Last night (Mon. 04-10), I did another healthy 8 hours of animation, and captured some interesting things, which you can see below. If, after seeing all of the animation I have completed, you are wondering what the hell I’m doing, and how I’m going to combine it into a form that means something, I’m worried too.
This took a rediculous amount of time to set up lighting for. Two mini-moles for the rear bluescreen, a light pointing straight down for the floor bluescreen, two lights on stands for fill/key, and a snooted tiny mole for a blue-tinted backlight.
The backlight is to make my planned chroma key more convincing. There will be the solder-side of the circuit board layered in the background, to create a box-like environment. Behind the two puppets and their interconnecting wire, there will be what looks like static of a television screen nested in a square between solder pins green etched circuit board channels. Hopefully this will be hinting at the subservient and entrapped positions of those who watch popular media without question, as well as the inescapable interconnection that comes with technology.
[flv:http://www.archive.org/download/JedSmithmeatbackmeatbackmov_1/meat_back.mov 640 480]
This clip relates to the death and decay aspect of the evolution of corporeality component of my video. The mud was really gross.
On the agenda for the next few days, in opposition to my schedule, is further experimentation with Kontakt 2, Absynth, Reaktor, Live, and Max/MSP/Jitter (which I now have a working demo of), and the rough comletion of my soundtrack. I am playing with the idea of sampling portions of pop-songs and making them sound all dark and disturbing, like Alex did in his soundtrack, and so kindly explained on his blog. Anyway, I need to stop playing with ideas and learning software, and actually start creating the thing. I suppose those first two are necessary though, at least for my ignorant self.
On Thursday, there is the proficiency for the DVX100A, and on Friday, I hopefully will be able to pick it up and use it this weekend to capture at least half of the live-footage component of my psuedo-film. Thus: no more animation, at least for a little while. I’m looking forward to using the automated method of capturing frames.
I would very much appreciated any scathing comments on the stupidity, fallaciousness, or downright foul-heartedness of the footage I have posted so far. (With the realization that these are unedited). Thanks.
3 Comments
Seems like you’ve taken some good steps towards your chroma keying, although the chroma subsampling rate of DV can be a bit of a problem. But this looks like a solid set up, and also the fact that you’re doing stop motion should help I’d think, none of that motion blur, clearly defined lines and all that. Tho maybe that doll hair might give you some trouble.
Glad to hear you got something out of that soundtrack post of mine, if you want any of those Reaktor ensembles I used, one of them is a basic one which comes with the software (Grainstates FX), the other one doesn’t tho so I can provide you with that one if it looked appealing to anything you’re looking to do. But if you’re looking to get some dark sounds with a timbre which recalls their pop song source material, that would be an effective tool I’d think.
I was also planning on getting a DVX over the weekend, to use in the 3d lab on Friday, perhaps if there are troubles for one of us in getting the camera, some sharing could occur?
more advice on chroma key:
it seems like lightly using blur effects solely on the blue channel can help clean things up a bit as well, it’ll yellow things the more you use it, so color correction will be needed.
Not as foul as I expected…