Final animation

The Hotel!

Here is my final animated response 

  

Right off the bat the main problem I encountered was the render time that it took to render 1100 frames of animation, I had to render out at 540p which took 35 hours on my laptop, but this was down to the amount of time I had to complete the animation. if I were to revisit the module I would definitely give myself more time to render my animation, but After the deadline I will render the animation out at 1080p for my show reel as I cant stand how poor the quality is of this render.

I would also devote more time to the mannequins, they look too passive, I could have had the one properly chase the camera to add more suspense, but then again that would make the mannequin the main factor of psychological concerns rather than the environment which is what my essay was all about.

there are other minor things that I would have done to improve the over all quality, I was meant to use live action in the mirror to add more realism, I was going to add an environment outside the hotel but these were all cut due to my time frame. I am happy with my response to set tasks, the psychological concerns raised by this animation are open to interpretation, but the intended concern was hallucinations, seeing things that aren't there, but it also keeps to the uncanny valley with its questionable human nature. I think to conclude my analysis I would definitely devote more time to the render, and touching up the quality to make it as good as it can be.

Final hotel renders

Final renders

Here are a selection of renders of the main segments of my hotel in 1080p I am very pleased how these turned out!

Hotel development

Testing render techniques

As stated in the previous post lighting was a big part (and struggle) of this module, but it gave me a chance to explore different render techniques to achieve different aesthetics. here are a couple of examples:

mental ray physical sun and sky

Mental ray renderer has a built in sun and sky creator, it provides a very realistic lighting set-up to a scene, but because mine is mainly indoors the sun didn't add any direct sunlight, it just made the whole place look softer, this was a problem due to the aesthetic I wanted to achieve

The left is with mrSun and the right is without. as you can see there is a considerable difference!

Final gather

Final gather is one of my favourite tools in mental ray, it diffuses the light to replicate the proper way shadows act, the image here isn't a very good example of this because I don't have many lights in the scene for it to make a difference.

On the left is final gather and the right is without. as you can see the shadows without final gather are incredibly harsh and not as realistic as id hoped. but final gather made them act more realistic, letting light fill the room as it would.

These techniques are very valuable and I will be able to use them when needed in the future!

Hotel Development

Lighting

A big struggle in this module was the lighting, I used area lights which created horrible speckles that were created because of the ray-tracing conflicting with the area lights as seen below

although it makes the carpet look good its just the speckles that are creating this look, this can be achieved by increasing the bump value of the carpet bump map. but this post is about the lighting, i wanted to add a glow to the lights to create a vintage kind of look, it took a few attempts playing with the translucency of the lamp shades and the intensity of the point lights:

After a session with my tutor, it was discovered that my use of lighting was making the the render times incredibly long, this was due to having surplus amounts of different light types. so my tutor explained that you can adequately light a scene with purely spot lights, this reduced render times greatly and it just so happened I could achieve a very similar render. so I have learnt a lot when it comes to lighting through this module and will definitely take what I have learnt onto my future endeavours.

Hotel development

New Windows!

As previously stated I decided to re-do the windows due to the cartoon aesthetic, and after measuring they were too small and too chunky, this is why in the future I need to create a proper scaled floor plan and orthographic plan to get all the right measurements before hand.

Before

After

I've also added curtains using nCloths, which I am fascinated by the ability of this amazing plug-in and the creations it helps to make. But the windows are looking alot better as they are larger which in turn lets more light in and i also changed the bars to ones that are more realistic. If i was to revisit this module, as stated before, i would definitely revise my napkin floor plan and create a proper professional scaled floor plan with real measurements to get the right scales in Maya, this became aparent when I created the doors, it wasn't until after I got some feedback and I realised that they were way too small.

hotel development

Starting to Texture and light the place

I had now started to add textures and some lighting as I model to save time and discover new visions about the hotel.

Desk

Chandeliers

As you can see i'm experimenting quite a bit with the lighting and glow effects, this I realised was the workflow that better suited me and Maya, maybe I should have completed all of the modelling and texturing first so then i could focus mainly on the lighting as they were changed constantly with each thing you added. so in future I will leave the lighting until last to achieve the best results.

Development

Modelling stage

Here is the development of my hotel in the modelling stage before adding textures and other assets.

Here are the window spaces, it turned out that I changed the windows entirely due to the way they looked too big and cartoon looking, but I will talk about that at a later date.

The image above was the first design of  the doors, initially there were indents as I found that real hotels have this style, but as I rendered out the hallway you couldn't see the doors so for the purpose of the animation I chose to get rid of the door gaps, as you can see below.

Hotel storyboard

Storyboard!

Here is the storyboard for my animated response, they are simple napkin sketches but never the less roughly show the story and how the animation will pan out, due to the fact its from the point of view of someone walking through, all there was to do was storyboard angles, and the way the mannequin appears.

If i were to revisit this module I would definitely allocate more time to the storyboarding to get a more  creatively resolved story board.

Hotel development

Hotel development

Here is the floor plan for the hotel that I am going to create for my context of practice animated response.

The room at the end is optional according to the time scale, but as you can see its just a napkin sketch floor plan, not to scale. I would have done a proper to scaled professional floor plan but I didn't learn the skills until after. so if I were to revisit the module I would definitely do a scaled floor plan so I can work to scale in Maya!

Lecture 10 What is research?

What Is Research

(Research) is the process of finding facts. These facts will lead to knowledge. Research is done by using what is already known.

This was quite a different lecture all together, as we all thought we knew what research was and how to do it, because we are second years and research is a big part of our modules, but this lecture gave a good angle on research and went into detail about different academic processes of research.

‘Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.'  Incomplete Manifesto for Growth – Bruce Mau Design 1998

“Everyone is a genius at least once a year. 

Success comes from having brighter ideas 

closer together.”

FAIL!

FAIL AGAIN!

FAIL BETTER!

FAIL QUICKER!

It gives you more time to

‘get it right next time’.

Here are some of the academic methodologies in which the lecture suggested

Stimulated approach

This is a conscious or subconscious search for inspiration from an external repertoire: in the surroundings, media, in discussion, libraries, etc. The main concern here is the development of analogies and associative approaches, which are then further developed into individual solutions.

Systematic approach

        This is based on the systematic collection and modification of components, characteristics and means of expression: such as by structuring and restructuring, enlarging and reducing, combining and extracting, replacing, adding, mirroring or reproducing.

Intuitive approach

This is the development of thought process, which is primarily based on internalised perceptions and knowledge, that is to say an internal repertoire. This type of thought process may occur spontaneously, without being evoked specially. This is actually a systematic process that takes place subconsciously.

And here are the examples of research that I never really got my head round until now:

PRIMARY RESEARCH

• Research that is developed and collected for  

   a specific end use, usually generated to 

  help solve a specific problem

• Research that involves the collection of data 

   that does not yet exist 

SECONDARY RESEARCH

•Published or recorded data that have already been collected for some purpose other than  the current study.

•The analysis of research that has been collected at an earlier time (for reasons unrelated to the current project) that can be applied to a study in progress

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH

Deals with facts, figures, and measurements, and produces data which can be readily analyzed. Measurable data is gathered from a wide range of sources, and it is the analysis and interpretation of the relationships across this data that gives the information researchers are looking for.

Here is a strategy in which we learnt to complete a task:

Phase 1  Assimilation.

• The accumulation and ordering of general 

information and information specifically related to 

the problem in hand.

Phase 2  General study.

• The investigation of the nature of the problem.

• The investigation of possible solutions or means 

of solution.

Phase 3  Development.

•The development and refinement of one or more of the tentative solutions isolated during phase 2.

Phase 4  Communication.

•The communication of one or more solutions to people either inside or outside the design team.

Analysis

• What is the problem / brief/ question about?

• What do I need to know more about?

• What already exists?

• What are the specifications, materials, functions, 

client preferences that are a fixed part of the 

brief?

Research

• How many ideas occur in response to your analysis?

• Ask yourself “What happens if ......?”

• Use lateral thinking & word association to spur originality

• Find the extremes (simplest to over-the-top / bizarre)

• Use mechanical trial and error e.g. mock-ups to find how & where to 

join bits together.

• Try out likely materials & find their limitations

• Go for lots of fast possibilities rather than one precious solution.

Evaluation

• Which fulfils the brief?

• Which looks the best?

• Which does the client/audience/viewer prefer?

• How does it fit the current ethos/values/ trends….?

• Is it easy, cheap, expensive, impossible to make?

•    Does it excite/innovate/ intrigue…..?

• What is its function? Does it work?

Solution

• usually a compromise between what  you 

want to do, what can be afforded, and what is 

feasible.

• Be sure this is acceptable by getting feedback 

on all the possibilities before you reach this 

stage.

This lecture was very beneficial to my practice as to be quite honest I didn't understand how to formulate the right method in which to research but now I can refer to these methods and hopefully my research will be a lot more professional.

Lecture 9 Censorship and the 'truth'

Censorship and the 'Truth'

There were many interesting topics raised in this lecture, as uncomfortable as some of the images were it did provide an insight into a bigger issue than I had previously knew.

Five years before coming to 

power in the 1917 October 

revolution, the Soviets 

established the newspaper 

Pravda.  For more than seven 

Decades,until the fall of 

Communism, Pravda, which 

Ironically means “truth”, served 

the Soviet Communist party by 

censoring and filtering the news 

presented to Russian and 

Eastern Europeans

as you can see, censorship was happening well before the modern notion of censorship, but it was used predominantly in a more political sense rather than censoring to not let minors see graphic content.

At that time [World War II], I fervently

believed just about everything I was exposed

to in school and in the media.  For example, I

knew that all Germans were evil and that all

Japanese were sneaky and treacherous, while

all white Americans were clean-cut, honest,

fair-minded, and trusting’

Modern censorship

At this stage of the lecture I was very much disturbed due to the graphic content so I wasn't very involved in the slides, but on that hand that shows that censorship is also causing people to be very easily disturbed! if people were de-censored then we wouldn't be on a constant whirl wind of people being less and less censored causing more and more things needing to be censored. 

Suppose that a picture of a young woman inserting a chocolate bar into her mouth makes one person think of fellatio, but someone else says that this meaning says more about the observer than it does the picture.  This kind of dispute, with its assumption that meaning resides in a text quite independently of individual and group preconceptions, is depressingly common indiscussions on advertising.

Here is a rediculous example of cencorship, the original image was banned but if the image was rotated 90 degrees to the left then that was deemed acceptable, what madness is that!

Banned

Allowed

Over all I didn't really benefit from anything in this lecture other than learning about the history of censorship but it also made me realise how strict the censorship programme can be! and as i'm creating media I will need to bear this in mind.

Lecture 8

Globalisation and sustainability

The lecture covered many different aspects of globalization, mainly the fact that you shouldnt trust contemporary media, and how the world is being 'Americanized'.

How can we relate globalization to animation?

Going back to what was previously stated, the world is being Americanized, lets look at Disney for example, an American animation company that has been the flag ship of animation from an early age!

If we look at he studio gibely animations, the animation is of the style Manga, with a heavy Japanese background which has been very Americanized for a mainstream american audience. it loses its values and traditions, some of the stories are changed to make them similar to fairy tales/ present top grossing animations.

Which is a prime example of globalisation in animation.

Lets explore further:

This is also true for westernisation specifically.

is it bad to portray the characters of an animation to be westernised?

It isn't always a bad thing.

If we look at it from a historical point of view, at the fall of the samurai, when Japan was in the struggle of riding the country of what they perceived samurai as being 'rebels' the government employed various different western experts to influence the country: training their army, introducing photography, fashion and religions.

So the country wanted that change, the westernisation. but we cannot forget the samurai. they were fighting to keep tradition, so for arguments sake, if we super impose the historical westernisation to the westernisation that we are talking about; The samurai are are small group of people that want to keep tradition who are fighting (metaphorically) the people who want the westernisation who happen to be a larger demographic so obviously the larger group are going to win.

But this is a very trivial view point.

Forgetting about Globalization in animation just for a second, lets better familiarise ourselves with Globalisation and Americanization.

Undoubtedly the prime example of Americanisation is McDonald's  ...

A huge sweep of fatty foods and fizzy drinks that has swarmed the world with restaurants and the floor with empty wrappers.

It can be very disappointing to middle class western holiday makers who want to travel to distant lands to experience different cultures and exotic foods but instead get hit by the huge Mcdonalds 'M'.

So going back to animation: the disappointment can be reflected, people investigating into different cultural animations but due to the globalization and westernisation they aren't that dis-similar to animations that many are used to, so the disappointment will be very strong.

So to conclude, there isn't really a positive to globalisation other than the rich get richer and the poor pay them, and without resorting to babbling on with a utopian attitude, it is very much negative.

Lecture 5 Cities and Media

Cities in Media and Film!!

Architecture serves as a metaphor for the human mind.

I was really looking forward to this lecture due to my passion for the city, and the fact that its almost a character involved in the plot instead of being an inanimate creation.

So what does the city represent?

Dreams and Ambitions? 

Or an artefact to show the development of modern society.

A Civilization

We as humans have always felt the need to tame the landscape (more so in the modern world) and the city could be our way of trying to tame it!

The difference with the city and modern arts is the fact that we can choose to ingest certain forms of art, for example, we choose to watch TV and to turn it off, we choose to walk into an art gallery and decide when to walk out. but the city is very much forced upon us, its an unavoidable character in the journey of life. 

The fact that the city could be perceived as a character can be an incrementally developed one at that, due to the modernisation of the city. if you compare earlier sky scrapers to modern day ones, the style has very much changed (very much like how art has taken into different movements).

Also from the cinemas relationship with the city, it also agrees that the city is a character. for example, in the 1949 film The Fountainhead, the scene 'Bit of the old bit of the new' an architect is brought in to discus his building for commission, and the board responsible for the funding have given the architect a couple of changes to make the building look more modern, whilst still holding on to the classic look. 

The architect replies with this:

"..."

Which is a great way of describing the city!

But the countryside can also be very alienating, I wanted to emphasise the dichotomy that the city creates; you cant have a 'city' without having the 'countryside' either. we can see the sinister side of the countryside portrayed in the shining, the opening scene without the music would appear very picturesque and nice, but because of the music it creates a very dark representation of the countryside, one that relates to the modernist view of the city; being alone. a small fish in a big pond

Anything could happen ...

This relates back to the dark side of the city. 

the city as a labyrinth of streets and alleyways in which you can get lost, but in the end you will be exactly where you started.

In terms of animation, there is more chance to emphasise certain aspects of the city to create a darker atmosphere or a lighter one, in metropolis the film, there was a celebratory representation of modernity with the streets being grid locked and busy, which has turned out to be the opposite of celebratory 

As an example, one of my favourite cities in animation is the city of rapture from Bioshock 1 and 2 the game:

Its an abandoned (partially)

But also its a chance to create more realistic interpretations of the city, in Grand Theft Auto 5. its an innovation in the modern world of video games, the vast expanse of the city in which you inhabit is extraordinary in terms of realism and detail! which sort of celebrates the city in a way as it re-kindles the love of the city.

Academic text review

Reviewing Sigmund Freud's text "The uncanny" 1919

An academic text that has influenced the creation of the practical response but also helped to better understand how to label the direction in which all of my work takes, this of course is the uncanny valley which has been theorised and investigated by Sigmund Freud and his works on the valley are very rarely recognized by people other than those who adopt his theories and explanations. The text I am reviewing is his essay entitled “The Uncanny” written in 1919 by Sigmund Freud, it explores various realms that the uncanny valley creates but this isn't from an animation point of view, due to the fact it was written years before animation was created, but it explores the fundamentals of the uncanny and describes some of the elements and theories involved with the uncanny.

Freud starts quite vague, he states that the uncanny’s purpose is to insight dread into the viewer, he goes on to say that the uncanny is representative of all things fearful which doesn't relate to my previous understanding of the uncanny valley, but as we move on through his essay we discover that he elaborates on this theory and sheds some light of other possible representations of the uncanny.

This next segment is the most crucial part of the essay, as it explains one of the crucial fundamentals of the uncanny valley, and it reflects on the work in which people have done and also creates the fine line between the uncanny and horror. This is described by referring to one of the first people to explore the uncanny, Ernst Jentsch, he goes on to explain that the effect and representation of the uncanny all depends on how susceptible the viewer is to such aesthetics as the uncanny, similar to horror, some are more susceptible to horror films than others.

The main debate in Freud’s essay is trying to interpret how all things terrible, represented by the uncanny, can seem so familiar to us and in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening. One theory that has been reflected upon by my animated response is one supported by Jentsch’s works, this is the theory: one of the most successful devises in creating a story is to leave the viewer into questioning whether a certain character or figure is a human being or an automaton and to do so by not directing the attention directly towards his uncertainty, as depicted in the animated response, the reason in which the viewer is running through the hotel is due to a mannequin that seems to be following the viewer. This is exactly what Freud was explaining, the audience doesn’t know for sure whether the mannequin is a real human or an inanimate objects being controlled by a third party, which adds to the overall uncanny aesthetic, it is only when there is a jump scare that it is questionably a horror, but this just leads me to slightly disagree with this text due to the way that if there wasn’t a jump scare there wouldn’t be anything frightening about the animation but instead there is just a creepy aura because of the uncertainty described by Freud which proves that there doesn’t have to be horror for something to be uncanny. 

Visual analysis task

Visual writing task analysing Kristen Leapore's 'Bottle' and Siri Malchior's 'The Dog who was a Cat Inside'

Instantly one can see a definite similarity between the two animations in terms of hidden message, the concern of identity, and a growing issue with young people in the world today with the growing use of social media. But they are portrayed in very different ways, and the message being represented differs slightly with each animation. Here is an analysis of these social concerns and how these two animations portray them.
Inspecting ‘Bottle’ first, created by Kristen Leapore, it takes on a different approach to the current concern of identity crisis. But Kristen provides a softer approach until we get to the end. It starts with two characters each inhabiting two different environments: beach and snow covered beach. Separated by a vast ocean communicating with one another by means of glass bottle, they start sending different items found in their different environments. These items are used to attach to their plain figures to slowly create certain human like features such as eyes, hair and mouths. Then the one sends some drawings implying they should meet by converging at the bottom of the vast ocean that separates them, it’s when they get closer they start to lose the items that they attached to themselves and slowly start to dissolve. This brings to fruition the ideology of social media miss-representing people, how people represent themselves in such a different way on social media than how they are in reality.
Compared to Bottle the next animation, The Dog who was a Cat Inside deals with a similar issue but in a different approach. The basic premise is that a cat is trapped inside of a dog; it is created to suggest that the cat isn’t a separate being or character but rather the identity of the dog trying to override the identity of the character. This leads us to sway towards the identity in which the social community and groups of individuals create and enforce on their peers which in turn create it very hard for someone of a different orientation to accept this or present themselves ion this way and try and hide it, such examples consist of: sexuality, religion, gender and such aspects of human orientation.
So as described they are both oriented around the same concern, one which effects a lot of people in the ever growing dominance of social media. But the animations differ in a way that represents two different approaches to this concern. Bottle seems to represent the way in which people display themselves how they want to be perceived in social media which is not true; when The Dog who was a Cat Inside seems to display the inner desire not to be how one is perceived.
But it isn't the meaning that is different, it is also completely different aesthetically, Bottle is created using stop motion and The Dog was created using 2D hand drawn elements within 3D computer generated space, they both merit different benefits to the concerns that these animations represent for example, in Bottle the objects used are everyday objects along with naturally occurring ones, depicting an empathetic response to the characters making the concern seem more pronounced. This cannot be said for The Dog due to its abstract charm, but this benefits the understanding of the issue making it easier to represent

response to essay

Idea

So being briefed on our practical part of context of practice, we are to create an animated response from our essay. and being as though mine is quite a vague topic, I'm going to hone in on a certain response.

I'm going to create an environment in Maya and animate a camera going through the environment as though through the eyes of a person walking/ running through the environment to reveal certain aspects of the environment that becomes its own character, causing the viewer to feel certain emotions.

The film that influenced this decision is called Room 1408, where the protagonist is subject to  room in a hotel that seems to be its own character! that causes problems and takes the protagonists through various experiences that make the viewer uncomfortable.

So I too am going to use a hotel as my environment, but instead of one room i'm going to use a larger part of the hotel, such as the lobby and such, this will give me more opportunities to express its character.

This is the kind of style I am going to go for, just a bit less 'blingy' than this example. I need to rough out a storyboard and to design the aspects of the hotel 

essay plans

So I have derived my Essay title from the lecture that i enjoyed titled: Cities in film and media.

After a discussion with my Context of Practice tutor, the title that came to fruition was:

How does the environment in animation represent the uncanny and psychological concerns

There is a lot of room to explore darker reasons as to why some animations sets or environments are as they are, but i will have to be careful to not slip into the trap of exploring the animation itself, its characters and stories.

I will research into Sigmond freud's work to explore the uncanny and various other psychological texts to better understand where i am to go.

I will be influenced by a number of graphs as well that give a more visual outlook on the uncanny valley

But first i will start my essay in order to scribe down a starting point in which to explore further.