The Animator’s Survival Kit: ANIMATED - a 16 DVD box-set by Richard Williams, triple Oscar winner and Director of Animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

It’s based on his (apparently) amazing book of the same title (minus the ANIMATED bit at the end!) and from the previews on the official site, it looks like it’s got a wealth of usefull information. Quite apart from the fact that Richard is hilarious and incredibly animated (forgive the pun!), so it’s good entertainment just to watch

Downside… £596 (incl. VAT) seems a bit steep even for 16 DVDs, but I guess it’s quite a good investment… I think for now I’ll just be getting the book

Just watching the previews for the DVDs has inspired me to get back into tradition animation - which I started getting into a while ago (1,2,3,4).

That’s it for now!

I partially followed this tutorial over at the Blender Wiki, but I decided I wanted to try something more organic, and found this picture:

The first thing to do, was to isolate the foreground hill in the image, by cutting out the original reference image in GIMP:

Then I roughly modelled the hill in Blender, before using a “UVProject” modifier, which (as the name implies) projects the isolated image onto the 3D geometry.

The next thing to do was to prepare the background. Using the clone tool in GIMP, I repainted the parts of the background that the foreground hill were covering to produce a background image.

Admittedly the cloning was a bit rushed, so it’s not a very good result!

Anyway, all I needed to do now was to map this image to a plane (for even more realistic results, I could have roughly modelled the background mountain, and made a second projection), and make a simple camera move.

The result was quite good, but just to had some of the errors in my model, and to add “real-world” camera properties, I also added some motion blur (or Vector Blur, as it’s called in blender).

OK, so after all that, here’s the result:

Camera Mapping Test (AVI, h264)

Camera Mapping test from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

My latest editing project was for Caernarfon based “Cwmni Cofis Bach”, and their opera, “Trwbl yn y Gwynt” (Trouble in the wind). Read more at this Daily Post article.

Basically I got 5 DVDs of archive (newsreel) and stock footage, that I had to edit down into 3 specific clips that were to be projected during the production.

It was a pretty short deadline, and was surprisingly a lot of work even though each clip was only roughly 2-3 minutes long. I was briefed to make it “not look like it’s a newsreel” and instead to make it more cinematic or artistic. I decided to crop the footage into a typical film aspect-ratio. This involved resizing each clip individually, but unfortunately the newsreel footage had different aspect ratios throughout, so it wasn’t a “quick-fix”.

I was also going to try and do some vigorous colour-correction to make the footage more cinematic, but didn’t have the time, plus a large portion of the footage was black and white anyway.

It was quite good to have a short deadline, because I learnt how hard it is to edit under pressure…

One last piece of news, I now have some fairly decent headphones, yay!!

Project Treborth: Teaser Trailer from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

It’s not as good as I would like it to be, but I think this was largely due to the fact that we really didn’t plan the trailer at all, and we basically still haven’t finalised the storyline or script… So really this was just a fun test/we were bored so we decided to make a film!!

“Project Treborth”

Me, Huw and Laurence went out to do some test/pre-production/teaser trailer filming the weekend before last and it was really quite an awesome filmage sesh. We actually managed to get quite a few really good shots, although we made the mistake of not planning them first again which has made the trailer editing a bit difficult, but still it’s ok… All in all it was a really inspiring sesh and gave me plenty ideas for the rest of the Project Treborth storyline.

I couldn’t get the trailer quite right before, so I decided to edit together a behind the scenes type of video thingy (warning: ultra cheesy music!)…

Project Treborth: Behind the Scenes from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

I’ve also uploaded The Deadly Diamond to stage6, and someone made a comment which just really made my day:

I agree with comments posted aboce, you kids got talent.

Simple, but really encouraging aye… shame about the spelling mistake!

Anyway… there should be a teaser trailer coming online soon (probably tommorow)…

Wow it’s 2008 already! Seems like I’ve neglected updating this blog for a while :P, well this should make up for all the missed posts!

During a revision-sesh (read: a revision session) I noticed what an awesome clear sky ’twas outside. So I decided I’d do a time-lapse gradually getting darker to reveal some stars. Anyway it was already pretty dark by the time I got it all set up, so it ended up being just an ace video of a constellation moving across the sky. Obviously seeing as it was only a 4 second video, I had to add some titles, and an “extra sharp” version of the video where the stars are more visible.

The time-lapse was actually done using my digital camera (Canon PowerShot A75) and using the software that came with it I used the “Timed Shooting” setting to shoot at regular intervals. I started off using 5-minute intervals, but then the constellation was moving a bit too fast (as you can see in the vid at the start), so I changed it to 1min 15s intervals (the 15s was to compensate for the time it took to take the picture). I had to use the maximum exposure setting on my camera (15 seconds!), and still it isn’t as bright as I would like… hmm I need to get a Digital SLR.

With the resulting set of pictures I batch processed them using GIMPshop and a plugin called “David’s Batch Processor“, to fiddle with the brightness/contrast a bit, and to resize/crop them to HD framing. After this was done I dumped the files into a program called Monkey Jam, and then generated an uncompressed HD movie from the seperate image files.

As I say it was only 4s long, so I thought I might as well make a slightly longer video to make it worth posting… So I fired-up Edius Neo (trial version - might be buying it soon, more on that in a later post…), and did a quick edit, and added a second version of the vid with a bit (actually nearly maximum) of sharpening. The only (reasonable) option for HD output in Edius Neo is WMV, so I just did that… now I’ve uploaded it to Vimeo (which has a nice new HD-viewing feature, where if you upload a 1280×720 vid, it will keep it at that native HD resolution…), and you can view the result below.

Constellation Time Lapse (HD) from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

(hmm seems you have to go on the actual vimeo page to see the HD version.)

Well I did say I was gonna make up for all the lack of posting… SORRY FOR THE ESSAY GUYS!!

I’m studying four subjects: Physics, Maths, Chemistry and Art.

Art’s going pretty well and after doing several self-portraits I’m currently drawing this lithograph by M.C. Escher, called “Reptiles”, where a reptilian creature seems to crawl out of a book. It’s a pretty complex piece to draw, but I think I’m slowly getting there!

Anyway all posts REQUIRE a picture, so here’s a random sunset on the campsite we stayed on, in Pembrokeshire:

3D Silly Walk from Joel Davies on Vimeo.

I basically found an old Blender test file for using a feature called DupliVerts (where one object can be repeated on the vertices (or corners) of another object) that I made a while ago. In the end I didn’t actually use dupliverts as there were some problems with applying an armature to the meshes (possibly a bug). So I just manually duplicated the characters. Anyway it turned out looking a bit like a “silly walk” (like in Monty Python, Ministry of Silly Walks), so I thought I’d post it! The music is Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 16 from Musopen.com.

Yesterday I randomly decided to do a sketch and the first thing that I saw was Patrick Moore on the cover of one of my “Sky at Night” magazines. So I challenged myself to try and draw him! I think the result actually looks pretty amazing, if I may say so myself! Although it doesn’t quite look exactly like him, but I’m pleased with the shading in general…
Click here to view a bigger version (I added a bit of a soften effect on this larger size)… (JPG, 286Kb)

I’ve also done a random animation using an old Blender test file that I made a while ago. It turned out looking a bit like a “silly walk” (like in Monty Python, Ministry of Silly Walks)… I’ll post the video later.

I composited it with a background image I got from Flickr.com… It’s hard to tell but the image is actually stretched in the render - I only just noticed it now!! I’ll be posting another render soon without the stretched background… I might try and add an entrance to the building if I have time.

There is a possibility that I might try and recreate the “Saying goodbye to an empty train” cartoon in 3D - it would be quite a challenge, but also would help me to learn more Blender!!!