The beauty of animation is the capability of expression beyond still images and without words.

Lately I have been struggling with how to move forward on my senior project. I still love what I am doing – I’m just a little lost on the execution. And for various reasons I am desperately in need of distractions.

With so many things on my mind and a little bit more free time than last quarter, I’ve decided to really buckle down and work on some personal projects. The first you can see above, it’s a really short animation of our family dog, Misha!

My sister had drawn this picture of him:

And I could not get over how cute/funny/quirky it was (and it really captures him physically and personally, ha!) so I had no choice but to animate it!

This was my first time attempting a walk cycle animation of any kind, so I referenced some walk cycle drawings from the Internet. First I made a hand drawn version that took about 4 separate attempts before I got it right (My family likes that version better – I’ll post it later). Then I took it into after effects.

It was great to get some more practice animating shape layers in AE, which I haven’t done in a while. I’d love to do a series of these with this image, or make some of our other two dogs!

I’m super excited to have started Senior 1 class! I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to do for my final project for a long time, and it wasn’t a hard decision. I knew I wanted to do a music video from the get go, and I knew the band I wanted to work with.

The Rickshaw Roadshow is a group of 5 guys based out of Johnson City, Tennessee. I went to high school with 3 of the band members, though I didn’t really hang out with them or get to know them much until after we graduated. I don’t get to go back home to Tennessee that often, but when I do I try to show up if they happen to be performing.

I could write more about the process behind this project here, but I’ve done a lot of that on my web site. Instead, here, I want to discuss what it means to be a creative person from small rural town, and why I think it’s so important and rewarding that we work together and help each other.

Where I am from, in Bristol, Tennessee, the arts are not emphasized. Many of my high school classmates went on to join the military, pursued a technical career track, or to college for engineering, business, law, nursing, or another medicine/health care related field. There is absolutely nothing wrong with those professions, of course. But I feel strongly that a lot of kids who would otherwise love to have a creative career in design or music fail to do so only because those tracks are never presented as a viable option to them. Our football-oriented high school did not relegate much funding to the arts.

Even though we aren’t particularly close buddies and don’t see each other that often, I feel a sort of kinship and camaraderie with my friends who followed their dreams irregardless of what everybody else was doing; irregardless of the level of “security” their chosen career path would provide. They just like playing music and writing music, more than anything else in the world, and I respect that.

Collaborating with other creatives from your small hometown is a symbiotic undertaking. It doesn’t matter whether they are musicians, filmmakers, writers, artists, or designers – by collaborating you can each give each other a leg up in an environment where creative outlets and resources may be sparse.

And I don’t mean that in the sense of “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” kind of thing. I mean it as “Hey, I love what you’re doing, and I’d love to be involved. Any professional benefit I gain from the project is just a bonus, because I love doing what I do anyway, and it’s even better when I get to do it for friends.”

Here is my first set of design boards (in addition to my initial styleframe up top) for the video for their single “The Last Outlaw (Jimmy’s Gotta Go).” The song is part of their debut album, which is available on iTunes.

I nearly died whilst matte painting.

I had fun with illustration for my knolling and Prometheus boards.

My first ever demo reel!!!

And portfolio site!

Snowstorm Nemo found me in New York…

I went, I designed, I triumphed at the Battle of the Boards.

And I almost made a logo thingie.

Spring quarter starts in a mere 10 days -__- Bring it on?

I hope to be tackling a bit of animation over the break. Follow me on Vimeo and Twitter!

Above is one of my very first motion media projects – one of my first ever stabs in the dark with After Effects. It’s not bad I don’t think, for a beginner, but I’ve come so far since then.

When I first got to SCAD, I had no idea what I wanted to major in. I knew I didn’t want to go back to Painting because I could not bear the thought of being alone in a studio for the bulk of my professional life. I know myself; I know I can’t be trusted to be motivated enough when left to my own devices. So I chose Production design, thinking this would be an opportunity to paint [sets] on a grand scale in a collaborative environment. But it just wasn’t the right fit.

A friend suggested Motion Media. It was both an alluring and scary proposition. I wanted to animate, but with a background of working in only two dimensions, I didn’t think I could do it with four (line, shape, volume, time). I entered college with pretty developed skills in drawing and painting. I skipped right into the advanced classes freshman year. I was used to being one of the top students in class.

But I also was used to being frustrated, as I witnessed the leaps and bounds by which my less-experienced classmates improved, while my work stagnated. I grew at MICA freshman year, but admittedly, I had less ground to cover.

That’s a huge reason why I chose motion media. I knew nothing about animation going in – about any program other than Photoshop, really – and nothing about how to design for things that move. How do you come up with transitions? How do you sync image with audio?

Starting from scratch. Having nowhere to go but up.

A full year after my first motion media techniques class, I’m really proud of how far I’ve come. A full year after the above animation was made, and I’m already in the process of interviewing and applying for internships. I’ll be graduating in two quarters. It’s kind of unbelievable, but very, very exciting. It’s really hard sometimes because I still think I don’t know enough, and there’s not enough time to learn it all. But I try to see any and all shortcomings as an opportunity for growth, rather than just a gap in my skill set. To me, learning (and seeing the results of what I’ve learned) is way more fun than just practicing.

Next up: a Principles of 2D Animation class in the Spring, some self-tutelage in Cinema4D (3D graphics program), a senior project, a Summer internship. I can’t wait

I’m so excited and honored that my teammates and I won our category in Battle of the Boards!!! Our team won for the best book in Network Branding, and Jason and I tied for best Network Branding boards This was such a fun and rewarding experience and I cannot WAIT until the next MOME workshop!!!

Team Luxe

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Previously: Battle of the Boards! Part I

Also: The official BOTB web site, which lists the rules and the judges and the informational/inspirational participant-generated stream.

Above is our profile page from my team’s process book. (A process / pitch book is a glorified powerpoint presentation that packages, sells and explains a design pitch). I was so happy with my team! Jason, Krystal and I have all been in Design for Motion together this quarter. And Lexie was one of my team members for the Carlo Vega Workshop in October. So I knew everybody. Not gonna lie, having a graphic design major in our group was a huge asset. I have to thank Jason for helping me learn InDesign a whole lot better from this workshop!

I think I forgot to mention that for the competition, we were being judged A: As a team for having the best pitch book and B: as an individual for having the best design (per category). The winners haven’t been announced yet! I’m hoping they’ll announce it this week…

The teams were just named alphabetically. We were originally team “L,” and so we chose the word “Luxe” to be our team name (I’ll let the page above explain why). If you notice, the “XE” in “LUXE” is bold because we wanted to emphasize the duality inherent in all of Showtime’s characters – they all have a good side and a dark side. Other network branding teams worked off of Showtime’s sports and reality programming, but we focused only on their original scripted dramas.

Some teams approached the competition by having everyone work together on one set of boards. I think this made a lot of sense for the Adobe teams, since the CS6 Suite is so… massive. But because network branding pieces are typically shorter and simpler than say, a title sequence or even a commercial, we thought we could each work on our own set of boards. That way our hypothetical “client” would have more options to choose from. Greg had showed us a pitch book that he worked on while he was at Digital Kitchen, for the title sequence of HBO’s True Blood. They had at least 4 or 5 different sets of design boards in there! The funny thing is that I could tell the final True Blood title sequence took a little bit from all of them.

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Greg Herman giving me and Krystal advice (photo by Professor Dominique Elliot)

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For my boards: Personally, I became fixated on two words in the Showtime brief: they wanted something “pristine” and “high end.” These words, commonly associated with aspirational brands, made me think immediately of fashion and lifestyle magazines like Vogue and GQ. I thought, how COOL would it be to see a print magazine design aesthetic brought into motion for a network brand? I’ve never seen anything like that.

So I started by designing some magazine cover layouts for 4 different Showtime shows:

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Ok, The Tudors one is more of a romantic novel cover. Whatever. The point then was, how do I make motion boards out of this? Here are some of the pages from my section of the team LUXE pitch book!

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]]> http://blog.scad.edu/chaase20/2013/03/10/battle-of-the-boards-part-ii/feed/ 0 http://blog.scad.edu/chaase20/2013/03/09/battle-of-the-boards-part-i/ http://blog.scad.edu/chaase20/2013/03/09/battle-of-the-boards-part-i/#comments Sat, 09 Mar 2013 19:48:31 +0000 Caresse Haaser http://blog.scad.edu/chaase20/?p=820

Battle of the Boards Participants!

For the past five years SCAD has organized an event called Inspire for the Motion Media department. For the 2012-2013 year, however, the department has decided to try something a little different.

Rather than holding a singular, 2-day event (as a bookend to the Career Fair), they decided it might be more beneficial to give students the chance to actually put their skills into practice. They decided to invite some professional designers to come and lead 2 or 3-day workshops over the course of the year.

The Carlo Vega workshop I wrote about a few months ago was the first of these workshops, and it was an amazing success. All of us MOME students were begging for them to do it more often, and we were very excited when we heard the next one would be a design workshop with director/designer Greg Herman.

Greg has designed for [deep breath]: FOX Sports, SPIKE TV, Columbia Pictures, AMC, Syfy network, NBC, ABC, Epix, TNT, UFC, HBO, Food Network, ESPN, HGTV, Nike, Kraft Foods, Sprite, Microsoft… I could go on.

I was especially excited for this because #1: It was to be a “Battle of the Boards,” workshop, not an animation workshop. I love animating and want to become a better animator, but I know that my Photoshop skills are a lot stronger than my After Effects skills.

And #2: I’ve been taking Professor Austin Shaw’s Design for Motion class this quarter, in which we only create design boards for projects. So I was used to boarding by this point.

Since this blog is partly for my Writing and New Media class (and because my friends and family read it), I’ll explain a little bit about design and boarding.

Before anyone gets to animate anything in the real world of motion graphics, the ideas have to be pitched to a client and approved. Beyond that, it’s important to have a strong visualization of exactly what you plan to do before you execute it.

Design boards are the same thing to motion graphics that storyboards are to narrative animation. In fact, the term “storyboards” and “design boards” or just “boards” can all be used pretty much interchangeably.

The important thing about design boards with motion graphics is that they must convey the sense of motion so that the client (and the production team) knows how everything is supposed to move and look like.

In this series of boards by Greg Herman for a tv spot on Syfy, you can see what I mean by needing to show the motion and feel of the design. (You can also see how his boards were translated into the final promo video).

One other thing: There are design boards and then there are style frames. Boards come in a series, and are – as I said – meant to act as a storyboard or demonstration of sorts of the final product. Style frames, however, are usually singular boards – single frames – that usually just serve as an example of an idea or look for the animation. Style frames can be the first step in development for a motion design, coming before the creation of design boards, or they can be supplementary to design boards by simply providing further detail about the design. Design boards are almost always in standard HD format, but style frames don’t have to be. They can be double- or triple-wide, or in a completely weird aspect ratio as long as it helps convey the designer’s idea. Here are more excellent examples of design boards by Peter Crandall.

More MOME <3ers rocking our BOTB t-shirts. That is Greg Herman up front throwing the horns. (Photo by Duff Yong)

Moving on. #3 reason I was excited for this workshop: It was a competition! There were 3 categories:

1. Network Branding
2. Commercial Branding
3. Movie Titles

There were 6-8 teams of 3-4 students in each category. Network Branding teams had to do a rebrand for Showtime, Commercial Branding had to design a commercial for Adobe Creative Suite, and Movie Titles had to redesign the title sequence to Drive. I ended up in the Network Branding category, which I was very happy about because I felt I needed more examples of commercial/branding work in my portfolio.

Reason #4: The judges of the competition were all directors, designers, and producers from major motion graphics/animation/advertising studios around the US!! What a great opportunity to have the exact sort of people you WANT to see your work, seeing your work.

I’m going to write a separate post for the production part of this workshop, because this one is getting a little long…

This rotoscope animation video was just released last week for the rap artist Joey Bada$$. Not only do I LOVE this sort of style (talkin’ bout the animation, though I love this song too), but I’m happy to say that some SCAD motion media alumni designed and animated it:

Luke Ifinger, Ben Gableman, CJ Cook, and Jordan Taylor, for Creative Control.

I wanted to write a bit about the current VFX industry debacle that came to everyone’s FaceBook awareness last week. Though not a VFX – visual effects, Mom, Dad, if you’re reading this – major, in motion graphics we deal pretty often in compositing and chroma-keying (green screen), which both fall under the VFX domain. I have a lot of friends who are VFX and 3D animation majors. A few of them have already graduated and are working in the industry for companies like Disney and DreamWorks.

VFX, which includes compositing and 3D modeling/texturing/lighting/animation, was one of the money fields. So we were told. Yes, the hours are long and grueling, and the work is highly technical and requires a great deal of instruction, learning, and experience – but if you make it out with a VFX degree, you’ll make money. At least, that’s always been my perception. So it’s very very disheartening to see all these VFX houses closing. Especially when it seems like a new VFX-heavy blockbuster film or jaw-dropping video game is coming out every month.

Even television has been stepping up its game, with higher and higher production values being seen on premium cable channels like HBO, AMC and Showtime.

With the film, TV and video game industries this busy, how can it be that Rhythm & Hues (the company behind VFX-Oscar-winning Life of Pi, The Hunger Games, X-Men, 300, The Lord of the Rings, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc…) is bankrupt?

If you do a bit of Googling, you’ll come up with lots of articles about the situation. But I thought this Reddit post did a really good job of summarizing the problems faced by the VFX industry today. I think the first point – the most important point, according to its author – is the most interesting (below). I wasn’t aware of the role of foreign subsidies at all before this crisis.

“The most noticable, is that other countries offer tax subsides that do not allow even competition. If a VFX studio in California bids on work for a set price, then a VFX studio in Vancouver can bid that very same price AND offer a 30-35% (not sure of exact figures) tax rebate on that work, but the VFX studio doesn’t get that money, the movie studio does. So they (the movie studio) automatically get 30% of their VFX paid for by tax payers instead of out of their already wealthy pockets. The California VFX studio therefore cannot compete with this situation, so fair competition is impossible.”