Funemployed Filmmaking

Animated Spot for Televerde

2011-12-17T11:44:00.000-08:00

Last month I designed and animated this little spot for Arizona-based B2B marketing agency, Televerde:

The script was written by producer/director Jack Hooker, who gave me quite a lot of creative freedom with the look and feel of the ad. To create it, I drew all the elements by hand with a pen on paper (with help from a lightboard) and scanned it all in to be animated with the Puppet Pin tool in After Effects. Then sound engineer Matt Schwartz designed the sound and voiced the narration.

Check out a quick look at the process of taking all the individually drawn elements and bringing them together for one character's series of movements:

Now, it's time for the holiday break. My vacation goal: making a new and improved silicone puppet for some personal stop motion fun! Check out the latest sculpt:

New Stop Motion Music Video! - Jesse & Joy's "Me Voy"

2011-10-12T12:37:00.000-07:00

This video was a complete labor of love for all the people involved. We spent 30 days locked in a house together designing, printing, cutting out and animating thousands of little pieces of cardstock in a clear display of stop motion insanity.

Carlos Lopez Estrada, working with production designer Tyler Jensen, would start us out with a storyboard with notes on timing and a loose idea of what elements would be in each shot.

This would give Carlos a guide for what to shoot during the day we shot video of the band and extras...

I would then take that footage in, effect it out in After Effects so it looked all old and scratchy, rendered it out at 12 frames per second and wrote a couple Automator scripts that would take the files that After Effects spit out and resize and print them all for me.

While I was doing this, Tyler's art department team was busy designing in photoshop, printing on a large-format printer, and mounting all the set pieces so that they could be built in front of the camera for our DP Moonie to light and frame up the shot.

To be ready to shoot we had a pretty constant flow of wonderful friends and volunteers that helped us cut out all those individual frames and keep them organized in stacks.

While this was going on, I made some pre-animations in after effects that would tell lead animator, Charles Pieper, things like what numbered frame each character was supposed to be on and when characters should be entering or exiting to make sure everything lined up. With stop motion we dont really have time to make a mistake, so these pre animations assured that we'd get stuff right the first time.

We also didn't have the money to rent or make a stop motion dolly rig, so all the camera moves were actually us moving the entire set while the camera remained locked off. I wrote an expression in After Effects that would print out how much in millimeters we had to move the set each frame to get nice eases into and out of camera moves. That preanimation looked like this:

The really tricky part for this shot was timing the camera move so that she reached out and grabbed the ticket right as the ticket booth got to her. It took some pretty precise coordination, but we ended up getting it.

With all those elements ready to go, we then were able to shoot about ten seconds (120 individual photographs) a day. We captured with Dragon Stop Motion, which allowed us superimpose the preanimation that I made onto what we were doing live so we could be absolutely sure all the motion was smooth and clean.

I then took the footage we shot, cleaned up what needed cleaning, and strung it all together in After Effects. The final piece to be added was all the smoke and magic effects. For this, I took what we had already shot, used it as an overlay video, and shot cotton balls moving around on black cloth, which I used the luma value as an alpha channel in After Effects to put into the shot. Like this:

Now imagine doing this entire process for 30 days straight. We had to stagger all the work so that as we were shooting one scene, art department would be building the next scene and I'd be animating the scene after that. Each shot had a unique set-up to execute what was needed for the story, but for the most part this was how it all went:

And if pictures aren't really your thing, check out this silly behind-the-scenes video we made:

If you liked this video, check out the last stop motion video we did for Jesse & Joy HERE.

Making a Stop Motion Puppet (Part 2): De-molding and Casting

2011-10-06T13:21:00.000-07:00

This is a follow-up post to THIS POST.

After rubbing a little Vaseline onto the finished half of the mold as a release agent, I built another clay wall and repeated the process.

In the morning, I peeled off the clay around the outside and put it back in the back in the bag to use it again later. (Recycle, Reduce, Reuse!)

Using a couple screwdrivers and some elbow grease, I pryed two halves apart. The back half came of all nice and clean, but the sculpt stuck really hard into the front half. I ended up having to go at the orginal sculpt with a hammer and chisel to get it out of the front. Here is what it looked like after like 10 minutes of chiseling:

I ended up not being careful enough in my chiseling and made a few pretty gnarly scratches on the mold. There were also a couple bubble spots. But otherwise it came out pretty nice for a first try:

I'm using Smooth-On's Dragon Skin silicone as a casting material, with an armature wire skeleton. Because the Dragon skin is pretty pricey, I wanted to do a quick test to try it out. So I filled just the hand with silicone and used the armature from the original sculpt that had been chiseled clean.

I was lazy and added the color once it was already in the hand, so I didn't mix it very well and it ended up looking like this:

But that was fine to do a little test animation with some Helping Hand parts using my webcam. It's pretty quick, so you might have to watch it a couple times:

Excited that it was so easy and fun to use, I went on to doing the whole puppet. First I applied a thin layer of colored silicone to the entire mold:

Then added another few layers...

Then made a new armature based on how the silicone fit in there. I went with thicker armature wire and used some coper tubing around the leg bones because I was worried he would be too heavy to stand on his own. Then I used some plumbers epoxy to stick it all in place:

Also, because I knew that his fat old stomach would be incredibly heavy if it was solid, I cut up some kitchen sponges and painted them with a layer of silicone to use as flexible filling:

I then put the armature in one half and did a quick pass of silicone over it to make sure it really stuck in there with no slipping.

Then I put the stomach sponges on, poured in way too much silicone and put the halves together. What came out was this:

And after a quick trim of the extra stuff, I had a little guy!

There are some pretty obvious problems with the quality of the mold. Mostly I was too rough getting the original sculpt out of the front half, but I also didn't put enough silicone into the feet, and one of the hands. I also need to work on minimizing the size of the seams, which a cleaner mold would probably help with. Overall, if I was using this guy for a short film, I'd want to start from scratch from all I learned on this first go. But for a first try, I'm pretty stoked. Now I'm going to give him some eyes, a moustache, and a little costume, and then I'll make some test animations. I'll post them as I've got 'em....

A New Animation & VFX Reel!

2011-10-05T16:19:00.000-07:00

Check it out. I cut a new reel:

Thanks to Matt Schwartz for helping me out with the audio on the title card.

Making a Stop Motion Puppet (Part 1): Sculpting & Molding

2011-09-26T16:08:00.000-07:00

My current personal project between jobs is making a silicon puppet with a wire armature to use in side projects and to get some more practice in character animation. I am sort of figuring it out as I go along, and will record the process here in a few installments as I finish them.

I'm going for a character that has long skinny limbs and a sort of Danny DeVito-esk torso. I was thinking for the type of animation I'm going for, I want him to have replaceable eyes on top of his head, like a frog, and a large mustache that will act as an expressive mouth. I imagine him ending up a little like the guy I made HERE.

First, I did a little sketch of the proportions that I wanted, and then used some armature wire and plumbers epoxy to build up an armature to build around. I actually made two armatures using the sketch as a template so that I'd have one to live inside the silicon version as well as the original sculpt. You can watch a quick timelapse of the sculpting process here:

I used Super Sculpy that I could then bake for molding. I feel like there are more responsive and accurate clays to use, but I grew up on and I love the feel Sculpy. The only thing I changed from the original design was the style of nose. I like the original, more bulbous nose, but thought that it would be too much trouble as far as undercuts go when it came to making a mold of it.

I then baked him, spent quite some time sanding him, and then sprayed him with a good 9 or 10 layers of Krylon Crystal Clear to smooth him all up. Here his is all smooth and shiny before I started up with the molding process:

Since that video, I added some nipples and a bellybutton to give him a little anatomical correctness. The black dotted line around the edges is there to indicate where I want the mold half to go up to to minimize the undercuts in the molding process.

To make the mold I used some UltraCal 30 to act as the actual mold material, and some water based clay to build the housing for the mold. Here he is sitting in the clay holder I made around him to pour the plaster into:

And here with the first layer of Ultracal, looking very much like Han Solo:

Then, after five more layers and a layer of burlap, here I wait for the plaster to dry:

And then, after pulling off the clay and hosing it down, here if the completed first half of the mold.

I ended up using all my Ultracal on just this first half, though. So now I am waiting for the delivery of a new tub of plaster, as well as some Smooth On Dragon Skin silicone, to start on the next step of the process.

NEXT UP: Part 2: Demolding and Casting!

Lots of Birds! - Gustavo Galindo music video...

2011-09-10T17:45:00.000-07:00

Back in August I did the animation and most of the compositing for Carlos Lopez Estrada's music video for Gustavo Galindo's "Amor De Alta Mar." I think it turned out pretty rad considering we made it in about two weeks DURING pre production of our big Stop Motion Project for Jesse & Joy. That other video will premiere soon, but for now here's Gustavo Galindo's "Amor De Alta Mar":

To make it I looked at stock footage of birds taking off, landing, and flapping and then drew keyframes with After Effects masks. I let AE do the initial tweening then did some clean up and made little timing tweaks of different versions so it would look a little less "copy-and-paste." I then used those little pre-comps as particle layers for use with a particle emitter. Here's what all the bird versions looked like on their own:

Now a bit of rest before premiering out next big stop motion video. To wet your appetite for it, here's our last project for Jesse & Joy:

VFX for The Wilderness of Manitoba's "Orono Park" - Directed by David Altobelli

2011-05-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

Last Month I did VFX for the music video, "Orono Park" by The Wilderness of Manitoba. Check out the video here:

The video was directed by David Altobelli, and shot by Larkin Seilpe. The 3D work was done by Director, Gabe Askew, maker a very successful Grizzly Bear fan video. I did the compositing and motion tracking to place the band and the 3D supplemental footage on the miniature made by talented production designer Jason Kisvarday. You can see a little behind-the-scenes footage from the miniature shoot day here:

Trouble with a Jar

2011-05-09T01:33:00.000-07:00

To make up for the fact that I'd been doing to much money-making jobs and not enough stuff just for funsies, I'm doing some character design for a stop motion short I might eventually get around to. Check out this little guy.

And some making-of photos:

I think I'm going to make a little bathrobe and some slippers for him to wear...

J Hilburn Commercial

2011-04-28T17:42:00.000-07:00

Last month I did some VFX supervision for the San Francisco branch of a great PR company, LauchSquad. Check out the commercial here:

The client was the online custom men's clothing company J. Hilburn and the commercial was directed by LaunchSquad creative director, Brett Marty. I was in charge of on-set supervision, comping, tracking, and clean up, while the graphic design work was done by talented SF-based freelancer Colin Gill, and the 3D modeling was done by Pierce Templeton.

It was a fun couple weeks, and a great excuse to get out of the LA black hole and spend some time in my favorite place in the world, The Bay Area. You can see proof of this fun in a behind-the-scenes shot and cut by producer and videographer Jesse Tarnoff, who works at LaunchSquad but is the brains behind one of the only good wedding video companies I've ever seen. Check it out:

"Groove Me" at South by Southwest!

2011-02-11T12:42:00.000-08:00

Our video for Maximum Balloon's "Groove Me" got into the South by Southwest festival in Austin, TX! This is a great festival of Film and Music. If you have the chance to go, you definitely should.

Here's the link to the film lineup, where you will find our video under Music Videos:

SXSW Film Lineup!

A New Reel!

2011-02-08T02:01:00.000-08:00

Check out my new animation and visual effects reel. The sweet tunes were graciously provided by CandyBomber!

MTV3 Commercial VFX and Animation!

2011-01-28T18:11:00.000-08:00

Check out the new commercial directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada for MT3's show "Quiero Mis Quinces":

MTV3 - QMQ Promo- Director's Cut from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

I did the post clean up and VFX (wand sparkles, wire removal, etc.) but my baby is the stop motion animation shot of the cake and presents. This shot was made over a 12 hour day, shot in reverse, with amazing help from one Emily Franz:

She designed and built the animatable cake and boxes. There were armature wires running underneath the wrapping paper of the presents so they could be posed, and the cake was made with one-inch sections made of cardboard and concealed with clay that we could cut off for every shot. We used a Canon 7D, Dragon Stop Motion, and a lot of patience. Here we are on dragon's monitor working together to cut that cake:

And here is a before and after of the pre animation I did in After Effects. We used it to make sure our animation was going on time to the music so there would be minimal guess work on set:

Another great piece of stop motion to add to the 'ol reel. If you want to see my other big stop motion project, you can go back in time and find it here:

Jesse and Joy's music video for "Chocolate"

I also think this is as good a time as any to post Carlos's last commercial for MTV3 that I did clean up After Effects work on:

MTV3 PROMO from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

I added the matte, did some color tweaking, and combined the Metro shot(s?), but my biggest claim to fame is rotoscoping out the baby on the right's penis because it was supposed to be a boy. And it was going on TV. There's a good thing to put our my resume: Baby Penis Removal.

Tiesto vs. Diplo ft. Busta Rhymes - "C'mon (Catch 'em by Surprise)" Video

2011-01-15T01:01:00.000-08:00

The video for the Tiesto, Diplo, and Busta Rhymes song, "C'mon (Catch 'em by Surprise)" just premiered on youTube. I did the VFX on the snake shots near the very end. Check it out:

The snake was actually venomous and not defanged. The medic on set told me that if one of us were to get bit, there would be nothing he could do but call an ambulance because only a doctor can administer the anti-venom, and that it's not 100% effective anyway. That wrangler really had some guts--or a certain level of insanity. Compositing him in and making the energy ball in After Effects was considerably less dangerous...

Check out some footage of set!:

The Goo Goo Dolls Video "Not Broken"!

2011-01-06T12:34:00.001-08:00

Check out the new video for "Not Broken" by The Goo Goo Dolls, directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada. I was the VFX Supervisor on it and was basically in charge of turning what was shot on a blank white stage into this:

Goo Goo Dolls- Not Broken from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

We had very little money to do what we wanted so everything was shot seperately (people, props, explosions, etc.) on about 16 feet of white stage and the worlds were designed and composited together in After Effects in the weeks that followed. You can get a sense of the process from the behind the scenes, cut by one Taylor Brusky:

Goo Goo Dolls: Making of Not Broken from Brusky on Vimeo.

And here's a picture of me hard at work on the computer putting all the elements together. I was wearing a monkey-hat:

Merry Christmas from Hanz!

2010-12-24T17:31:00.000-08:00

Meet Hanz, a new little Sculpy guy made especially for Christmas. He is excited to be added to my mom's growing collection of gifts I'm too broke to buy...
A thousand points to anyone who can guess why his name is Hanz...

Watch "Passing On" Online!

2010-12-02T11:44:00.000-08:00

After a couple years of trying the festival thing, I'm finally releasing a copy of my Thesis film, "Passing On" on the interwebs.

Passing On from Cameron Clark on Vimeo.

The film was shot in a incredibly fun but hectic six days with an all volunteer student crew. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Maximum Balloon Directors Cut

2010-11-20T18:10:00.000-08:00

Maximum Balloon- "Groove Me" (Director's Cut) from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

We ran into some time constraints and had some creative differences working with the label on this video, so Carlos and I decided to put out a director's cut that had more of the original vision.

A big thanks out to Vimeo for featuring us on the front page which gave us a big exposure boost. I love Vimeo!

And if you want to see a side-by-side comparison, here's the label approved version:

Euromation!

2010-10-30T18:39:00.000-07:00

Here is the Flip Camera footage from my trip to Europe early this summer. I limited myself to under 5 second videos of the entire trip. The resulting video is very shakey and a bit headache-inducing, but a pretty accurate record of the two months I spent wandering around hostels and utilizing CouchSurfing.org.

Because the final video ended up being 23 minutes long, and no one wants to sit through that, I'm breaking them down by city.

New York to Madrid:

Granada:

Barcelona:

Marsaille:

Rome:

Florence:

Prague:

Berlin:

Paris:

Amsterdam:

Stockholm to New York to Oakland:

And here's a link to the youtube playlist.

CLICK HERE!

Bear Animation Walk-Through

2010-10-15T17:22:00.000-07:00

I spent the other night working on some traditional 2D animation for use in a music video treatment. The goal was to create a simple loop of bears walking inspired by the Drunken Pink Elephant scene in Dumbo. Here's what I put out (watch in HD):

A here's how I put it together:

With that amazing Disney sequence in mind, I wanted to go as traditional as possible and get out the light board and pencils and actually do it by hand. So, I started by getting a quick bear design from the talented Mr. Tyler Jensen.

Now, I think in motion paths first because I learned animation in After Effects, so I began by planning out the basic motion of what I wanted--rather than figuring it out as I went. I knew I wanted it to be a 12 frame loop because that was the length of a beat in the song I was originally drawing to. So I drew this in pencil:

Then, using that sketch as a guide for where to put my bear over the 12 frames, I got out the lightboard and roughed out bears in varying states of leaping, stretching, and landing in pencil.

Then, when I was happy with how each of the 12 little bears looked, I used the lightboard and a black felt-tipped pen to ink them all clean-like:

Then, I scanned each of them into photoshop, removed their backgrounds and put them all in sequential layers in a photoshop file, which looked like this:
I took this file and imported it into After effects where I applied some color and a grungy texture from a Google image search. Then I looped him, duplicated him with different colors, and staggered the timing so that they jumped over eachother. I also "panned" the digital camera at the same speed they were moving forward so they remained in the center of the screen.

If I were to do this for real, I would probably do twice as many frames and up the framerate because the motion is quick enough that 12 frames a second looks too choppy. Next time...

Maximum Balloon Video!

2010-09-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

Finished work on Carlos Lopez Estrada's new video for Maximum Balloon called "Groove Me":

Click here to go to the official release link.

I'm back to Blogging!

2010-09-02T20:48:00.001-07:00

So, after about six months of doing my best impersonation of Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate and being a pretty useless vagrant in various parts of the world, I've finally returned to a somewhat stable mode of working and living like a real person again. So, I feel it's fitting to get back into the blogging game. To start off, I've got some pictures of a silly character I've made in preparation of making some armatured puppets for stop motion. Warning, he's naked:

As far as work goes, I'm currently on a project for the same director as the Chocolate video, Mr. Carlos Lopez Estrada. Here is the making of:

I'm in charge of turning all the green things into other things. Hurray for Rotoscoping! I'll post it when it's done...

Passing On at the 2010 MethodFest!

2010-02-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

My thesis film from Chapman, "Passing On" is making its festival debut at the 2010 MethodFest! And they wanted us to cut a trailer. So, with the help of editor Pascal De Maria, we threw together this little diddy:

Passing On (Trailer) from Cameron Clark on Vimeo.

The screenings (yes, theres two!) will be held:

Sunday, March 28th
11am

and

Monday, March 29th
7:15pm

@

Founders Hall, CCC
100 / 200 Civic Center Way
Calabasas, CA 91302

Buy tickets at the door or online here.

Tickets are $10 ($7 for students)

The Video is Complete!

2010-02-25T22:18:00.000-08:00

So, I've posted almost nothing in over a month because my life had been eaten up by a single project: animating the music video for "Chocolate" by (Latin American Grammy winners) Jesse & Joy. Here it is:

Jesse & Joy- "Chocolate" from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

The video was directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, for London Alley Entertainment, and funded by Warner Music Mexico. It took us about three weeks of preproduction and a month of shooting. It is made up of 2,900 still photographs of custom made cookies, cookie crumbs, salt, and other edible goodies. By that, I mean there are no digital effects; we actually sat, lit, and slowly moved physical objects around the old fashioned way, with the help of Dragon Stop Motion. We were working our asses off. Want to see? Here's a behind-the-scenes:

Behind the Scenes of "Chocolate" from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

So watch it. Enjoy it. And please send it to your friends for Digg submissions, StumbleUpon thumbs ups, and other means of internet validation. Maybe I'll actually get the big bucks for future projects once this gets some--and I hate to use this term, but--viral success.

UPDATE:

We've also now been graciously linked by the following blogs:

The Dragon Stop-Motion Website Blog

Video Static

Cartoon Brew

Animation Magazine dot EU

Best of Animation/Stop Motion Vimeo Channel

Everything Animated Vimeo Channel

And for you Espanol speakers out there:

Hecho en Mexico

Thanks to everyone that has helped spread the word!

Too much work

2010-01-25T23:30:00.000-08:00

Working full time on this video has left little time for blog posting. Regular posts will return After February 17th. Until then, scroll down and check out some old posts. Remember that Daft Punk show...?

Stop Motion!

2010-01-11T23:30:00.000-08:00

We've just finished week one of the music video for Jesse and Joy's song, "Chocolate." It's a slow going process with lots and lots of still photos of cookies. But we've been making some really cool looking footage. Here is a sample:

That is a boat made of cookies with waves made of clay rubbed in olive oil. I pre-animated a reference video to overlay in Dragon Stop Motion for these shots. It looked like this:

And here are a couple of pictures of me and fellow animator, Nate Miller, hard at work making it happen:

We've got 2+ more weeks of this. Lots more to come!

Happy Holidays!

2009-12-28T23:30:00.000-08:00

No animation to show this week. I've been working on planning and some pre-animation for the music video down south as well as dealing with the holidays. But I DID make a cool little fridge magnet for my Mom for Chirstmas. Check him out:

In a week I'll be working full time in LA. Here's to creative employment!

Work work work.

2009-12-21T23:30:00.000-08:00

So, I've had a bit of a kick of paid work which has put a damper on my random crap production. So, I've got nothing new to show this week. However, the music video that I animated for D.C. Don Juan back in June finally got released online.

D.C. Don Juan - "Lookie Looky" from Cameron Clark on Vimeo.

Ignore the choruses; they got rushed by the label and I didn't have a hand in them. But I think the verses came out pretty nice. Especially considering this is what the footage looked like when I got it:

And there was no specific concept when the footage was shot. I pretty much made it up as I went along.

Clay and Cous Cous

2009-12-14T23:30:00.000-08:00

In an effort to spend as little money as possible on a Secret Santa gift exchange this week, I made a little guy out of clay. But I liked him so much that I had to take some pictures before handing him off to his lucky new owner. Check him out:

I recieved a bunch of Boton Rice Candy from my secret Santa, which couldn't have gotten me more excited. God, I love that stuff.

I also have been getting more stop-motion practice in to prepare myself for the video I'm making with the likes of Carlos Lopez Estrada, Christian Heuer, and Nate Miller. The video is going to involve a few different styles of stop motion, and I've set up a webcam to Dragon Stop Motion to start trying some stuff out.

The first test I've done is to try out a sand animation technique that we will most likely be using. I didn't have any sand on hand, so I grabbed some cous cous and tossed it on an old briefcase. It was slow progress, what with the pushing little tiny cous couses along with a matchbook and a paint brush, so I only made about three seconds of animation. But I think it came out pretty cool. I looped it a few times so it's easier to watch and put a track behind it by my friend, Triptonikhan. Check it:

Stop Motion!

2009-12-07T23:30:00.000-08:00

I have just signed on to do animation for a music video to be directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada. I won't go into detail just yet as to what will be going on in the video, but it will be stop motion. And so, I've started to get into the stop motion mood again.

To loosen myself up I've set up a little primitive animation setup next to my desk with a cheap little webcam and a desk lamp. I've been in almost exclusively using After Effects for so long I've got to get back into the swing of moving stuff by hand. Here's my first little test:

The tangerine was the closest thing to my desk at the time and was just to see if my ridiculously jimmy-rigged camera setup would work. I will be doing more applicable and planned-out tests throughout the week as we finalize the style of this video a little more. I'm dreaming about tweening.

And with stop motion on the mind I rummaged up this old little peice of claymation I made when I was a kid. I couldn't have been older than sixteen when I made this. I think it still holds up:

I promise to be more productive this week. Instead of making doodles like this:

Or this:

Hurray for self-employment!

Side Project #3: Hand Drawn Animation

2009-11-30T23:32:00.000-08:00

Being between paid gigs means more time for me to do some real time consuming side projects for fun. Plus, I saw Fantastic Mr. Fox (twice!) and was inspired to do something with some physical animation. So, this week I thought I'd get out the 'ol light box and ball point pen and take a stab at some hand drawn animation. I always have fun--but rarely have time for--working out how things are going to move by hand instead of with the computer. It's crazy satisfying. Check it out:

I drew this guy on printer paper and shaded it on the computer. Maybe someday I'll find the money to do an entire short in this style. But seeing as just that shot took me almost three days of work, I don't see that happening anytime soon. Want to fund a couple months of me making a cool short? Eh? Eh?

But seriously.

Oh, and I am still thinking about the music video that will utilize that stop motion dolly from last week's post. Here's a little animation test I did on the computer really fast to take a look at the animation style:

Now, imagine if each of those little images was a physical cut out of paper. And that instead of one move it was a full choreographed dance with multiple dancers cut out of different colored cardstock. Now imaging that they were all placed frame by frame like a domino rally (or a growing time-catapillar?) and shot with a nice digital SLR moving with dolly shots. Because that's what I'm thinking. I'll do a sample shot soon. Possibly by next week...?

And I'm still looking for a modern dance choreographer for that. Know somebody?

And because this post seems to be playing on the test animation theme, I'm going to put this old one up that still makes me laugh. It was my first experiment with lip synching in After Effects and was from a longer script. Enjoy:

Side Project #2: Stop Motion Camera Dolly!

2009-11-23T23:30:00.000-08:00

Dolly!

I spent this week designing and building a camera dolly for stop-motion camera moves. I have a stop motion music video idea a-brewin', and I knew I was going to need something for dolly shots. It seems that the demand isn't high enough for any one company to make premade stop motion dollies. But I had seen a design that I liked by one Brady Whitcomb that a google search turned up and knew I could fashion something like it myself. His was controlled by a long threaded rod that was spun at one end to scoot along his dolly platform. However, I had no idea how to cut all the aluminum that he had used. So I sat down and thought about how I could achieve the same control with wood and PVC pipe because I knew how to cut and screw those substances.

After a lot of head scratching and procrastinating I drew this last tuesday:

I then hitched a ride with E.T. Hazzard to Home Depot in Oakland to stock up on some hardwares. I bounced my ideas off of him over the almost two hours we spent walking around and grabbing random things. He took my one-pully idea and proposed using two to avoid the wire catching on itself. He also cut the angles and the metal for the handle. He's really a handygod among handymen.

Without a car, it took me the rest of the week to buy some skateboard wheels--Thank you, 510 on Telegraph--and to take a few more trips to hardware stores--thank you AC transit--as I figured out I had not gotten everything that I needed the first time. It's really a miracle that I yesterday I was able to drill, screw, and sand my way into making this little doozy (all for under $80):

It's controlled by a crank in the center of the board that when spun, slides the dolly along a steel wire down the track. The spitfire sticker came with the wheels. Hella custom rig, yo.

I put a protracter on the bottom so that I can turn the handle by a standard degree each shot and plan out speed ramps to and from a stop.

I have E.T. to thank for this pully design. I was originally thinking one pully with the steel wire making a full rotation around it, but this works a lot smoother and the wire doesn't have to touch itself. Plus it looks really classy.

And here is my very first dolly shot ever. Made with the help of my screen writing buddy Austin Zumbro. Keep in mind this is shot with an old point and shoot still digital and I had yet to put the protracter in and was just eyeballin' it for the rotation. Expect more (smoother) test shots in the coming week.

But although I am very proud of my dolly, that shot is kinda boring. So instead of leaving you with that, I'll leave you with an old bit of stop motion that me and Austin made a couple summers ago. It's silly:

And a couple doodles from the week:

Until next monday...

Side Project #1: Daft Punk Tribute!

2009-11-19T01:20:00.000-08:00

View from inside our pyramid! Watch out for ghosts!

For the last two months I had teamed up with DJ Bosko Dahmer to throw one of the finest Daft Punk tribute shows of all time. Now, to some, this leads to the reaction, "Wait, what's a Daft Punk?" or "Why would you commit yourself to such a colossal waste of time and energy?" And to those people I suggest you stop reading now because the following will make little sense. But to those who are lucky enough to understand what a Daft Punk show is like, you can understand how excited I was to be involved in a recreation attempt.

Here's a link to some cellphone footage of a real daft punk show. I saw them at Vegoose in 2007 and it changed my life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78z4ARaRgFk&feature=related

In a clear display of insanity, I spent two months going through the DVD of their show minute by minute and recreated all that I could of their light show from scratch in After Effects. We then coordinated with the carpenter from my film Mr. & Mrs. Pratt, E.T. Hazzard to build a 15 foot tall pyramid on which to project my animation. Then, with replica helmets aquired by Bryan, we mounted the pyramid and performed a humble homage to their Alive 2007 tour in front of a unsuspecting crowd of Halloween revelers in Chico, CA.

Keep in mind, no one gave us permission to do this. We knew Chico would be crazy on Halloween and without any advertising and without charging admission, we set up our show in the parking lot of a apartment complex and sent out a few text messages and let the subwoofers draw a crowd. Oh, technology.

The cops showed up a little after 2 a.m., very confused and very angry.

A highlight from the night was overhearing someone seeing the pyramid who clearly had never heard of Daft Punk. They had pulled out their phone when they saw the lit up pyramid to call a friend and say, "Dude, you HAVE to get down here. There's some crazy party, and they've got a rock teepee!"

But I think I should let the pictures and video do the talking:

Mastermind Bosko Dahmer and carpenter E.T. Hazzard set up his brilliantly designed and crafted pyramid/DJ booth.

E.T. putting the final touches on his pyramid as the sun starts to set.

Bosko, Me, and DJ Ryan setting up the projectors.

Us being Daft Punk before the lights turned on.

Some of my animation...

...and some more animation!

Me in the aftermath.

The whole crew that made it happen.

And although everyone was too drunk to capture any really good video, we've got what E.T. happened to grab with his digital still camera in video mode. Watch:

Daft Chico from Bosko on Vimeo.

So, after all that, I needed a vacation. I went to New York and Boston for a couple weeks and just got back. Although I did a lot of things with a lot of cool people, I took no pictures. The only proof that I was there is these drunken doodles I made in central park, and a sketch an elderly man drew of me on the street for $10. Enjoy!

Oh, and here's the only proof I was in Boston:

Time to Blog!

2009-10-27T18:24:00.000-07:00

So, what with the new website and all, I thought it seemed appropriate to get a blog going. Here you will find updates as to what I'm up to. I'll try to keep it down to only the interesting stuff.

But it's going to be pretty empty for a bit, because I am going out of town. I'm visiting the east coast the 2nd til the 16th! I promise to return with pictures, as well as hints as to my next project.