I first wrote about this rather experimental music video I created here (where I write on it in more detail). Basically, it was shot over the period of a 28 hour train journey from Baotou, Inner Mongolia to Shanghai. I’ve now been able to upload it to youtube in it’s full length form and it is a slightly different version too. I altered the grade a little for a couple of shots that annoyed me and I also digitally removed some tiny bits and pieces. I actually performed these changes about a year and a half ago, so it was nice to get the excuse to finally upload it.

You can find the Kelvox1 Tumblr here and also some more of their material here on bandcamp.

A bit off the sides please.

Just a quick update. I’ve been onlining a short film in After Effects and, as part of my workflow, I’ve been using the excellent script “rd: Pre-compose” by Jeff Almasol. If you are unfamiliar with After Effects scripts, you might want to check out my earlier post here before continuing.

As a bit of background I was initially using the “trim compose” script (found here) from Andrew Kramer’s Video Co-pilot website, but after trying to pre-compose two layers at once I discovered that this created two separate pre-compositions as opposed to just one containing both layers. Jeff’s script however, accepts multiple layers without a problem and again asks if you want handles on these clips.

Ordinarily, when pre-composing layers in After Effects, the default action (if you choose “Move all attributes into a new layer”) is to place those layers into a composition of equal length with no real indication of when those layers are precisely active. If you are not familiar with this issue, give it a try now, create a number of solid layers and shift them out along the time line at intervals. You could also trim them down. Now, when you select these layers and pre-compose you will see that the new composition layer stretches out across the whole timeline with no accurate indication of where the actual layer is actually active. Undo the pre-comp, and now try Jeff’s script with the layer selected and (if you choose “Trim new composition to combined layers’ duration”) you will get a trimmed down layer showing precisely where that layer is active.

For me, being able to have a neat and organised composition is key to preventing me going insane with layer navigational claustrophobia. Keeping pre-comps of shots in this manner helps me to work on them in isolation without the usual clutter and distraction.

Pushcat by Zut!

Just a quick update to point you in the direction of my Pushcat review for the Indie Games website The Indie Mine. I’ve taken a keen interest in Indie games over the last few years, having really had my eyes opened to them after I played Jonathon Blow’s phenomenal “Braid”. The level of personal craft seen in indie games is a stark reminder of how little personality AAA titles actually have particularly in regards to eccentricity. That is if you forget about all the bugs and patches they roll out…

So far this year I have invested in a number of indie bundles, where the motto has been pay what you can. The Humble Indie Bundle being a particular standout. The fascinating thing with their model is the amount of control it provides, as to how your money can be split e.g what amount goes to charity, the individual developers or the curators. It’s a little extra work on behalf of the buyer, but its an intensely refreshing and not just a little rewarding too. The bundles have generated a huge amount of sales, and I can’t help but feel a little disappointed when reading peoples boasts of just how little they payed, but that’s the model and there are plenty of people who do pay fairly and others way over the odds too. Any kind of venture that helps/tries to further intellectualise an actual purchase is good in my book and I truly hope to see this kind of thing increase.

These bundles often feature the “headline” grabbing games of the indie scene, with many, many others going unnoticed. If you’ve ever been interested in computer games then I highly recommend some searching around for indie games, perhaps even check out Indie Game: The Movie and, maybe, even learn to program yourself and go make something! I’ve got a couple of games in the pipeline and I’ll be sure to post more about them as they develop.

Oh, and in case you missed it, you can find my Pushcat review here.

P.P.S

Another bundle has just launched which is currently tempting me to purchase it. You can find it here, courtesy of the Indie Royale crew. It’s a collection of titles from some of their previous bundles. The tempting factor for me is the old school graphic adventure game Gemini Rue.

P.P.P.S

Here’s the trailer for Indie Game: The Movie;

I’ve been researching ways to create walk cycles for character animation in After Effects, trying to find any plugins or scripts that might make this process easier. I’ve come across a wide range of useful tutorial videos, and scripts, which I’ll share. The main issue is that After Effects is lacking bones with inverse kinematics in its set of animation tools.

The DUik script brings inverse kinematics to After Effects and thus your characters, enabling you to rig them like you already might in a 3D package. It’s a pay what you want script , and it can be found here. There are some tutorials on the website – I’ve embedded a video introduction below which should help familiarise you with the workflow. It’s a little long winded but basically, you should have a range of parented layers that comprise a limb, you can then apply puppet points to the joints/anchor points of your layer, then with each puppet point selected you identify them with the scripts tool panel as joints before finally assigning them a controller. The process is described in the video (from the DUik site) below.

If you’ve never installed scripts before you just need to place them in your After Effects script directory. To launch them in After Effects, go to the Edit Menu > Scripts and select your desired script.

I also found an exhaustive range of tutorials describing the design and rigging of 2D characters within After Effects by Daniel Gies, he has quite a wide range of tutorials on Youtube and also another series on AETuts (found here). He describes his process of rigging, using expressions driven by sliders, to control things like breathing and also eye line, so that a character’s head can follow a null. He also is an advocate of Mettles Freeform pro plugin, using it to add a 3D effect to his characters heads. In addition, he covers the use of the Puppet tool and the DUik tools, see below.

Mo chat

Time for an After Effects update. I’ve been following the #mochat twitter transcripts as I’m not online when the live chat happens, due to my timezone, but it’s proving a fun source of shop talk. Topics covered already have included After Effects scripts, After Effects and Cinema 4D plugins, design theory resources, the Fusion IO, pre-production talks and more. You can find transcripts of all the #mochat sessions, held so far, here.

I also came across a few sites offering free HD footage on a Creative Commons 3.0 license, meaning that you can even use them in commercial projects. I’ve found similar sites in the past, and much of the content has been understandably flawed to a certain degree, but in this case the work seems actually rather good.

http://recroomhq.com/ – Offers some actual, analogue television static, as well as shots of Ink in water, bubbles and matches being lit. The free footage of TV static they offer for free download looks particularly useful. They do ask for donations to help them with the download bandwidth however in order to sustain the site.

http://beachfrontprod.blogspot.co.uk/ – Is not a site I’ve dived into too much, but what I have seen has been of a focused, decent quality. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Finally there is www.videvo.net which appears to collate a lot of these sources and more, including free motion graphics clips.

Stellar performance from Stellan Skarsgård

There are three things you can take away from Den Enfaldige Mördaren, the first being that Stellan Skarsgård, as an actor, kicks ass and that people with power are intensely cruel, zeitgeist riding bullies. Thirdly, it reinforces quite how amazingly good Swedish cinema is.

In an ambiguous, Bonnie and Clyde like opening, we are introduced to the film’s main character Sven (Skarsgård). He, and who we can only assume to be his girlfriend or captive have seemingly committed a murder and are on the run. Stellan’s character Sven has a facial deformity that hinders his speech. Is the woman controlling him, has he taken her prisoner? I began preparing myself for a Swedish version of Badland’s, or maybe something again related to the time period, like Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us. However, we flash back in time, and are treated to the kind of eccentric background character exposition found in The World According to Garp, as we discover that Sven’s father once modeled in a historical vanity painting, his face painted out and replaced by someone else. It’s a nice social historical introduction to what is essentially a social historical drama as we get properly introduced to the good natured Sven and witness what leads to the film’s disturbing opening.

When Sven’s mother dies, he is taken in by the local factory owner who is, if not a Swedish Nazi party member, then certainly a Nazi sympathiser. He hosts Nazi gatherings at his house, where he routinely terrorises his staff and humiliates his family.

Sven is given a bed in the factory owner’s barn in return for his work. No doubt due to the cold in the barn, he has hallucinatory visions of winged warrior angels. These visions bring both the grand (simple) theme, and the operatic to the tale, of mortal struggle and oppression. This is particularly relevant as Sven finds his sense of self worth and begins to earn his own emancipation with the help of another local farmer. It’s a stellar film, filled with fine performances, visual compositions and at least one nice little match edit.

See the following youtube clip, which sadly lacks subtitles but, with cinematography this good, who needs a translation?

Mills and Boon just got real

Written and produced by Harvey Weinstein, this 1981 horror was the first release of the now renowned Miramax company. The plot involves teens at an isolated summer camp as they slowly discover someone is hunting them down – a slasher with gardening sheers no less as the poster above ably demonstrates. It’s not a bad poster either, slightly aping Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” with its antagonist waving their weapon of choice above their heads. Slightly odder is that the “monster” is missing its head where instead a light emerges, something John Carpenter’s “The Thing” remake made so much more famous in 1982. Not that these films share anything close in terms of quality.

“The Burning” is a slightly above par bad film, it does have qualities of effort for something of modest budget. As a filmmaker, there were things that impressed me, that demonstrated more than a workmanlike approach to the production. For instance much of the films lighting is quite effective and atmospheric, and there are reasonably well choreographed camera moves, so it’s not surprising that these sparks of talent went on to develop the Miramax brand.

Also, goremeister Tom Savini is on board, providing effectively gruesome gore make-up. So, I think you can begin to understand why it is a slightly above par in the summer camp slasher genre.

So, what did I enjoy about it? Well, other than some truly, truly appalling acting and repeat uses of overused mastershots… very little. It has Jason Alexander of Seinfeld fame making an early film appearance and if you like bad films, gore and boobs then this has that. In fact at times I truly wondered whether this is one of those “ironic” 80′s movies pastiching Grindhouse flicks, and actually considered whether they made Jason Alexander look slightly younger.

Ultimately, if you are a fan of Friday the 13th, trashy cinema, or simply plain bored (and like the look of the trailer), then this would be worth checking out.

You can find the movie here on IMDB.

And some more info here on Wikipedia.

Filmic Reflections

I absolutely hit this up at the right time. A warm Friday evening in June had passed by, and, at a still stuffily warm 1.30am, I decided to throw this on. Going into it totally blind – having never seen a Marco Ferreri movie before.

It opens with a good slice of existentialism, setting us up (in part) for what we are to see, and it’s an absolutely brilliant curveball. I mean in a *what IS this movie* kind of way, great genre bending, subversive 60′s cinema, before that kind of thing became simply ironic and a joke, the preserve of “Scary Movie” and “Airplane”. Movies which took the political act out of such statements and played them solely for laughs. Whether this is a good or bad thing, modern marketing and audience demands have pretty ended the practice, although not always entirely.

The film explores a mid life crisis played out over a single night, think Alexander Payne’s “About Schmidt” or “American Beauty” but stylistically rawer, and you’d be in generally the right mood, frame of mind and humour. Although instead of a jaded, sardonic Nicholson we have Michel Piccoli wandering aimlessly around his house, (in almost real time I might add) trying to entertain himself through the night, my own sleepless predicament only served to help endear and relate.

Those looking for a strong driving plot will be disappointed, this is a film essentially about the human experience when stepping outside of ritual, a “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” where an adult instead deals with an ordinary, typical midlife crisis rather than a mid educational one. Sound dull? Well, there is a lot of humour too, a fiercely devilish, boyish one, the one that billows out of Lars Von Trier films, the vented steam from those resigned to life’s realities and responsibilities. Regular boys bored of their toys. It’s political too, of course, as only films of the sixties really manage to be, in aesthetic, dialogue and action. Imagine Terry Gilliam and Goddard getting all Seth Brundled into Fellini perhaps.

So, we spend this evening watching a man trying in turns to find himself, how he feels, reveal, and attempt to expose his inner psychoses and contradictions. It’s an absolutely enthralling experience. The lighting and sound design helping to convey those strange hours we spend illuminated by electric bulb. At first I wondered whether the film was badly lit, as you might, but it really is a defining character, helping to locate yourself in the continuity of the piece, as there is precious little exposition, so do be prepared to acclimatise!

It really is a shared journey of his and us. Larry David with no one to bounce off.

That the film is so successful at what it does is a marvel, and a lot of it is down to the efficient way in which information, pace, “developments” and resolution are conveyed, as much as it is Michel Piccoli fascinating performance of complete alienation.

Take a look at the trailer below, and no, this isn’t so much a sleazy softcore romp as suggested in its frames, but a genuinely top class film you won’t easily forget, although be warned, the movie does also feature ridiculously attractive Italian and French beauties Annie Girardot, Anita Pallenberg and Carole André. This movie WILL shock you and leave you with the most stupidest of smiles on your face, just wait. Phenomenal cinema.

You can find it on IMDB by clicking here.

Proxy (Lower Res Copies in After Effects)

I’ve not posted for a while, been rather busy, but I will pass on some links to helpful free tools I’ve been using in my After Effects workflow. They will really help to speed up your work in After Effects.

Working with high resolution imagery, for example, can be a real show stopper when trying to experiment with camera placement on a 3D animated After Effect project. Working with proxy files within After Effects can really help in these situations and it needn’t be a pain to create proxies hand by hand. These temporary low resolution proxy versions of your files are easy to turn on and off, just click the square icon they create in the project panel. To help speed up the creation of proxy files within After Effects I use the following free (pay what you want) scripts from aescripts.com;

Approximate by Jeff Almasol.

or

CreateProxies by Charles Bordenave.

They each enable you to select your files in the After Effect’s project panel, be they video or image files, then batch process them with the settings you have selected. Be aware that you may need to create your own settings for the quality level you need. These templates can be found in the After Effect’s menu;

Edit > Templates > Render Settings…

Change the proxy defaults (click New… and then edit…). You can then save these templates to export and load onto other machines you may be working on by choosing the Save All… command. Really useful stuff.

The whole process is automated and as painless as can be.

I came across this link to a selection of free video’s on youtube of character reference. The clips also come with a helpful grid overlay with syncronised front and side views. I don’t currently do too much character rigging or animation, but this find has encourage me to do more. There are about 60 clips on the youtube channel of people doing a sample of typical computer game type movement. There are boxes on the floor that are pushed, various kicks and punches as well as a few drunken walk cycles too. The models are athletic male, female, large male and large female.

There isn’t as large a range as I’d like, but they are free and inspiring.

Also, I found this tutorial for creating walk cycles for computer game engines using sprite sheets, although the same technique could equally be employed for motion graphic and video work. It uses Daz3D which was released for free recently (download it here). The tutorial can be found here on the great blog www.gamefromscratch.com. You will also need The Gimp digital image manipulator software (open source photoshop), which I have blogged about previously. Again, that can be downloaded for free, from here.