Intro Assignments

This is my assignment page for Intro to Tech: Scroll down for the latest ones!

Friday, January 23, 2015 - My first assignment was this very blog!
I guess there will be more to come, for now this is just my henna blog.


Friday, February 6th, 2015- I chose the Budweiser "Lost Dog" as my favorite 2015 Super Bowl commercial. I hardly watch football at all (actually not at all,) except for maybe the Super Bowl every once in a while. I didn't watch this past Super Bowl but the ads are always my favorite part of watching one, which is mostly due to the enthusiasm and effort stuffed into these 30-60 second ads. Animals are probably what makes these Budweiser ads work primarily because it's not all that great to see a dude talking about beer for a minute, but it is fun to witness a heartfelt mini-story involving the Budweiser Clydesdales and a golden retriever puppy!

Why did you choose this commercial to review? What caught your attention... What design elements were used to capture your interest? (Light, Sound, Composition, Color, FX?)

I personally love animals of any shape and size and so I was initially drawn to this particular commercial. What kept my interest was the whole overall feeling the ad gave me. I felt really attached to the owner, puppy and horses all because the ad is entirely designed to make you feel that these people and animals (attached to the beer company) show compassion and emotion in the ad.
What adds to the emotion in this commercial is the composition of it. The shots feel long, even though they last a few seconds or fractions of, because the timing is spot on and gives a continuous feel. The lighting tells a story in itself during the events of the commercial: earth tones in the beginning, followed by darker, bluer hues from when the dog is lost leading to the bright and sunshiny return of the lil' pup. The music is the final touch to complete the ad that gives it a homey, heartfelt realistic story feel. It starts a soft and sweet slow piano melody and eventually makes its way into a increasingly intense symphony when the dog returns and ends with a small ascending flourish. The melodic beginning also seems to stretch the length of the ad, yet it is still a longer than most ad standing at one full minute. Overall I enjoy the ad because it is not intense like its fellow ads or even football itself. It speaks to a different audience than most super bowl ads do! And I dig it :)


Wednesday February 11th 2015 - Blender Mesh Edited Sphere
Made it into a little king! Having some experience in programs such as video editors and sound editors I assumed there would be shortcuts and icons to aid in the completion of the project and fluid manipulation of the program itself, and so it proved to have such characteristics but ultimately Blender was quite different then anything I've used before! I enjoyed using the program but I don't think I've developed a knack (or immense interest) in the program yet! Not sure if I plan to explore this program more.

Monday, April 20th - CGI Film Review
Producer Name: Audrey Robinson
Name: Huzzah, Bobaloo The Beast Boy (1996)
Time: 4 min 13 sec

https://youtu.be/yQZHPGBBPqU

The character's face was the first thing that got my attention in this film.  The uncannily human movements coming from the misshapen face were what grabbed me.  A carnival barker gives a glass of water down into a cage concealing the star of a freak show, Bobaloo the Beast Boy from Borneo, and then proceeds on his spiel to an unseen audience, trying to get them to come in an see his show. The barker seems tender to Bobaloo, who we never see, then gets lost in his progressively outlandish speech. The barker's left arm is withered, but its movement is absolutely human, based as the character is on the movements of local Minneapolis storyteller and writer/performer Kevin Kling, whose arm is similarly affected.

The direction is not dynamic, allowing the groundbreaking technical aspects to dominate.

The technical achievement of the whole film is the motion capture of an actor's performance in one take, to include facial and body performance, eye movements, finger movements and voice performance, essentially, ACTING!  This is the tech that informed motion capture from the uber creepy Polar Express to Gollum and Caesar in recent days.

The circa 1996 form of motion capture used 3-D sensors placed at points on the actor's body (to include a special glove) who then proceeded to act out the scene in an electromagnetic field generated by a device in the center of the stage. The translation of the 3-D sensors on the actor's body through the space was the data that moved the 3-D model. The eye movements were grabbed using a 2-D special effects integration program named Flame, by virtue of conventional tracking methods. The facial motion capture was achieved optically using a head-mounted, face-pointing camera that recorded the movements of highly reflective dots pasted to the actor's face.

The 3-D model was digitized with a similar technology whereby the paper machet puppet of the character was based on was placed in a 3-D electromagnetic field, and a pen like a stylus was pressed against the surface of the doll, the coordinates of each press-point adding to construct a 3-D whole.

Nowadays of course the wizards just put a bunch of reflective dots on a person and they film them and the computer does the rest, but in 96, the year I was born, they had to use a gaggle of different techs to achieve the same capture of the data of performance. This data of motion was laboriously cleaned and modified to fit the 3-D model, which itself was worked on for months to turn it from the 3-D statue that it started as, into something animatable.  One person worked for days on just tracking the movements of the actor's pupils, since no motion capture technique then existed save for good old human slavery.  A team of about 20 people worked for months on this project, which basically faded into obscurity.  The principal creators, Larry Lamb, Kevin Kling, and Michael Sommers are still active in the Minneapolis art scene.  The film was produced by Lamb and Co.

Scene 1: Medium shot, The barker looks directly into the camera and rambles about Bobaloo, and you pan out to fully reveal the barker's limp arm. The character's eyes bob and fixate in place and move in time with his arms as he gestures.
Tech. used: 2-D special effects program Flame

Scene 2: Low dutch angle, of the barker pouring a cup of water into the cage of mysterious Bobaloo. The water passes through the cage bars into an abyss we cannot see. Facial and Body manipulation is present still along with the rendered water and night sky above.
Tech. used: 3-D rendering & 3-D motion capture