A song, an animation, and another animation.

First, a song.



I wrote this as I went along so it's largely improvised.  Actually, it had no drums until about 30 minutes after the rest of the song was recorded.  Just had a weird 2:30 AM impulse to try something different with some electronic-y drums.  I admit to a lot of looping of guitar parts in this.  I normally don't do that, but my intention when starting wasn't to record a whole song. just to write the arpeggio part.

Overall I'd say it's kind of sloppy (should have started with drums, in hindsight), but I like some of the ideas going on here.

And I'm not sure what genre this falls under.  I wrote and recorded it as an ambient thing with some post-rock elements, but added the electronic drums later.  Now I dunno what.  Not that it matters to much.


EDIT: NEW VERSION
Added a bassy synth.  Kinda neat.




Now, an animation:



My work is from about 0:16 to about 0:36.  I had one more shot that appears to have been cut (probably for the best, it never felt right.)  That's the last one I worked on for this show.


And another animation:



(posted this to facebook a little while ago, haven't done anything to it since) Work in progress, obviously.  There's going to be a beginning and end to this that I haven't animated yet.  I'm pretty happy with the direction it's going.  Somewhere between cartoony and realism.

Debate Team - Postmortem

Here's the animation I've been making on and off for (too) many months now, finally finished and rendered.



And now I will break down what went well and what didn't:

The Good:

- First time using actual reference in a long time.  It helped quite a bit, and I made sure I didn't over-rely on it for the most part (I'll touch on that later).  I think once I got all the breakdown poses in I left the reference footage alone, allowing me to put a bit of cartoonishness into it

- Speaking of cartoonishness, my intention wasn't to do anything overly cartoony, but little hints of it helped a lot.  Mainly the guy's snappy remark and the girl's reaction and expression.  The reference footage kept it based in reality, especially the first half, so the end is a bit of a contrast.

- This is definitely the best bit of dialogue animation I've done.  It'll definitely be the opener for my CG reel for now; it's not jarring or too in-your-face, but it's still interesting and funny enough to draw attention in.

- The render turned out pretty nice, and at 720p took about 8 hours to render the normal and occlusion passes.  Easy enough to leave the batch render running overnight and wake up to a finished render.  The lighting is pretty decent, and I even had to do some weird light-linking to get everything looking right.  Mental Ray motion actually blur worked for once, so I didn't have to do the crappy After Effects post blur.

The Bad:

- It's not as finished as I'd like.  I had to call it finished so I can move on to other stuff.  I got remarks from Ken Duncan a while back, saying to watch out for where I want attention to be directed, and not to be afraid to put characters in full holds.  The guy tends to be a bit floaty, and I showed him a version where the girl wasn't finished and he commented that he actually preferred her motions at that stage.  I tried going back a bit to the guy to simplify his movements in some spots, but I could do a lot more to it.

- The faces and hands were rushed.  If I had more time, there would be a lot more detail there.

- I kept getting caught up in the reference at the start which set me back a bit.  I'd try to match the footage rather than make it how it should look in the final piece.  I reconciled that for the most part, but that's something I need to address earlier in the process.

- I couldn't get depth of field to work without it screwing up their eye textures for some reason.  I had the same issue when initially adding motion blur but resolved it after a lot of troubleshooting I'd rather not go through again.

- I've forgotten a lot since the class I took on lighting.

- I'd planned on adding props and an outdoor environment, but I didn't give myself time.

- I think After Effects might have slightly offset the audio (by maybe a frame), it might lag behind the video a small bit.

Notes:

I need to remember to use reference, but use it as a suggestion.  I need to work more holds into the characters, and make sure I know where I want people to be looking on the screen.  And I need to set some sort of schedule for myself to get these things done in a reasonable amount of time.

My plans next are to do some really short action-oriented bits.  Maybe some martial arts type things; some cartoony action, some realistic.  Then maybe a non-dialogue acting scene after that.  I have some ideas in mind, but I'll wait until they're more fleshed out.

All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with this.  There's a lot that could be fixed, but I need to move on to other stuff.

Face.

 Sitting around doodling, decided to digitally paint this random face.

No reference for the head or color, even though it came out looking a lot like that one guy from Lost.

Here's the sketch it came from:

Various things and such.

You may notice a complete overhaul of the blog design.  I completely stole it from a failed side-project blog of mine that I had forgotten about.  As a note, I made the background from scratch in Photoshop some many years ago.  Don't remember how exactly, just know it's a bunch of layers with various blending modes.

Some artworks I did last night:

- Sketches from TV and various images:

 

- Digital painting based on a random picture (can't find the reference photo).  Pretty happy with this one:

Here's some music stuff I haven't posted on here yet:


An experiment to nail down the scale changes (5 changes in 8 bars, gets pretty confusing).  The lead line is improvised.  Backing part turned out pretty cool and spacey.



Experimenting with a new effect.  This is all one guitar in one take.  You might notice at one point the chord progression from the first song is played.  I think this would be a cool outro to an album.


Other stuff:



Most recent episode of the show I was working on.  Worked on shots randomly throughout the episode, but the biggest one is the one where they're racing each other down the hallway.

Also I realized I never posted this episode:

Again, bunch of random shots throughout.  I think my best shots are the very first one whith him jumping into the tunnel, and the one where he snaps his fingers after noticing the pipe.

Music of some sort

Recorded a song last night.  Wrote it over a year ago, but I didn't have the means to do a proper recording at the time.



The main reason I was hesitant to record before I had better equipment is that I was never able to get a decent clean guitar sound.  With the recording interface/new guitar/amp emulation software I have now, it's far better.  Most of the guitars are completely clean; the solos have a very small amount of overdrive, and the leads in the 2nd part have even less so.

Part 1: 0:00 - 0:57
            Rhythm part is kinda fun, but pretty tiring.  Luckily I recorded that first, and in relatively few takes.  The chord progression is interesting, because each chord has a C# in it somewhere, until the very last transitional chord at 0:56.
            The solo here was the last thing I recorded.  Did a bunch of takes to work out some motifs I wanted to have as the base of the solo and finally got something that worked. 

Part 2 : 0:57 - 1:44
            This is the part where I let myself get weird with time signatures.  First bit is alternating 5/8 and 6/8.  Second bit is 4/8, 7/8, 4/8 repeated.  The next part is 6/8, 4/4, then back to the first part.
            From 1:10 until the end of this part I have 4 guitars playing at once, either in unison, or two playing an octave up.  This was the most worrisome part recording, because I don't have distortion to hide mistakes so I needed to play it fairly accurately.

Part 3: 1:45 - end
            The 2 backing guitars are playing the same chords, but in different ways.  One is playing straight chords, the other is playing sort of improvised arpeggios of those chords.
            The solo here is improvised, although the first and last phrases are basically along the lines of the thing I usually started off my improvisations on this song with.  I'm particularly happy with the bit at ~2:13


Regarding the "bass guitar," parts 1 and 3 are my guitar pitched down an octave.  Part 2 is normal pitch, played on the lowest strings of my guitar.

Drums are exported from Guitar Pro 6, which is primarily a writing program, so they are understandably crappy.