BLOG POST 5: THE END

Before I get started with my reflections on my presentation and this project as a whole, let me post the version of my animation uploaded to YouTube.

Okay. Let's start with my presentation. I'm not going to lie, but I was kind of disappointed with how it turned out. A few things went wrong:

- The presentation was not the most recent version, where a few edits and a missing picture were added
- As far as I can tell, every single joke fell flat
- The music from the animation was playing from the computer's internal speakers, not the external speakers (for this reason watching the video embedded here might be a better experience)
- My timing for many parts was far from perfect

Am I very upset with how it turned out? Not really. Here are a few things that I thought went well:

- My main point was relatively clear
- The power-point itself looked quite nice
- The animation was well received

So, I'm going to grade my own presentation.

1. Final product: 9.5/10 (Although I have not "mastered" the art, I think I have done the best I can with this specific project)
2. Delivery: 3/5 (Timing was off, "jokes" weren't funny, awkward improvised lines... those who were there can probably remember some)
3. Preparation: 4/5 (Power-point was nice, but had a missing picture that some might have interpreted as a deliberate joke)
4. Process: 4/5 (Described three specific methods of animation and also my thoughts)
5. Main point: 4.5/5 (I thought I made this quite clear and wrapped it up nicely with "divide and conquer". Still could have been more polished)

That all comes out to a 25/30. I think I could have done better with this, but like many other students said, I can learn from my mistakes. There is nothing I can do to change what is done, but I can try my best to make the next time better.

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Now, my presentation experience doesn't change my thoughts about the project in general. Like I said in my presentation, I had a great time making the video and sharing bits and pieces of it before showcasing the final product. I was able to explore different techniques for making stop motion, and the response I saw today after playing the video was very gratifying.

I don't think I will attempt stop motion again in the near future, as so much work must be put into a single video. Nevertheless, if an opportunity comes along, I will have a better idea of what stop motion really is.

After my presentation, I gave our original introduction to the genius project some more thought. Let's go back to the three main concepts of the genius project.

1. Autonomy
2. Mastery
3. Purpose

I think I have achieved two of these three things. I have achieved autonomy, as I was able to freely explore my own creative instincts. I was able to utilize my resources to literally set my ideas in motion. I found a greater purpose in my project, and that was learning how to break down large tasks into smaller hurdles that I can overcome individually.

What about mastery? I think Brett said this impeccably in his presentation, and that mastery is something one strives for but never reaches. What truly is mastery, then? If it cannot be achieved, then how do we define it? I have no solid answer to those questions.

However, recall Malcolm Gladwell and his book Outliers. He and other thinkers said that 10,000 hours is generally a reasonable time for an individual to achieve mastery of something. My response is that 10,000 is too concrete of a number to describe something as abstract as mastery.

I'm going to use something from a subject area I'm more familiar with to show my point. Here's a video with Janos Starker, a "master" cellist whose technique has been described as near perfection, talking about the concept of never-ending self-improvement. The first minute-and-a-half are of him teaching a student in a masterclass, but he speaks for a while after that portion.

An individual's level relative to the elusive idea of perfection cannot be measured, but an individual's level relative to where it was before can be measured. This is another point presenters have made throughout this past week; instead of trying to be better than something or someone else, try to be better than yourself from the past. That is the most direct and effective method for self-improvement.

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In conclusion, as I step away from this roller-coaster ride of a project, I feel neither a sense of disappointment nor a feeling of elation. In my mind there now exists a deeper understanding of improvement and how mastery is really quite impossible.

In that sense, my genius project worked quite wonderfully.

Blog Post 4: THE BEGINNING OF THE END

I'll start with some very exciting news... I have finished my final product! All drawing, photography, editing, and music-ing has concluded.

"About time," some of you might be thinking.

Well, I'm planning to upload the video to YouTube on Wednesday night, which is the night before my presentation (what a slacker, right?). This way, the video will be new to most if not all of the audience during my TED talk.

Editing the whole thing was surprisingly quick (albeit monotonous). I had planned out the length of each little clip prior to shooting, and this turned out to be very helpful in the post-production phase. I'll give you an example of one of my plans:

"1 sec: Balloon enters

1 sec: Zoom out, boy is standing

Draw --> 4 sec: Zoom in on boy's face, head turn

1.5 sec: Zoom out... "

And etc... I don't want to give too much away!

I think what I'll do now is post a few pictures and briefly describe some of them. The first picture below shows some cutout sunflowers I used in the second scene (that's the last one I shot). I initially drew these with watercolor markers and scanned them into a computer. After doing so, I printed six of each out and arranged them accordingly on my background.

Next is my uncolored character model sheet for a farmer (also in the second scene). Here, the character doesn't do much except scratch his head and frown/smile. So, I drew individual frames for his facial expressions and designed a sort of "action figure" for the farmer to scratch his head. The figure on the far left is essentially what the figure would look like put together. The figure directly right of that does not have the arm and was to be taped on top of the third figure near the head and the lower body. One arm, which has a sort of extension in order to keep it from falling out, will be placed in between the middle two figures and can freely rotate. I positioned double-sided tape so that the arm could rotate around a "joint", yet I could take the arm out when needed. 

This is a shot of my "movie set" (a.k.a. a small section of my basement) near the end of filming. I've got to say, even with all of the stress it brought, this project was extremely fun. That's right: extremely.

Next, I'll upload some stills from the video to give you guys a closer look before seeing my presentation (if you aren't in the morning classes, I'll post a link to the video in an update soon after my presentation). 

That should be enough until Thursday! Onward...

Now comes another issue... what am I actually going to say for my TED talk? I've already thought out most of my script, and I'm going to try to avoid repeating the content in my blog too much. My current plan is to have a 3-minute presentation and a 1-minute video, as well as some room to breathe and answer questions. I'm going to try my best not to go overtime.

Some topics I may or may not cover are:

- Struggles

- Initial thoughts and their changes

- What I learned

- Application of what I learned

- Stop motion in the movie industry

I have to say I'm a bit nervous. The presentations I've seen so far have been funny (sometimes accidentally... I'm looking at you, Noah), well-organized, and informative; the bar is high, and I have some work to do to reach it. Although my genius project is not a stand-up routine, I think it's necessary to have a few good jokes to loosen up both the audience and myself. Humor will make me less nervous, I think.

One final thing... I need all of your opinions. I've been debating about whether I should include a random joke about McPerlman. It seems that most people are doing it within the first three slides or so. By the time I present, at least 10 presentations will have had some reference to McPerlman, so I might just not put one of those jokes in. Serious stuff, guys.

I look forward to talking to you all on Thursday!

Comments for this blog (not even sure what cycle anymore):

- Kenny (Yellow)

- Jessica (Orange)

- Dani (Orange)

GENIUS HOUR: THE VLOG

Vimeo's being annoying... apparently, I have to wait "in line". The link below should work.

THE VLOG CAN BE FOUND HERE: https://vimeo.com/122067012

COMMENTS:

- Fred (Brown)
- Jacob (Yellow)
- Josh (Orange)

Update 03/08/15

Hello everyone... hope you all had a nice unplanned four-day weekend.  I think it's time for a brief update! I'm nearly finished all of my backgrounds for the cartoon. They required quite a bit of precision, as demonstrated by the picture below. I had to use a ruler to draw the buildings of the city in this scene.

This next picture includes a mostly colored version of the same background.

I'm using PIGMA SENSEI manga-drawing utensils (not sure if they are considered pens or markers), Fibracolor markers, and some generic color pencils. I did just buy a pack of new color pencils... the green ones are running out fast.

If you've been following my blog, you probably remember this boy. For several plot reasons, I flipped him around digitally. After printing him out, I colored him using Fibracolor markers. I will cut him out later.

Here are some more character designs. Notice the remarkable changes occurring at the top of the paper. I'm not sure how I got from point A to point B...

The whole cartoon will follow the "journey" of a single hot air balloon. I have some preliminary designs for it directly below, as well as another character design.

The following is a drawing of the balloon that I scanned and made a digital copy of. I used a kind of cross-hatching technique to emulate shading and lighting.

After printing the balloon out twice, I colored both but varied the shape of the mouth (open or closed). I will add googly eyes, too (this may turn out to look pleasant or creepy... I sure hope it's not the latter). 

That's about it for this update. There's much more to come in the video blog (which will be edited and uploaded by tomorrow evening) and the next official blog post.

A few inspiring stop motion videos

I've been making lots of progress, especially with these past two snow days. The animation is almost ready to start coming together, as most scenes are already planned out and choreographed.

I spent some time this afternoon to watch certain stop motion animations, and I'm sure glad I did. These videos will probably influence how my final product will turn out. I hope you enjoy!

"MUNRO"

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZey6toSToc)

This one is probably a response to the Vietnam War, given the time period in which it was created. I thought that was rather interesting.

"BALANCE"

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wJj58aLvdQ)

"THE MAKER"

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

I might have a brief update on the project coming tomorrow concerning character models. At least, it will be separate from the next scheduled blog post.

COMMENTS FOR CYCLE 3

- Catelyn Huang (Yellow class)
- Nathan Leung (Red class)
- Matt Autieri (Orange class)
- Jacob Kaffey (Brown class)

Blog Post 3: BABY STEPS

It seems that we're just about at the halfway mark of the project, which means I'd better have made some real progress. Fortunately, it seems I have. Let me show you a GIF file I created:

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***... DRUM-ROLL PLEASE...***

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Actually, many of you may have already seen this on social media of some sort. Sorry if I killed the suspense for you or something.

To some of you, this may not seem like much. However, I was completely caught off guard by the amount of detail and precision required in making a high-quality stop motion image. You may recall from my first blog post that I had previously attempted making my own video game and also me saying that the animation was crude; I now know why that animation was crude.

For an animation to look like it is in motion, certain parts of the subject have to remain relatively stationary for the whole product to look fluid. It's like how one object is moving relative to an object at rest (we meet again, 8th grade science class). In my video game, each frame's size and shape was too different from the others, so the final look of the animation was rather sloppy; my character simply looked like he was having incessant spasms. In the GIF animation above, I used several tricks to make the motion seem more natural.

I first had to think of the overall look of the character. To do this, I found a very helpful video that had some important tips on drawing teenagers. You might notice some common traits between the video and my own design.

In the picture directly below, I drew different versions of the character, initially starting with the boy in the baseball hat that appeared in what I think was my second post. Close-ups on the face (like those shown below) may or may not be included in the animation since they are a good way to show emotion.

Now, there is once again the challenge of maintaining a steady, smooth animation. To keep the postures of the characters consistent with each other, I used tracing. In this next picture, I used a desk light to show the outline of a figure already drawn on another sheet of paper.

To the right of the clear outline is a faint figure from the paper underneath. At this point, I partially traced the face. From each frame to the next, most of the upper body stays in the same position; I move the legs to give the impression of walking.

Here's another picture that shows the first two figures I drew juxtaposed side-by-side. It's hard to see here, but on the first figure, the right leg is extending forward, while the left leg is extended forward on the second figure. In the animation reel, these two frames will be at opposite ends and will show one leg moving back and forth.

After drawing six figures, I outlined them with a fine-tip marker made especially for animation. One note I made to myself was to try outlining finished figures beforehand next time so that the figures I'm trying to trace over are easier to see.

These are scanned copies of the drawings.

After cutting each figure out digitally (I'm not going to do this in the final product, but this is a quicker way to demonstrate the stop-motion concept directly), I inserted them into an online GIF file creator. I also tried this out on a video editor, but video files are inconvenient for posting on Blogger. I set the frame rate to 10 frames per second, which is slightly slower than 12 fps (what I originally intended). I might use 10 fps because entering 12 fps in a video editor is too much of a hassle. Also, 10 fps will take up slightly less space as well as less effort.

Here is the complete reel, in order from beginning to end. When the whole reel is finished, it repeats itself.

And finally, here is the GIF file again.

Since I know the process of drawing these moving figures, the rest of them will be much easier. I've already started with a few others, and they are coming along much faster. I think I will use the same GIF file method just to check if they look smooth when put together.

I was simultaneously working on some background designs. Here are two ideas for a city background. I drew a stick figure on each of these to show the relative size of my character (the one I just finished) to the whole background. My background will be much larger than letter-size paper, and I've found the paper I will be using for the final video. There will be two other backgrounds, both of which I have planned as well.

Only now have I realized how disorganized my shelf is in the background. Piles of material from middle school have accumulated there, and I somehow decided all of it would be useful. Maybe I should have done organization as my genius project...

The background music for the video is nearly complete. It has a sort of French vibe to it, as it utilizes the accordion (computer-generated audio) and a waltz rhythm. I have adjusted the tempo (speed) to 180 beats per minute so that the audio can easily be matched up with the video (each measure will last one second).

These are some other noteworthy resources I saw this week. They will probably become relevant at some point down the road, although I haven't used them yet. I'll keep them for reference.

Drawing emotions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVrw24fYOIs
Drawing houses: http://www.how-to-draw-funny-cartoons.com/cartoon-houses.html


It seems my animation has taken its first steps. Look out for any updates, which are sure to come sooner this week.

"Au revoir!"

Blog Post 2: BLUEPRINTS

I've been practicing my cartooning, and I think I have found a "style" that I like. Of course, said style must develop in order to incorporate all elements of the animation. Currently, I have a general design for people (it may remind some people of "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" from way back when...). I have yet to figure out what the objects will look like, taking background/middleground/foreground into account.

Here is a page of my sketches. I don't want to give too much away, but these designs should be enough to give you all a taste:

***Note: for animation, the right drawing utensil is surprisingly important

As you can see from the picture above, I have an idea of how the scenes of the video will look. For many days, I thought about how to make the drawing process as efficient as possible. For now, my plans involve drawing the background on a long strip of paper and looping back to the beginning of the paper when needed. On that piece of paper, I will place cut-out figures or objects and move them independently. This way, I do not need to "draw" hundreds of frames; instead. I will arrange separate pieces and take photos of the different arrangements. Think of it like Flappy Bird, where there is a bird moving relative to a scrolling background and green pipes.

This presents a few complications. Firstly, I will have to cut out many forms of the same character to show them walking. I showed an example of this in my previous blog post. I will also have to create transitions between two different backgrounds (I have three pictured above). The perspective in a scrolling animation is limited; I will most likely insert close-ups to show more specific actions than walking or moving. This may or may not utilize a traditional frame-by-frame drawing method, in which I do not have independently moving parts.

Here is a cool video that I saw yesterday. While it is not an actual animation, it uses stop motion (and walking animation) extremely well. It was made by the YouTuber Ryan Higa:

While we're on the subject on that video, I should mention its use of actual real-life objects along with images. If convenient, I might incorporate actual objects into my animation as well.

Starting this next week, I will start to draw "test" animations. Perhaps I will draw 20 to 30 frames of simple images and piece them together using various software. I should figure out all the logistical issues before the final video comes together.

Some other things I've been thinking about/working on:

- Background music
- Color scheme
- Shading

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate any comments and feedback very much!

COMMENTS FOR CYCLE 1:
Commented on Brett's/Liliana's/Paul's blogs.

COMMENTS FOR CYCLE 2:
Commented on Felicia's/Christy's (Red class)/Noah's (Red class) blogs.

Blog Post 1: SQUARE ONE

Before I get started, I should mention the following two things first.

M GOAL: to attain mastery in the art of stop-motion animation.
MY PROJECT: to create a short video with stop-motion animation.

The vast realm of stop-motion is quite overwhelming upon first glance. One has countless options when creating a film using this technique. Just consider all of the possible ways in which the artist can express his thoughts...

     - LEGO (building images with LEGO bricks was a common suggestion)
     - Claymation (I tried using clay in stop-motion animations in a previous Enrichment class)
     - Photography (My dad is a photographer, so this would be a good option)
     - Drawing (I have experience in drawing and sketching)

I mentioned that I've had some experience with stop-motion. During middle school, I had a grand total of two stop-motion endeavors, the first being the Claymation video.

The Claymation was a music video for The Lonely Island's "Threw It On the Ground". My group had a great deal of fun animating a fake hot dog splattering in a clay figure's face, but the animation itself was rather choppy, to say the least. All in all, it was a decent first effort.

The second time I attempted stop-motion was not for a class. In a burst of narcissistic impulse, I decided to make a video game entitled "The Adventures of J. Shu". I will not name any names, but in my defense, one other person was also involved. For the character models, I had to draw a few frames of me moving. Here are some very crude samples (it's as good as it gets for The Adventures of J. Shu):

Deciding to take advantage of my artistic background, I chose to draw my animation. Thus, I had to consider the requirements of a standard stop-motion animation. A very smooth video should show 24 frames per second. If I were to create a 60-second video, I would have to draw 1,440 frames. Keeping the amount of time I have in mind, I decided to go with 12 frames per second instead. This will cause a slight decrease in quality, but drawing 720 frames is significantly more manageable. Perhaps, using a smaller frame rate may challenge me even more than 24 fps.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will periodically consult YouTube for both techniques and ideas. There are a seemingly infinite supply of fantastic stop-motion videos on YouTube. Here is one that I particularly enjoy:

(If the embedded video does not appear, go to this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv_TOkGtreI)

I have several ideas about the story line, designs, and methods with which I will create my final product. Once I finalize my plans, I will post my second blog post.