Superheadlessgirl!

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Nefarious and I made a new Pencil video that I think turned out well and as always, I had a ton of fun creating it. The headless effect was super easy to create. I did it by filming the whole thing on a tripod, so the background was steady, and then making sure that I had at least one shot at the end that she wasn’t in. Then when I created the animation, as well as having layers for the sparks and text, I created two layers from the camera, one of the motion image, and one of the empty background right behind it. Then I just used the eraser tool as needed — so yeah, ultra simple, but really fun. Unfortunately it was a cloudy day, so the lighting changed very slightly (over the roughly ten second length… I wasn’t expecting that!) and you can see a slight difference in the light levels which manifests as the cut-out being visible. Oops! It could be manually fixed or re-shot on a clear-skied day (or indoors), but by the time I noticed I was half done and didn’t feel like doing any more work.

But this was maybe the most fun one yet to do. I really cut elements fairly short and would have loved to spend more frames — and more time — to the themes explored, especially the opening scene before the head disappears and it’s glowing blue, and the end when the green death ray is firing. Totally fun.

And oops! Caitlin just pointed out that I forget to deal with the shadow, which has a head! So with that and the halo problem, maybe I shouldn’t boast that it turned out well, but I stand by how fun it was.

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A couple stories and a new video

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

I recently watched a great documentary on philosophy called Examined Life in which Peter Singer tells a sort of a koan that I thought was very much worth thinking about. He asks you to imagine that you’re crossing a bridge over a small pond, and that as you do so, you see that a small child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. You look around and you don’t see his parents or anyone else to save him, but the water isn’t very deep so you could save the child without any risk to yourself. However, you are wearing very expensive shoes and they will almost certainly be ruined (and isn’t time to take them off).

Most people, Singer says, would choose to save the child rather than the shoes when faced with this immediate and first-hand problem. But then he asks, if you’re willing to do that, why buy the shoes in the first place when an equivalent donation to numerous organizations would save the lives of multiple children? I don’t have a good answer.

I also watched a documentary recently called Why Do Dogs Smile and Chimpanzees Cry (a 1999 classic that won an Emmy so you may have seen it) that was very emotionally moving — although I have to admit that there’s any debate over whether animals are emotional creatures… It just seems so obvious to me that they are. That said, there’s strong evidence for emotion in octopi and other animals where I was in the past assuming a more “mechanical” brain.

Anyway, they were discussing emotional problems in animals, and had a segment about the rescue dogs dealing with the Oklahoma bombing. After a while it became clear that they were not going to be finding any more survivors, and it was just dead bodies. The dogs were trained for this, and when they found the corpses they got their rewards and congratulations, but it was taking a toll on them — they were becoming very depressed, “clinically depressed”, and started not wanting to do the job any more. To help the dogs cope, at the end of the day, the teams would stage a successful find, where one of the humans would hide in the rubble pretending to be a victim, and give the dogs a turn finding someone that was actually alive. This seemed to cheer them up and give them hope that what they were doing was worthwhile, and they perked up and were willing to continue the difficult job.

Anyway, I did another quick animation test, as you can see above, this time at 30fps. I figured out a much faster and more effective way of importing and exporting video from Pencil, and did this super quick and dirty rotoscoping test — my third animation so far. All of this playing with the software is giving me a lot of ideas and some time I really want to tackle a music video. That said, I really should put the drawing tablet aside for a while and do some real work on the keyboard instead!

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DIY Rotoscoped Animation

Monday, March 8, 2010

Here is the second animation that I’ve created in the awesome free (shareware — I donated so I suppose it’s not really free) animation tool Pencil (with some post-processing in Photoshop). It starts off with some sketched rotoscoping (rather than using a tweened vector a la Waking Life), and then continues with me transforming into a poorly drawn werewolf. It’s just 61 frames of animation, but it was quite time consuming to draw! I think if you visit the page on Youtube you can view it at 720p (I drew it natively at 1280×720). There’s no sound, and the video ends at 0:40 but for some reason it has another twenty seconds from a previous edit tacked onto the end. I’m not sure why. Anyway, here you go! I think it turned out quite well for being only the second animation that I’ve done using these methods. The next one will have an actual story I think.

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Trip to the remodelled ROM

Saturday, March 6, 2010

We did end up doing the museum — the batty ROM / Royal Ontario Museum — visit today as planned. As it contains many photos I’ve placed most of that behind a click-through, so you can “read on” for all that. However, I wanted to start things off with this picture of the three of us about half way through the day that I really like. All of us had a good time.

museum-portrait

(Continued)

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Worst keloid ever… the keloid beard

Saturday, March 6, 2010

I’m sure it’s not the worst ever, but really, this is as bad as I need to see. Somehow after reading how CBS got sued over tricking a guy into having his penis surgery publicly broadcast and wondering what exactly his cock deformity was (turned out to be something that, from looking at thousands of penises over my publishing lifetime, I know is very common and rarely worth stressing over) I got into reading Wikipedia’s list of cutaneous conditions — a real horrorshow list — and came across a picture of the worst keloid ever. I’m not going to include the full size picture in the entry because I don’t want to lose the few regular readers I have left, but click if you dare.

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