Draft of the Visual Performance

I opened up Resolume and tried messing up with the effects and the videos and this is more or less how the final show will look like. Beware the video is about 6 minutes long. You can just go through a certain parts if you want.



AV show draft

Audio Visual Show

My performance has one primary part and a secondary one.
In the first part I wanted to have a silhouette of a dancer in one layer and in other layers I wanted to have video effects and background videos. For those purposes I was trying to figure out how to create the dancer video. I knew that I could do it in front of a green screen and then mask the dancer with a black color. But that was not in my capabilities so I was wondering of other ways of doing it. One day an idea came to my mind - using threshold filter on the video so everything except the dancer would be white. I tried to record few videos and realized that even the darkest gray becomes white when the filter is applied. Thus I dressed myself in black, put on black gloves and tried doing it once again. It worked more or less.

Dancer video
I took the videos with my camera that can record in 640x480 resolution. The quality of the original videos is good but when the filter is applied and the video is encoded it gets far worse. Here you can take a look at the original video. The video that was processed using threshold filter (cropping and resizing was used as well). The last picture shows a mix of three layers outputted from Resolume.



Game part
The second part was simply about adding gaming videos into the mix. The games in particular would have something in common and that would be the music. All the games are music games of some sort. In one layer I would have me playing a certain game on a controller and in another one you could see the in-game video of the game. In a third layer I would still have some jump backs (the background videos with various visual effects).
I took the videos and did not process them in any special way. I wanted to grab the in-game videos directly from the Playstation 2 on which the games run. But an accident happened in my gaming room - both of my PS2s are broken
- and I wasn't able to grab them at all.



Music
As for music. The dancer should dance to music of some kind. I am a para para dancer so the music chosen should correspond Para Para (note the music games also have Eurobeat music in them as this type of music is popular in Japan and it suits the games well - because of the speed and rhythm). Para Para is a Japanese dance that is danced in clubs and can be danced individually. It does not require too much
space. It uses mainly arms. Legs/feet are moving from left to right to keep the rhythm. This kind of dance is danced to Eurobeat. An upbeat and relatively fast music (around 140-150BPM). Eurobeat originates from Italy where it evolved from Italopop.

3d room model and QTVR

I present to you my (terrible) room I made in 3ds max^_^

We were supposed to create at least ten objects in a room. Take 13 shots from a camera placed in the middle of the room. Each shot would be under a certain angle. With a specialized program we would then create a quicktime virtual image.

I'm working on it still even though I'm not sure if I will finish it. Here are few rendered shots. The room is not finished and probably won't ever be as my modeling skills are really low.

I learned how to use 3d studio max to some extent. I used primarily edit poly/mesh but I discovered many ways how to work with a model. I realized that there are many modifiers that allow me to do something more precisely and in a much easier way than doing everything the hard way (moving vertices or polygons individually). But I did not spent so much time on it and that's why I'm not sure if I will be able to rediscover all this next time.

I learned more on texturing and UV mapping which is good and also I learned something about lights, cameras and projections.

As an introduction to 3ds max it was good but it did not help me much as next project was doing a model of a human body and animating it (500 frames.).

Flash Animation

Stop motion is finally over. So now it all came to trying to come up with a Flash animation. I knew that my animation will hardly be anything good but I needed to try to learn something.

I wanted to do an animation of something appearing. At first I wanted to draw something and color it step by step and to show that. But I could do this via stop motion as well. So later I decided to do a kanji character appearing.

I started with doing the whole kanji and then I started masking it stroke by stroke. I had no idea how to do the increments or how fast it should be. I tried doing it so it would be visually good, but that's where my problem lies. If I would want to add sound I would encounter a huge problem. The way I did the animation is completely wrong. It's not realistic and thus the brush strokes sounds would be completely wrong.

I learned something about masking and animating objects (symbols) and such which I'm glad. But next time I need to think about an animation as a whole not just parts (video, audio).



Sakura Animation

Stop Motion animation

Next step after my hand drawn animations was a stopmotion animation.
It is an animation technique where you make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. I choose poker cards as my object.

It might seem easy to do but it showed to be much more difficult than I imagined. I tried doing this animation probably 10 times. Each time I had problems with my camera moving (even when being on a tripod), cards changing their position and lights.

Doing this animation I learned a lot, but I'm not really happy with the result.
My main problems consisted of:

Getting the right angle
Setting up the camera on the tripod
Having good lightning

Stopmotion Animation

Final Audio Assignment

Today I had to finish our final project for the Sound Class. I was afraid that something would go wrong (well...the exported data does not work but um...it might be just our computers not wanting to read the DVD???). Anyway I choose for this assignment Secret World trailer (I have no idea what it is so don't ask me) and I created the sound effects and put it all together and processed it so it could be aired on TV.

There are still some things I would like to work on a bit longer but due to having problems with ProTools I did not manage it on time.

So here's the video. There's a licensed song used in it (Injection of Love) so I won't rather upload it to youtube...

I learned a lot during the classes. I realized what can be done with sound effects and what is needed for a video to have a professional sound. I know now what needs to be done to create a well done podcast or moderate something on radio or TV. The class was valuable and I would like to continue taking other sound classes as well.

In the video below. The sound starts to get late from a certain point and I did not manage to get the sound into the right speakers at the right time. I had a really hard time with this and it is something I need to learn and find a way how to do it properly. Otherwise I'm quite happy with the result, especially when I did not have that much time to finish it.

3ds max introduction

Our first lesson about 3d studio max was quite intensive. We had a 5 hours review of all the features and modifiers in 3d studio max that we could use. After the lecture we had some time to create our first models. My model was a table with something that should have resembled a IIDX controller.

Then I made a scene with all kinds of dice (d4 - d20). I did not manage to map the textures correctly though (even though I had my own dice with me. I just couldn't come up with a correct system to have the numbers on the right spot). Render not available..probably lost somewhere on our network drive.