look and Listen:

        I made this little video using a few pictures of a bonfire I myself took and linked the image to the sound of a waterfall.

       The idea was to show the film to people without telling them the sound was changed into the completely opposite of what they would be expecting it to be and see if they could quickly or even at all notice it.

       The result was good. It worked! As I showed it to people they told me they wouldn’t have noticed it wasn’t sounding like fire at least not straight away.

       This idea was inspired by my theory classes of the 1st semester on Michel Chion and the re-association of sound and image.

Some of my summation on the: Walter Murch “Foreword to Michel Chion's Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen”:

“When inexpensive tape recorders became available in the 1950s it was a huge step for the sound enthusiasts.”

“Murch calls the origin of sound the sounds “shadow” and when you take the shadow away you are left with something completely different entirely.”

“Sounds that are detached from their source can be used on a completely different on screen object and this was working in the film maker’s favor.”