Conservation

This week's Animation Seminar was very interesting for me as a cinematographer and visual artist. The lecture given by Dr. Judith Hirsch taught me some of the amazing properties of the eye. The eye is most sensitive to movement, contrast, and hard edges within an image. Scientists discovered this by measuring the electric impulses from the retina to the optic nerve. I will work with these properties in my thesis because I am working with shadow puppets which center on the use of contrast.

My animation and my sound design for the project will center on promoting conservation of endangered animals. I will pick a subject like a frog, a panda, a chinchilla, etc. and do a cut-out animation piece about the animal. My animation will be limited, but I will develop a few 'style frames' and develop the sound environment portrayed in the frame. My sounds will include narration and sound effects that describe the animal's environment and maybe what aspect of humankind threatens its extinction.

Recent work

Jan helped me make editing decisions in this video, and I tried to experiment with sound to fill in the voids where the fly wasn't in the frame. I hope you guys enjoy it!

Brian

sound vs. image

I think all these ideas are great! Creating sounds for an unfamiliar or imaginary environment would be awesome. The microbial environment could be very interesting...We'd have lots of room for fluid/liquid sounds, and we wouldn't need to do much visual stuff, if anything. I've pulled a bunch of reference images to model the inner ear (it should be a pretty easy job), so if people have ideas for what we might want to do with the model, just post!

Looking forward to fleshing out a bit of a storyline, see you guys soon!

Brian

This wax is serious

Synergy

Jean was spot on, in order to make this thing shine we should take components from each of these great ideas and meld them together.

I like the ideas we're coming up with now! Jan's idea of a microscopic environment coupled with Malak's idea to produce sounds that trick the mind would be solid additions to the psychological aspects of conversation that Brian chose to post about.

Sound Consciousness says a few things to me.. Firstly, that this project and presentation should be dominated by sound aspects (mixing, effects, et al) and the visual references (characters, environments) should be subordinate to the sound.

I like creating an environment (microscopic or otherwise) in which a the user is not familiar. Many of these sounds will have to be interpreted because there is no way we can know what they are... Furthermore, the visual style should be very controlled (via the colors, or even lack of picture) so as to not "tip our hand". We want to play with the audience's mind a bit because what they think is one sound will definitely not be what they expect!

Perhaps this environment can be in the ear? We'll let Brian decide... The microbes can be characters perhaps? I know Jean was working on neat fish creatures.. Fluid/liquid environments totally change the way sound is represented so I know we will all have fun with that... AND, if you want, each piece on the screen can be contributing layers to the overall "sound" of the environment and can enter/exit the field in such a manner where the effect on the total sound environment a la "The Conversation".

Tell me what you think!

Strength and Honor

Hi everyone! I'm posting a few screens related to my abilities and strengths. As an update I have resolved my FTP uploading issue so I can post/maintain the website when the time comes.

I am well versed in Flash, Dreamweaver and Illustrator. For the majority of my 2D works I have combined these tools together to create (in my opinion) solid pieces.

This screen was captured from a Flash structured database simulation. Basically, the structure and interactivity is all Flash/Actionscript driven while many of the design elements were created in Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop was also used to capture stills and images that are used in the deeper bits.

I am primarily concerned with character animation, acting and gesture. I have used my own drawn characters and free 3d rigs from the web. I have not yet modeled or rigged my own character, but I would like to.

I consider Texturing, Lighting and Sound Design my weakest assets, not because I am horrible at them, but because I have the least amount of experience in these areas. I would very much like to work on mixing and foley to gain more valuable experience for the art of animation.

Hello All,

Sorry for missing last week's meeting and seminar. I think the best thing for me to do is just bring my work in tomorrow, because i only have it on a dvd format and that way we can just check it out quickly.
I've been thinking a lot about sound and consciousness and how different sounds affect us emotionally and even sets the moods. Ever since starting this I realized that I'm paying a lot more attention to my surroundings and its funny how I try and identify things and different people can associate the same sounds with different things, and that brings me to the idea I had of sounds and its association with images.
In animation and films a lot of time sounds are created for objects that we have no idea what would ever sounds like. Like light sabers and dinosaurs those are all created sounds, so the idea for the project was to create sounds. Maybe even a guessing game. We can use the folly room, create a set of sounds. First we would present the sound with out any imagery and just have people guess what the sounds could be and then play that same sounds with different images and their actions. Like a rough example would be the same wooshing sounds, and then have a wave, then an object falling, and car passing by and theyre all being shown with the same wooshing sound. I hope that make sense.
I think its an easy project to create and we can all have fun creating the sounds in the room and if everyone else is busy i can easily put it together. I think even the idea of what could microcasms sounds like can definitly be added to this.
I think the other ideas of the radio and other ideas all sounds real good, id like to hear more and I'm sorry I missed "the conversation."
Hope to see you all tomorrow.

My work

Here's my demo reel...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOTbn2AM3TQ

(I can't spell "digital.")

Sorry for my stupid idea and works

First,
Here are my works.

As for my idea, I didn't come up with some good ideas. I'm always confused with sound and music. I'm thinking about the sound of the city, and make it become a song or music. But I think that is an old idea. I like the movie "Conversation" and I think that is cool. Because there are so many kinds of sound we usually might ignore. In that movie, those sounds are presented out and let me know here they are. However I have no idea how to use the idea that "Conversation" talk about.

That's it.
oh! Will our radio show put all our ideas together or just one of the things we want to do?

Microsounds

This evening's seminar gave me some new ideas about a sound design project. What are the sounds in a microscopic world? It was great to see some of the beautiful images that come out of scanning electron micrographs and cell staining procedures. Also the film that our guest, Judy Lemus showed, "The Life of the Cell," was depicted the visually stunning environment within the cell. However, nothing I've ever seen has attempted to design the sounds that occur in such a landscape. I think I'd like to do a project that involved images gathered from microscopy and some of the storytelling techniques developed in the radio show.

Our own radio show?

Jan and I talked about doing our own radio show last night. Both of us referenced Adam Sandler and the way in which many of his tracks completely reveal characters, setting and story through sound. My suggestion for a project is to come up with a story to tell through voice over, sound effects and maybe music. Naturally, we'd present it at Seminar with nothing on the screen. We could do a visual piece separately to present other information.

For the visual portion, Jan and I discussed doing something in the vein of "Fight Club" when Tyler is explaining splicing footage in a movie projection booth. The story was presented humorously but still gets across information about switching reels, cigarette burns on frames, and subliminal imagery at 1/24th of a second. The part I like most about this part of the movie (Tyler's sick sense of humor aside) is the presentation. The segment is about movies, it's presented in a movie (obviously) and they completely acknowledge that. For example, Tyler points to a cigarette burn in the top corner of the screen to explain what it is.

Maybe for our movie, we could use audio mixing (e.g. fading and panning, increasing bass, etc.) to explain what we researched. Thoughts?


-Brian

Radio Show

Tonight at the documentary and animation seminar, Sheila Sofian gave me an idea about a project for us. She said she makes her film entirely with her recorded dialogue before she makes any images. The film is composed like a radio show. This is a great idea for the sound group. I used to love the old Orson Welles, Mercury Theater programs. I have one at home that I'll bring next week with The Conversation. They did sound effects, acting and perspective work. I've always wanted to try something like that. We should study this more....

Strengths

I work best with After Effects for animation and image-creation. I edit sound in both Pro Tools and Adobe Audition. I can record foley, adr, and production sound. For mixing, I use Pro Tools and the D-command controller surface. Cinematography and editing are my favorite aspects of filmmaking and I would like to contribute these skills in any way I can.

Projects

Our first group meeting will take place this afternoon. Before meeting, I wanted to layout some of my ideas and then after the meeting I will post the direction we will take as a group.

Idea 1: Demonstrate through animation the physics and biology of how whales communicate.

Idea 2: Create a sound piece around a memory, where listeners can distinguish between the present perspective and the mental recreation of the past.

Idea 3: Underwater sound environment.

Idea 4: The structure of the ear and how sound travels to the brain.

For me, these were a good starting point for our research. I seem to be going in the direction of including physics and biology in my work. Also, I am interested in composing an event purely through sound editing.

We also will develop questions for our guests and their presentations on October 17.
Guests: Dr. Bill Whittington
Prof. Ken Hall
Dr. Tomlinson Holman

Who's got skillzzzz?

What's everyone most comfortable doing? We should figure out what everyone's strengths and talents are so that we can divide up our work as efficiently as possible, and know who to go to if me need something specific. I'll start...I'm very proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Maya modeling, Final Cut Pro/Premiere video editing, and InDesign. What's everyone else confident in and/or interested in doing?

-Brian

Here We Go

The first run of the Sound blog....