Robert McLeod

Game 3

2010-09-09T04:37:00.000-07:00

Just testing to see if my blog picks up this post.

In Game 2

2010-08-19T18:44:00.000-07:00

That's what the poacher gets for trying to catch a gorilla with a net! Mwuhahahaha!

In Game

2010-08-19T18:40:00.000-07:00

Here's screen-shot of what the game looks like. The monkey needs to avoid getting caught by the evil poacher!

The Monkey Hero

2010-08-19T16:32:00.001-07:00

Here is the "hero shot" of my gorilla character. In the game if the monkey collects enough bananas he will have enough energy to take up his gorilla form and put the hurt back on the poachers.

Mini Monkeys

2010-08-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

More of where my monkey came from.

The Anti-Poacher Concepts

2010-08-19T05:13:00.000-07:00

This was the origional concept drawing for my game. The top drawing was the influence which inspired the walk cycle I eventually created for the gorilla, it is a sketch from a video it came across at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eVp61FasEs

Dinner With a Dragon

2010-06-11T21:58:00.000-07:00

Final product!

Video is viewable on Vimeo at http://www.vimeo.com/12501291

Once Upon a Time

2010-06-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

I wanted my character to be expressive with its facial features, which meant I needed to set up a number of different facial expressions which I would be able to morph between. I also wanted it to be cute. In ‘Rockin’ Bones’ I had 2 pretty Bad Ass character, and in ‘Hatching a Fairy’ I had a pretty animation, but cute was something I wanted to attempt, again trying to show a variety in my work.

In searching for some images on the internet I found the perfect precedent for this character: Spyro.

He’s just soooooooo cuuuute!

This cute characteristic was something I wanted to have influence my storyline. Somewhere in my short movie I wanted to create a scene similar to that of the Puss in Boots shot in Shrek 2. I obviously don’t have the skills DreamWorks have but I still wanted to pull something like it off. I noticed the key to that scene was the music that went with it; it was almost like a lullaby.

With this now in my head, I was able to start plotting a storyline which went like this:

1. Robert comes home from shopping

2. Robert walks through the door, closes it, and unloads a chicken onto the bench

3. While leaving the chicken unattended, the door can be heard opening – the camera rotates to show an open door with the dragon sneaking in

4. While Robert unpacks the rest of the shopping he hears something (the sound of the dragon munching on the chicken). When Robert returns his attention to the chicken the dragon will be eating it.

5. Robert is shocked to see a dragon eating his chicken and puts it outside

6. The dragon looks up with cute expression at Robert at the door. Robert close door on Dragon

7. A sigh of relief by Robert but when he turn to the chicken, the dragon had magically reappeared inside and eaten the whole thing!

8. Robert, not happy about his stolen dinner, reaches for the frying pan and chases dragon out of the house.

9. The end

The story was clearly going to have a comical feel to it so it needed a comical collection of music to go with it. I decided on a mixture of cartoon style themes which seemed fitting.

How to train [an animator to train] a Dragon?

2010-06-11T19:48:00.000-07:00

This project was a struggle right from day one. I really wanted to do something to the same kind of standard as ‘Rockin’ Bones’ but at the same time learn more tools. Coming up with an idea that I was willing to follow through with was my first hurdle to clear. I had 3 main ideas.

1. Use a green room, film a friend in it, then bring him into an animated world (probably my favourite idea).

2. Build an animated character that can talk, and film myself having a conversation with it.

3. Create a scene movie with no talking, but have the facial expressions and movements of myself and an animated character created the mood.

As much as I would have loved to have done option one, I wasn’t able to get access to a green room, or make my own cheap one. Option three was my final decision.

I was again feeling overly ambitious in this project and wanted to build on the skills I developed in ‘Rockin’ Bones’ and make a complex character. I decided to make it more difficult for myself this time by making a dragon. It sounded wonderful at the time, but my skills from the last project were working with 2 legged, 2 armed characters. This time I was working with a 4 legged creature... with wings.

Things I knew I needed to develop on from last time were material and camera movement. With the project brief asking me to blur the barriers between what’s real and what’s animated, camera movement was something that was always going to be a focus area, mainly because, this time, I was going to film physically... in real life... with a real tape... in a real camera...

As for materiality, the problem was overcoming the complex shapes I saw myself as reasonably good at modelling.

This meant I needed to learn more about:

- Bone Movement and Physique – including IK controllers, path, position, and orientation constraints, spring movements, and attaching specified vertices to specified bones (all this just for the wings and eyes!)

- texturing – working with Photoshop to create a unique skin for my dragon, with 4 main materials wings, wing bones, horns, and main body, all with their own gloss and bump maps, while flowing nicely onto each other.

- unwrap UVW – applying the texture to my complex shape (a dragon)

- Camera Tracking – Tracking the camera movements of my filmed footage and using that information to animate the movements of my 3ds Max camera. The most painful process I’ve come across in all my years of study.

- Lighting/reflection/shadows – getting my dragon to look like he’s really there..

All this, in HD... a lot to learn.

The Next Step

2010-04-29T23:41:00.000-07:00

I am really happy with my final result which I named 'Rockin Bones'. I will make it avaliable to view of vimeo soon.

When I get some free time I will tweek a few little imperfections and render it again in HD.

As for my next project I want to start looking into other areas which I haven't explored yet and build on what I've already learnt. Eg:

Grass
Wind
Better Biped movement
More believable materiality
Post production
Bringing animations into the real world/the real world into animation
FIRE

Making a Scene

2010-04-29T23:16:00.000-07:00

After buiding my characters, fully rigging them, it was time to develop my scene.

A couple friends and I came up with a story line for me to work with in my animation. The ideas had to work with the two characters I had created, a fearless/realively mindless skeleton warrior (which I named Bones) and a rock monster with anger management issues (which I named Rocky).

Storyline:

Introduce Bones - running through a canyon
Start an earthquake in the canyon while Bones is running
Bones almost reaches the exit of the canyon but the earthquake causes a landslide which blocks Bones' exit.
Rocky emerges from the ground behind Bones who now cannot run (not that he would, he is mindless)
Rocky roars at Bones (just to make it obvious that he's not a particularly happy rock)
Bones charges at Rocky
Rocky owns Bones
The end

This required for me to learn more about a few key tools in 3ds max for this animation, among other things:

Reactor physics engine
Biped animation
Morpher modifier - for facial expressions
Mental Ray sunlight
Procutter (I didn't have time to learn enough maxScript to create better fractures)

Making a New Enemy

2010-04-29T22:44:00.000-07:00

Now that I had made my monster. I needed a to get him to sculpt a story. I knew he would be inherently angry and that I would have him destorying something but I needed to get it a motive, or something to be really angry at. This was a problem, because every idea that came to me resulted in me having to create another character.

I eventually gave in and forced myself to come up with a new character. I needed something to be stupid enough to run at this massive monster i created. I decided on a skeleton worrior, a character thats basically fearless, but also mindless, and something that I really enjoy to watch getting its ass get kicked.

I worked with a similar technique as my first character and attached my imported skeleton structure (from poser 7) to a biped, only this time all the skeletal bones were attached to their coresponding biped bones as rigid bodies, with the exception of the spine and ribs, which I would allow to deform.

I origionally wanted to have a massive battle scene which involved an epic fight scene between the two, a really slow moving but strong rock monster vs a really agile and fearless skelton. However, I only had 5 weeks, not nearly enough time to construct two characters, a dynamic environment, give it all material then animate the introduction of those two characters, apply physics to the environment and after all that, choreograph an epic fight scene... But that would have been awesome!

Building my Monster

2010-04-29T20:49:00.000-07:00

I wanted my character to be as close to the opposite of the fairy that I made in the first project. Which is how I knew I was going to make a monster. It was going to have to have a solid texture, very unlike the translucent material I used for my fairy's skin. To do this I was going to make rock. Put both these together you get a rock monster.

Building this beast was going to take a lot of time. Lucky I had learnt how to make a basic mesh and bone structure (using a biped) in my first project. This time I was going to use a technique called box modelling more closely. This pretty much meant I was going to start with a box, and my monster would evolve from there. However I was going to work a little backwards and make the biped first, just so I had a shape that I could work towards (it also meant that I didn't have to spend hours perfectly repositioning the bones later).

My main difficulty with my biped last time was that my mesh became overly deformable, which meant when I moved some parts of the character other parts would be deformed, mostly in ways I didn't want. To make this more challenging, my new character was going to be made of rock, a mostly undeformable and rigid material. To combat this I made a base mesh which I would allow to deform and attach it to the biped, then added parts which I would force to remain rigid by attaching it to an individual bone rather than the whole biped, for example the left upper arm rock I attached to the left shoulder bone of the biped (thats the difference between 5 and 6 in the image above).

The Making of Rockin Bones

2010-04-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

This was a response to my Design 231 (VUW) project 02 brief. The project asked us to develop a profile of a character, a character which be the tool used to sculpt a story.

My last project (The Fary Beginning), was a really nice, slow, pretty subtle animation. This time I wanted to make something bad ass, fast and epic, just to try and show I can achieve both extremes and give my work some variety. There would be no pretty characters or subtle movements.

I also wanted to challenge myself to learn more about the tools that I used in my first project and build on areas what I needed improve on from my last project, like the lack of variety and quality of materiality. I also wanted to make things more interesting by adding facial features and expressions and generally add the little details which give a character more life.

These were things that I knew I wanted to achieve from day one. But also something I knew would require a stupid amount of commitment to achieve in 5 weeks.

The Rock

2010-04-14T19:19:00.001-07:00

The Rock Monster standing next to skeleton man

Skeleton Man

2010-04-14T19:18:00.001-07:00

My second Character.

The Fairy End

2010-03-24T20:10:00.000-07:00

(very low resolution I have an HD version which I will upload to vimeo later)

Fairy Wings

2010-03-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

And of course, a fairy is not complete without its wings. When I first created them the wings were static and bland. I wanted to add a wavey movement too it, something to make it seem more natural. Luckily for me there was a wave modifier in 3DS Max which worked perfectly for this job.

Hatching the Egg

2010-03-24T19:49:00.001-07:00

The next stage, having linked the fairy to the biped, was to hatch it out of the egg. I wanted this to be different from the cracking and strugling that you would expect. I wanted to reverse this. Instead I wanted the fairy to embrace its escape from the egg and be free, so I wanted it to break out of its egg and make an awesome display of awesomeness (even though it was a very pretty egg).

The material that I applied to the egg was something that took a lot of time to consider. I wanted it to be something that changed over time. The idea which i adopted onto the skin of the fairy.

The Fairy and the Biped

2010-03-24T19:37:00.001-07:00

This is where I started working on the animation. I started with buiding a human like mesh (not perfect but good enough to make it clear what it is). I then linked the mesh to a biped (part 3). From there I could start moving the parts of the biped to animate the fairy. This took a very very very long time...

The Fairy Story

2010-03-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

This was the basic story that I was hoping to fulfill by the end of the project (only in colour and 3D!).

The Fairy Beginning

2010-03-24T18:45:00.000-07:00

This project all started with the serach for the perfect open-source musical piece to cover the 30 second project. At that stage I wasn't sure where the project was heading but I figured one I found something that I liked, a story would grow from the atmosphere the music would provide. I knew that if I found a techno song that I liked then I would have a fast paced animation with loads of quick movement, and if I came across a slow piano piece then the animation will also be slow.

I eventually came across a sond in an open-source archive called 'Kiss the Rain' composed by a pianist named Yiruma ( http://www.archive.org/details/Yiruma-KissTheRain ). It was one of those musical pieces that I could listen to multiple times (which I figured was going to happen anyway) and still be impressed by its beauty. I knew I was going to used this piece and have to make a beautiful animation (or as beautiful as possible; this is only my first time animating something) to compliment it.

From there it was deciding what exactly the music made me thing of. A few words came to mind, beauty being one of them, but I needed something tat would direct the story of the animation. I started thinking of things that were beautiful. From amongst the many of other things, the one that I thought would best suit a 30 second video was the idea of growth, the development of something simple into something complex and beautiful. The most obvious example of this to me was a cocoon, where a butterfly hatches and evolves into a butterfly. Although this would look pretty damn good, I can't see myself convincingly digitally animating either of those at this stage, let alone the growth stages in between, but I had the starting point for my story line.

It wasn't hard from there. I remember a project that I had worked on last year where I made fairies in a complicated flash prject where I used the weather conditions to determin their behaviour. So "how about I hatch a fairy?", I thought. And that's how it all began. It gets awful technical from there.

2010 - DSDN231

2010-03-03T18:13:00.000-08:00

digital, surface, form and space

Post-Production Production

2009-08-05T04:10:00.000-07:00

The concept that got me started on my Quartz Composer path was based on dancing. What I was hoping to do was create an audio visual patch which would allow the user to manipulate a character's movements. The individual movement would be plain and simple on its own, but, a lot like dancing, a combination of these simple movements create a complex and visually appealing new flow of motion.

Thinking about this further, I would like to offer a different view on how to think of dance. Dance is usually performed in response to music, particularly to a beat. In this project I wanted this trend to be reversed, and instead have the music play in response to movement. This way, only when the correct combination of movements are made will the beat create fluency and rhythm.

The process involved in the creation of this patch started with the recording of a friend in a plain space. The recording involved him making preforming simple single movements. This recording was imported into After Effects where he was removed from the background and the individual movements were rendered in single video files. In Quartz Composer these files were linked to buttons on the keyboard; one button for each movement. Linked to the same buttons were simple sounds. I was able to highlight my friend through a motion tracker, which was given color through a color generator. Videos were imported from Video Pong to be linked to the melody and bass sounds which were given the same motion and color treatment. The result was a colorful environment capable of visual and audible change.

VJING AND LIVE A/V PRACTICES - Review

2009-07-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

In this article by Andrew Bucksbarg, there is a lot of reference towards the importance of movement and rhythm in VJing and Live A/V, which involves repitition and variations. Here is a summary of his writing.

Sound and light both share wave-like properties and we perceive them in both time and space. Coupled with performance, there arises a time-pressured practice that engages the process of being human. The marriage of waveforms of sound and light established in experimental cinema and animation embody an art of movement.

VJing and A/V performances are based on movement- rhythm: pattern, repetition and tempo and measures of dramatic intensity. Rhythm and movement are important commonalities throughout audio-visual performed practices. Movement in film and video is simulated by presenting samples, painted or manipulated stills or captured images, at a fast enough rate that we perceive a smooth, connective movement of shapes and forms in the frame. Rhythm is created by the regular (or irregular) alternation of content and the negation of content over time.

VJing performances share a potential for dramatic structure. Dramatic structure in narrative is forged along plotlines of conflict, rising action and resolution that build intensity to a climax. Drama is created through intensity. The simplest description of this dramatic shape relies on a major climax and resolution. In sound design, the articulation of time in sound is called the “envelope.” The envelope is comprised of the attack, sustain, decay and release. Envelopes are familiar means for shaping and manipulating sounds in samplers and software over time. The envelope is also used to create different timbres of or tonalities of sound, for example, a percussive attack of a piano versus a smooth attack of a flute initiating a note.

The prevalence of technology and media now enables the live performance and interaction of sound and image in ways that were not possible fifteen years ago. We will continue to see art and media created and influenced by such practices as VJing continue to expand in the areas of interaction and the participation of the subject, as well as work and systems with more complex and meaningful interfacing with the body.

Prj 02

2009-05-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

The first problem that I faced with this project was actually finding the site. Having selected the gym I now needed to find a gym that would let me go in and actually film it. I was hopeful towards my first choice in using the victoria university gym which was quick to decline my request, claiming something along the lines of "its against university policy to have people film inside the buildings". This set me back quite a few days until I managed to find a friend that would let me use their hostel gym (with management's permission of course). The problem with this gym was that it didn't have a boxing bag, so I would have to find yet another site to shoot this part in and hope for the best in editing to make it look as if the two different locations appeared to be shot in the same place... The boxing bag shots were actually done in my friends garage.

After taking to footage capturing it in avid was not a process that was cooperating with me. Importing the film from the camera was done in iMovie. The result of the importing was daunting, I suddenly had to deal with the size of the files, totaling 22GB before importing into avid.

As far as the sound went I felt that the quality of sound coming from the video footage provided a relatively meditative feel to it and worked well enough on its own, particularly with the impact on the boxing bag.

The biggest problem that I came across in this project was the rendering.. In parts of the video the picture quality was clearly not what it should have been. Looking over it again I noticed that this only occurred the areas where I had made frame rate changes, which is where I think it went wrong. The place where this is most noticeable is 03:07 into the video.. If anyone could tell me how to fix this problem I would love to know for future projects.

Project 02 Concept

2009-05-04T13:32:00.000-07:00

The location that I have chosen to work with is the gym. The dictionary describes the gym as “a building or room designed and equipped for indoor sports, exercise, or physical education” (dictionary.com). But to me, the gym represents an entire range of different uses beyond the obvious; working rigorously to change aspects of your body, for some people to loose weight, for others to gain it. To me the exercise is a form of stress relief, or possibly even meditation, and the gym is where I go to do it.

The way in which I intent to present my view of the gym to my audience would be through a narrative that includes a character who is experiencing an extreme amount of stress in his life and has gone to the gym to relieve himself of this stress. The main way in which I intend to display the fact that this character is stressed is by making it obvious that there are all these voices going through his head. Visually, we will be able to see through his expressions that he is thinking distressing thoughts, while audibly, we can here those exact thoughts as they run through his head. Many of these thoughts can be running through the character’s head at the same time, but at different volumes, the most ones that are most distressing having the highest volume. The more the character works out, the more the thoughts fade away from his mind.

The climax in the movie will come at the point where the character is hitting up a boxing bag, where the voices in his head become clearer, and the character is visually more frustrated. This is where I hope to have my visual effects to play a greater roll as well; working with changes between slow motion and changes in camera angle, along with illustration, particularly when the character hits the boxing bag hard enough to silence his stresses.

Project 1 explained...

2009-03-23T16:59:00.000-07:00

OK, considering the ridiculously poor attempt at a presentation, I feel its important for me to explain my assignment hand in. Seeing as this is my first (and probably the only) post about my project it's best if I start at the beginning. Origionally it was my aim to come up with a 30 sec clip which was more, in a sense happy. The reason behind this was other, having seen some of the previous students work, I felt there was a general unhappy and negative theme in most of them. So I made it my aim to search and download open source media which I felt sent across positive images.

From there my ideas developed, and changed. I wanted to make a short story about someone's life, and showing only memories that were, in my opinion, beautiful. From there the idea of someone's life flashing before their eyes came into mind. I decided to go with it even though it started to drift away from being happy, seeing as the whole idea behind your life flashing before your eye is something thats supposed to occur when you die. As a result: life remixed.

This is where I, pretty much, completely abandoned happiness and said, 'what the hell, lets blow something up'. In searching for materials for my first video I came across a clip of a mother talking to her child, just after giving birth. To avoid ruining my video for you I wont tell you what she said, but I wanted her loving words to be contrasted completely by the content in the remainder of the clip, which would involve mankind at its worst, most significantly the atom bomb.

My final clip I decided not to include in my website, mostly because the theme seemed rather distant from the other two. In the first two videos we see the life of a character, be it flashing before a dying mans eyes or an exaggerated destructive nature of man. This this clip's theme was more focused on sexual desire, and taken from only one origional source, where as the other two were a mixture of many. I wanted the most important point in this video to be the kiss, to moment where his dreams meet reality. I decided that this would be best placed at the end, where he finally gets what he's been longing for, which was shown in the first parts of the video.

Well, hopefully that explanation didn't read too much like and essay, especially since it was so long, but I'm sure it helped you to understand where my work was coming from.

2009-03-23T12:48:00.000-07:00

Life remixed is a short movie I made purely from open source media. I was aiming to portray the moments where a person's life flashes before their eyes. My hope was that the sun represented this person's life, and in the last moments of sunlight, those exact moments occur. The origional material was not my own.

Remix and Remixability Response

2009-03-09T02:12:00.000-07:00

http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/19303

Remix and Remixability by Lev Manovich

What I gathered from Lev’s blog is that he argues that remixing is part of culture. Which is remarkably true, but in many of his examples, for example when “Ancient Rome remixed Ancient Greece”, I would argue is something that you would label as development. Perhaps then it would be safe to argue that remixing is just another word for development, or at least is vital to development.

I would also like to deliver some negative feedback though. Personally I think Lev could have just left the article at “[we are] endowed with a certain flexibility and modularity which enables collaborative remixability a transformative process in which the information and media we’ve organized and shared can be recombined and built on to create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services.”

Music Network

2008-07-24T18:05:00.001-07:00

The real life (RL) network I chose for the composite image part of the assignment was music. The three stages of the networ are: singers creating the music, me listening to it, and people dancing to it (where ever that may be)...

Network Analysis

2008-07-24T17:48:00.000-07:00

Having looked at many blogs in the Design 112 network this week, i can confidently say that the sites I found most appealing had simple templates where the layouts made the content easy to read through. There are many blogs on the web that fill up their page with images an videos in seemingly random and disorganised sizes and positions, which makes the world wide web a world wide mess, so it is relieving to see some tidy sites in this network! In particular look at Matt Eales, James Russell, Nathan Berrett. To view my comments click on my Archive.

The Sexy Project

2008-07-24T17:32:00.000-07:00

Deign 101, Project 2, 2008

The dictionary definition of the word ‘sexy’ is: Arousing or tending to arouse sexual desire or interest. I was working on demonstrating the meaning of the word 'sexy' in the video by making the letters of this word seem sexy. This was done by slowly following the curves of the letters 's' and 'e' and the straight features of the 'x' and the 'y' in a seductive manor. The slow smooth movement of the video is strongly complimented by the song "let's get it on" by Marvin Gaye in the background, in an attempt to further demonstrate the meaning of the word sexy.

More Lurking

2008-07-17T19:13:00.000-07:00

These guys are simply amazing. You must view this website! ALL of the work in their archive is visually appealing on so many levels. The colour schemes and illustrations come together to make amazingly complex compositions. Brandnu has done work for Xbox, Advanced Photoshop and, The KDU and more. This illustration is called forever young.

http://www.brandnu.co.uk/home/archive.php

New Lurker

2008-07-10T19:00:00.001-07:00

Clever Advertisements:

This website is full of awesome advertisements, which demonstrate simple approaches to effectively reaching a market. Most of these images you look at and say: “that is awesome”, which for a marketer, would indicate success.

http://www.hemmy.net/2006/10/15/creative-advertisements-around-the-world/

Web Designer:

“Is a wall of design ideas, web trends, and tutorials.” Tutorials and design trends are posted here for people to learn from others about creating illustrations using tools such as photoshop.

http://www.webdesignerwall.com/

Cool Hunter:

Cool hunter is my new favourite website. It updates regularly, displaying the latest, well, cool stuff… Their categories range from fashion to travel and many other categories full of amazing innovative design, which is, for lack of a better word: cool.

http://www.thecoolhunter.co.uk/

New Comer

2008-07-07T17:14:00.000-07:00

For this project we (the design101 students) had to choose a word or our choice, and describe the meaning of that word using only the letters that spell it. Our options were in no way limited, but I was looking for a word which I thought would be funny, as well something that I felt would be hugely different from what my other peers were doing. For this reason I decided to choose the word sexy. But as well as this I was exited by the challenge of trying to make letters seem sexy.

The dictionary definition of the word ‘sexy’ is: Arousing or tending to arouse sexual desire or interest. I was working on demonstrating the meaning of the word 'sexy' in the video by making the letters of this word seem sexy. This was done by slowly following the curves of the letters 's' and 'e' and the straight features of the 'x' and the 'y' in a seductive manor. The slow smooth movement of the video is strongly complimented by the song "let's get it on" by Marvin Gaye in the background, in an attempt to further demonstrate the meaning of the word sexy.