Competition Entry

Though I left this till the last minute to complete and enter into a competition that would receive better entries, I thought I would still give it a go.

I learnt that when entering competitions with set criteria rather than a brief proposed by someone, you need to be well prepared to fill out the application form correctly.

I chose to do a drawing because I have not pushed myself in that field as I should because it is good to have a general drawing skill level to be able to get ideas across, and entering a competition that allowed me to produce any type of work from video to illustration, I think was good to try.

It was something different, but in the future I will not leave it to the last minute and would rather enter VFX or Film briefs, even though they require a lot more planning and execution, I enjoy the whole process a lot more.

Game Art Module Exhibition

We held an exhibition for our Game Machinima Module on Thursday 22nd from 4pm to 6pm.
It was to exhibit the finished work and other stages of production included like concept art, storyboards and cinematic.

We put it together in a short amount of time, but I learnt that if we had spent more weeks preparing posters and getting refreshments together for the event it would have received more people coming to view it.
It still went very well as we had kids from a school come to visit and play our games. We also had people from Games Republic and others part of the college come to view it.
For our game, we were given the tip of adding in an object in the cave so that the character can understand the scale and height of the cave more. It would also make it appear larger.

Overall, it was a useful experience and with more preparation we can have more visitors and more work to show.
This has definitely made me think of producing work that can be added to my portfolio and be proud of to present to a larger audience outside of my course.

Show Reel For Learning Journey

2nd Year showreel from Munirat Plummer on Vimeo.


This is my first attempt at making a showreel of my work, which I think I still have a long way to go to perfecting it.
Making a showreel and trying to find the best work to go in it, made me realise that I have to find the time to produce more pieces of work so when I do make another showreel, I will have a good quantity to choose from.

It was nice to see other people's work, learning journey presentations and know what area they want to specialise in.

I know that in Level 6, I definitely want to work in Film and VFX. I know that I need to work on my storytelling skills and post production skills

For storytelling, I am going to try to learn the basics on script writing so I can be able to get the storyline across to an audience clearly.
For post-production, I am keen on the role of being an editor, so this will mean making more videos so I can improve my editing skills and use of editing software.



Below is a mock-up of a business layout I could use in the future. Though I know this is not going to be my final look for my business card because it does not express my personality with the basic layout and colour.

I shall develop another business card, but this one just shows what information I think needs to be on there so I can be contacted.
This is something I can continue thinking of over summer.

Visting Museums in Berlin

After the 4 day festival in Stuttgart, we thought it would be nice to visit another city in Europe. We chose Berlin because it is known to be an entertaining city with lots of historical places to see.
Most of the museums were cheap or free to go to because the tickets could be purchased with a student card. It was great opportunity to go to these museums and exhibitions to gain knowledge and explore the city.
We also visited the Landesmuseum Württemberg (https://www.landesmuseum-stuttgart.de/) in Stuttgart. We came across by chance and decided to see the exhibition. It contained information and artefacts that were collected from different times in the past. There were pots, pans, jewellery, clothing from different eras, so that was interesting to see.

We visited the Neues Museum in the Alte NationalGalerie.  (http://www.smb.museum/en/museums-and-institutions/neues-museum/home.html). 
I personally wanted to visit this museum because of its large quantity of Egyptian artefacts which I find very interesting.
Though the museum was very large and had other sections like Greek and Roman Art, it would have cost a lot more. 

Statue of Amenemhet

People At Work

Bust of Akhenaten

God Amun, Temple of Karnak

Cult Chamber of Amenhotep and his wife Renenutet

We visited the Berlin Zoo and Aquarium which was very exciting. It took us at least 4 hours to see the whole zoo so that day was very tiring also. (http://www.zoo-berlin.de/)

There was an exhibition at the Computer Games Museum in Berlin which we got a chance to visit. Though I am not into video games, I still enjoyed learning the history and there was a timeline of games since they were first created to present that you could play.

It was a good exhibition to be able to experience. (http://www.computerspielemuseum.de/1210_Home.htm)

Below are some pictures of old gaming hardware which was very interesting to see.

 

For the second time, we visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and other Memorial Sites around Berlin. (http://www.stiftung-denkmal.de/)

Conference: Entrepreneurship in Entertainment Technology by Carl Rosendahl from Carnegie Mellon

The talk was given by  Carl Rosendahl, an Associate Professor teaching at Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center. He is a currently a co-director of the Silicon Valley satellite campus.
His talk explained how films from the release of Disney's first animated film to the present blockbuster films we see in the cinema today has restore the film industry and where it might be leading to in the future. This talk was different from the others I had attended but I found it knowledgable because it taught me how you might be an entrepreneur in the current state the industry is in.

The Golden Age of Hollywood: Sound and colour was introduced to movies and Disney was the first company to produce the first animated colour film. During that time, an average American citizen went to at least 30 films a year, so the industry was booming back then.

Disruption

In 1963, films were made with 15 million dollars, now in 2013 the average film cost 230 million dollars.

What happened since then?

Franchises started being released, it increased the long term value of the films and it was to entice the American audience back into the cinemas, since the 1960s the revenue growth has been from international sources.

If you look at where digital technology was increasingly being used in films and then look at what the audience were spending their cinema tickets on, you can see that the top ten box office films heavily relied on digital technology. There is a relationship that these types of films using digital technology were more popular with the audience. Sci-fi, animated films were a more popular genre for this type of technique.

It currently takes a lot more people in a team to make an animated film than in the past. For Snow White, it took like 64 people while Frozen, released in 2013, took 222 people, even with high running render farms. Frozen has grossed 1.1 billion dollars, gaining a place in the top ten grossing films.

Now film companies are seeing a pattern and have started supporting franchises, franchise films have a larger audience that most likely would see sequels.

Because of advancing technology, stores like Blockbuster started losing business, a factor for this is because of the Internet.

When the Internet became available to the general public, it affected the physical media business, but boosted companies like Netflix and Amazon so instead of returning films back to Blockbuster stores, Netflix allowed the people to have monthly online subscriptions.

Current world dominators are Youtube, Flickr and Wordpress at the time Web 2.0 was created.

Open Source software also became popular and made some softwares widely available to people such as Word, Excel and Photoshop.

The Mobile Disruption

This started with the portable Walkman, then books using Kindle, then games and photography with I-phones allowed for better video usage.

Being mobile with media means most devices today have features like an audio recorder, Internet, Wifi, touchscreen and camera.

The most profitable companies that have benefited from this is Twitter, Instagram, Angry Birds and Vine. They have seen a space in the market business and utilised today's technology to make profit.

The good thing about Angry Birds is that it is there whenever you need to occupy yourself, it does not take much dedication, this has been a factor in its success.

Vine allows you only to upload 10 second videos, this switches the boat and keeps viewers engaged because it only engages you for a short period of time.

These profitable companies have been able to for see the long term actions that might take place with technology.

The benefits of mobile technology is convenience, attention scaling with size and it allows people to be more social.

Conference: PETA 98% Human by Vince Baertsoen

PETA 98% Human by Vince Baertsoen from The Mill


PETA "98% Human" Commercial from The Aramean on Vimeo.

The Mill were approached by PETA do create a photo-real chimpanzee for a campaign they wanted to run, however The Mill needed more time to develop the skills that were needed to give the desired result so they took the brief from PETA much later on in the future.The campaign was to protect real apes from being used in commercials and other tests in life so the advert could use a chimpanzee.
The Mill were able to produce an extremely photo-real chimpanzee, bespoke technology had to be created for the modelling of the skin and muscle simulation. This has created more briefs that require photo-real animals for The Mill, as they are currently working on one for Sky TV.

Chimpanzee Research

To produce the desired result, they spent a lot of time looking at references, looked at videos of apes and chimpanzees walking and images and past films that have ape characters such as King Kong.

They had to learn the movement of the chimpanzee/apes and their facial expressions especially how the skin over their muscles moved, this all needed to be animated so minor details were important.

The reason they did not use motion capture for the movement was because the main aim was to make the chimpanzee look extremely photorealistic, so they had to weigh the options of whether to use it or not and motion capture would not have produced the minor details they wanted.

It was the animators job to make the chimpanzee look real so having an actor act out the actions of the chimpanzee made it a useful reference when it came to animating.
A muscle, blood and skin system were created for the chimpanzee model. The creation of a blood system allowed the chimpanzee to look more life-like.

They used a vector displacement map which allowed the wrinkles on the chimpanzee's skin to move much better and look realistic.

However, the main goal was to express the emotion of the character and story.

Raising the Dragons by Sven Martin, PIXOMONDO

This talk was about how PIXOMONDO approached their project for the TV show, Game Of Thrones.

I chose to to go to this talk because I am a fan of the show and knew that it would be interesting to see how they created these 3D creatures in a realistic setting. They had a tricky time meeting the deadline, because there was a lot of work that went into scenes on the show so that was one of the problems they faced with this brief.

Before this talk, I had not heard of the company, PIXOMONDO, so attending the festival, generally has made me more aware of different types VFX, Animation and Game companies that exist.

PIXOMONDO is a visual effects company that creatively solves challenges for clients and partners located in Europe, China and the United States of America. They have worked on commercials, TV series, films, and live media productions such as 3D projection mapping, media installations and events.

http://www.fmx.de/program2014/event/3481

http://www.fmx.de/program2014/event/3481

Creating the Dragons

Client VFX supervisor: Rainer Gombos (worked on Season 2) and Joe Bauer (worked on Season 3)

VFX producer: Steve Kullback

• Concept & Design: They took reference images from alligator snakes, lava flowing for the colour to develop the skin for the dragon. To understand how the dragon would fly, they looked at skeletons and followed rules from real world physics and tried to build the models from inside out to understand it better as a whole. They looked at animals that fly to enhance their knowledge of the real world physics behind it. The model was then sculpted in Z-brush.
• Surface: Texturing and shading made a difference to the look of the dragons, also looking at      colour palettes to experiment with what colours the dragons would be as there were three. This is where looking at the lava flows affected their work, when the dragons would breath fire, their neck would light up to show the source of the fire. Turntables were created to see how the model looked in different light modes and see how the surfaces reacted with the lighting.
• Rigging: They purchased a dead chicken to understand how the wings and body would move. This is where they figured out that where the wings folded, so did the skin around that area, though it is subtle, it made a difference when it came to animating.  They also placed the chicken in different light situations.
• Animation: They played with ideas of how the baby dragons could behave on Khaleesi's shoulder. This proved difficult because the dragon was not going to be very active on the shoulder so they had to think of what it would do during that scene on her shoulder. They used bats flying as a reference for the dragons flying animations.
• FX: This consisted of wing simulation actions, using a colour grading system showed green means nothing is happening, red means squashed and blue means stretched. They used these colour keys for a displacement map which made it easier to adjust how the wings moved and what happened to the skin during this process.

With season 3 they had a lot of factors to consider, for example, the size of the dragons had increased in scale, since they grew.

They looked at more references of dragon like animals such as the fruit lizards, it meant now that changing the scale to a believable size was a problem they had to solve.