flash workshop

I had a Flash workshop today. I learnt about tweens. There genius. All you do is put a key frame on one image and a key frame on another and create a movement or change of some sort. Then simply add either a motion or shape tween and it instantly fills in all the empty frames inbetween the images. It really speeds up making an animation. Another useful technique to make creating an animation quicker was to add movement to an individual shape and make it last a certain amount of frames by using key frames then save that shape into your library. You can then copy and paste as many of that animated shape as you want onto he timeline and it will have saved the movement of the original shape as well. I will try and animate some of my own images using Flash so I can begin to feel a little more comfortable with the interface and controls.

Below are some of the shapes I animated. The first shows a square that has been rotated on the bottom left hand corner every 6 frames. The second was done by creating a path for the shape to follow and positioning the shape so it goes round smoothly. The last video shows how by just using a shape tween you can morph a circle into a square. All of these simple animations were done using key frames to control the movement and shape of the object I animated.

animation storyboard

I want to make a short animation to accompy another of An Earth Tongues songs to also put on his MySpace to promote his music and gain interest. Above is a sketch of a tree that i would like to be the main subject of the animation as the song that will go with it is called 'Fractal Tree'. I also want to experiment with different programs to edit the animation - such as Flash and Final Cut. Below is a storyboard I drew which I want to turn into an animation using collage and drawings.

A seed begins to grow, the camera will follow the stem to the surface.

The seed grows into a tree.

Leaves then grow on the tree.

Cherries also grow and the camera pans to the top of the tree to reveal a bird.

The bird, with cherries in its mouth, flies off to its nest to feed its chicks.

The bird goes back to the tree to get more cherries and brings them back to the nest. This time the chicks have grown up slightly.

The bird goes back yet again to collect cherries and brings them back to the nest. The chicks are even bigger.

The bird goes one final time and when it returns the chicks are fully grown - this is to show the passage of time. Then one of the birds offspring flies off to the tree.

It sits on the tree trying to find cherries but there are none.

Suddenly the leaves fall off the tree and the growth of the tree reverses until it has disappeared.

Animatics workshop

I went to the animatics workshop today. Animatics are basically an animated stroyboard to give clarity and more information than a standard drawn storyboard. I learnt how useful keyframes can be-we used them to control panning of the 'camera', movement and rotation. I found today really useful and am wondering if i could use Final Cut to edit a simple stop motion animation and make it more interesting by using some of the techniques I've learnt. I could even just use still drawings for parts of it and use key frames to move focus to different parts of the drawing and even move parts of it. Below are my notes from the lesson which I will refer back to if I decide to edit and animation using Final Cut.

I also learnt a useful technique in Photoshop to remove the background from an image so when put in Final Cut it won't cover up other layers of images. Once you've done this you can actually use Final Cut to animate this single image - using key frames. In Photoshop you select the image using the magic wand tool then inverse it. Then you create something called an alphachannel which is an extra layer and then save it. When you import it into Final Cut the background has been removed and you are left with a single image.

music video

I made a music video in my video elective to accompany an artist's music called An Earth Tongue. I want to upload this video onto YouTube so I can then embed it onto An Earth Tongue's MySpace. I have had so much trouble trying to upload it onto YouTube. I naively tried to upload it just as it was when I'd finished editing it on Final Cut but discovered the file size was much too big. I looked into the type of file that YouTube preferred which are H.264, M PEG-2 or M PEG-4. I tried all these but found that video quality was drastically reduced; my video was a small pixelated mess once uploaded. I found that Stephanie was having difficulty with the same thing, and she had posted a short how to on our courses own sort of Wikipedia. She had used QuickTime to compress her video so it didnt take a thousand lightyears to upload onto the Internet. I tried this as well but still the video quality was rubbish. I ended up getting a technician to help and he suggested to keep the file as DV PAL as this is what I edited my video as. He also lowered the sound quality as I thought this could be compromised as it was already very good quality to begin with. And now, finally, I am uploading it and it is working, just quite slowly. Throughout this brief, I have found myself constantly waiting for videos to upload, videos to render and computers to sort themselves out after they have crashed on me because I've been uploading too much. Though I don't know how I'd cope without the kind of technologies I've been using recently, they do seem to drain a large chunk of your life away. And it also seems that when using a computer for even the simplest of tasks it will NEVER go exactly to plan. No matter how careful you are computers are temperamental little bastards, freezing and crashing at the slightest thing. I think the computer geniuses need to revise their invention and make it more human friendly. Because I know my mum still hardly uses a computer unless she has to, and it's because they are pretty hard to figure out and when you have to constantly wait she thinks she can do things quicker on her own.

picasa web album

yet another photosharing site but I am automatically a member as i have a google account. whats good about this site is that any photographs i post on blogger automatically get put into my picasa album. So i literally don't have to do a thing and all my photos get put into an album for me!

Heres a link to my newly discovered album!

it's a ducks life

life in 2D

I looked around the animation galllery at the Bradford Media Museum and found some great films that didn't need a film camera to shoot them. Below are some 2D animations that use stop motion animation that show how creativly and imaginatively you can make a moving image film without the use of a moving image camera.

This is a short film based on Russian Folklore by an animator called Yuri Norstein. This is the most advanced animation out of the three here using effects to make fog and also the characters and backgound are much more detailed. I really like the musical sound effects, sort of like the use of the flute in Peter and the Wolf.

Below is a clip from Monty Python's Flying Circus by Terry Gilliam, which i think is a very effective form of anmation, using mostly collage in a pop art style, and although this 2D way of working was done years before Terry Gilliam's creations it is still very popular, showing how versatile and lasting this method is.

I really like the animation below by Michel Ocelot as the use of paper doilies makes it a quaint and pretty film. I think I might buy this from Amazon or somewhere as I can't find the rest of the film on YouTube. The really simple colours and and intricate detail really suits the fact the film is all 2 dimensional.

Loco Roco is a psp game that takes on the ideas of these very simple 2D animations as it consists of just flat blobs and bright colours, even the controls are very minimal only using two buttons on the whole console. It looks as if it has been made on Illustrator.

Flickr uploadr on desktop

I discovered an even quicker way of uploading my photos onto Flickr. Theres a new desktop Flickr which enables you to sort out all the files you want to upload whilst you are offline then it uploads them quickly once your online. This means I can just upload alot of my photographs onto Flickr then using the embedding feature put the code onto my blog. I tried out the 'blog it' feature on Flickr aswell but it only allowed me to put one photograph on each post which for me seems quite useless as I usually put multiple photographs on a post.

narrative and interaction

We had a group exercise the other day to focus on narrative and interaction. We all came up with a story by playing Chinese Whispers where each group thought of the next line of the story. The we had to photograph each line and make a new narrative from them. Also we had to swap one of our images with another groups via bluetooth. We also transferred our images from a cameraphone to the computer using bluetooth which was very easy to do, though I had no idea that computers even had bluetooth! Below is the original story and order.

There was a bang and the lights went out.

There was a shuffle and the lights came back on again.

There was a sausage with four eyes.

Then Michael Jackson came in the room and took his jacket off.

And an eagle flew in through the window.

Mike Ainscough was there aswell.

He's from Wigan and he got the sick's and shit's for Christmas.

Then he died. (another groups image)

This is the narrative reworked to make a different story.

Mike Ainscough, entered his dream competition,

from Apple exclusive to anyone with the name Michael,

to record a single

with the one and only Michael Jackson.

Mike's trip to the Never Never land mansion made local news.

Once he arrived at Michael Jackson's house he was greeted by one of Michael's servants- a rare variety of umpa lumpa.

Suddenly there was a loud BANG

A huge eagle smashed through the window and attacked poor Mike.

The eagle gave Mike bird flu and made him too ill to be able to sing with Mickael Jackson and his dream was ruined.

The End.

Group video editing

In lesson we were put into groups of three and asked to come up with an idea for a storyboard for a 30 second film. We also had to think about our shooting order and the length of shot before we started filming to cut down on filming time. We then, individually, had to make our own storyboard with only long shots, close ups or extreme shots. I made a storyboard with extreme shots only - on the storyboard below the extreme shots are 2, 5, 7 and 10. We had to make them as clear as possible because another group was going to edit the film we shot. Sharon told us about drawing different types of arrows to suggest movement of the camera and movement of the actors and props when filming.

Shooting Order

Long shots - 1. 4. 8.

Extreme shots - 2. 5. 7. 10.

Close ups - 3. 6. 9.

Length of Shot

3 seconds - 1. 3. 4. 6. 7. 8.

4 seconds - 2. 5.

5 seconds - 9.

6 seconds - 10

Our group was then given another groups footage and storyboard and we had to edit it. using Final Cut. I think in the hour we had to edit we did well to get transitions pretty much in time although we didn't have chance to put the video to music and it's odd to listen to it in silence so put some music on when you watch it! I learnt some useful tips about Final Cut like how to speed tracks up and reverse them, how to fade in and out and some useful keyboard shortcuts aswell, mostly that the space bar is play and stop. I also refreshed my memory on how to capture video from a video tape, and found that having to fast forward and rewind to each point that you wanted to capture very laborious and quite confusing. Also when using the camera to film our storyboard we all found it difficult to view back what we had filmed which I think is an imporant and helpful tool. Comparing it to my digital video camera it takes much longer to use when filming and when capturing video in Final Cut. All I have to do with my camera is upload the video files then import them to final cut which I find much easier. It would be interesting to know how other people compare video tape cameras and digital video cameras. There must be a reason why all proffesional film footage is filmed with tape and the transition to digital video hasn't arrived yet.

I also tried uploading this video below onto my youtube account and found that it only took a couple of minutes in comparison to bloggers 40 minute waiting time. From now on I will always upload my videos onto YouTube first them just embed the code into my blogger posts. This video has had five views so far!

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Bradford Mapping Game

Another technology we recently learned about was GPS data loggers and other hardware and software we can use to track our journeys and plot photographs on a map. To help us understand how this works we were asked to plan a mapping 'game', which wasn't place specific so it could be played anywhere. My group came up with an idea for a game which involves four people. Each person was to go either North, East, South or West and photograph things which began with each letter of the place name that they are in. Our game was to be played in Bradford so each player had to find things that began with the letters 'B', 'R', 'A', 'F', 'O', 'R' and 'D'. I'll post the the groups photographs here when I get them. Hopefully they will be put on flicker to make it easier.

The game I was given to play in Bradford involved a mapped out route from the media museum to the interchange and a list of things to find each with a certain amount of points. The aim of the game is to find as many of the things on the list, photograph them and get the most points.Below is a picture of the list in organised columns of objects worth 10, 50 and 100 points.

I uploaded all my photographs onto Flickr. You can connect your blog to your Flickr account and upload things to your blog straight from Flickr. I haven't tried this yet but I did test it as you can see above-and it actually works! I didn't think blogging could be this technical, but I think it's great how all these websites like Flickr, Blogger, Facebook, Tumblr etc can be connected making it easier to transfer things from one to another and make all your accounts more manageable. 

Below is a slideshow from Flickr that I embedded into this post. It took me forever to figure out how to do this as it wouldn't copy the whole code and I know it might seem obvious to most but I figured out you have to switch to HTML mode to put the whole code in-thats just another small thing I've learnt whilst using Blogger which will be very useful for future reference.

You can also use Flickr to plot your photographs on a map which is called geotagging. Still not totally sure what the point of this is but I did it anyway-the link to my map is below 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/31484451@N08/map?&fLat=53.7919&fLon=-1.7562&zl=3&order_by=recent

Bradford Media Museum Research

Bradford Media Museum was really useful for this project as I learnt alot more about the origins of film and saw some of the first film cameras ever made. There was also a thaumatrope and a phenakistascope which I got to try out; they didn't work any better than the ones I made. Another couple of early moving image inventions I hadn't seen before were the mutoscope and the Wheel of life. The Mutoscope was similar to a flip book, viewed through an eye piece it revealed 'naughty pictures' and was often found at the seaside. Another name for them was 'what the butler saw' as this was the most famous film shown by a mutoscope. The Wheel of Life was similar to a Phenakistascope in that it has a series of images around a spinning disc. Another revolving shutter blade was put over the top which allowed to the sequence of images to be projected onto a screen very quickly giving the illusion of movement.

Mutoscope

Wheel of life



Double-use Chronophotographe 1888

This is one of the earliest cameras to record movement on a roll of film though it also used photographic plates. The images did however merge together so the inventor, Eitenne Jules Marey, dressed his subjects all in black with white stripes down their limbs to make them easier to distinguish.

16-lens camera 1886

This camera hs a very complicated mechanism to control each of the 16 shutters and keep the film rolling through the camera correctly. It produced alternate sets of eight images on two rolls of film kept side by side. It also had two viewfinders.

Below is a series of images of Leeds taken with the 16 -lens camera, it took 20 pictures a second.

Single-lens Camera 1888

This was the first camera to shoot a series of seperate images on a roll of film. The illusion of moving image works by precisely stopping the film briefly to record an image then quickly move to the next shot. To create a smooth looking film, the film in the camera must stop in exactly the same position each time to make sure the pictures are evenly spaced on the roll of film.

Cinematographe 1895

This was the first film projector to be made, it was also a camera and a printer. To ensure that viewing and filming went as smoothly as possible it used a similar mechanism as a sewing machine. A toothed wheel pushes itself into the perforations of the roll of film then pulls it downwards leaving it stationary for a split second to either view of record the film. They then move back up to catch the next shot. Film cameras have used a similar mechanism ever since.

Another interesting but probably useless fact I learnt at the media museum was that at cinemas the screen is blank for almost half the time of the film. This is because the projector cuts off the light when the film moves between frames. Also it slightly interrupts the projected film to increase flicker frequency which makes the picture flicker less.

Below are some of the first hand held film cameras aimed mostly at families and amateur film makers.

Ensign Autokinecam 1929

A clockwork driven camera that had three speeds, 8fps, 16fps and 64fps for slow motion. It could also be hand-cranked and back-wound to create a dissolve transtition effect. This camera would proboably have been for film enthusiasts not just for recording family outings.

The Keystone K8 1937

It had interchangeable lenses and adjustable running speeds. It also could use double 8 and single 8 film.

Midas Camera-Projector 1934

Combined a camera and a projector making it an economical buy for families. Now with the invention television and computer screens we no longer have a use for for multi use camera as it is so quick and easy to playback footage through a TV or computer.

Pathe 'Baby Cine' Projector 1929

This projector was designed to plug into a light socket but could also be run by a dynamo as only one in three households had electricity by 1930. It cost £6.75 and films it projected lasted on average only a couple of minutes.

The museum also looked at where the camera technology was going, though most of the camera equipment it displayed was even now quite outdated there was an occuring them of everything getting smaller. Below is a portable photograph printer, perhaps for taking on holiday with you. It seems that in the future cameras are going to get even smaller and even all the equipment that comes with them will eventually become handheld.

This is my video camera that I have used to shoot the footage below. I actually am going to read the manual to enable me to get the most out of this camera. So far, without reading any instrustions, I have learnt how to shoot film and replay on the camera and upload it onto the computer, but I am sure you can do some simple editing on the camera and also I want to try use it manually rather than leaving it on auto shoot.

Above are some clips I have filmed for my music video. As it is sunday and college isn't open i had to compile the shots on a program called PowerDirectorExpress to enable me to post them as I don't have Final Cut Pro. It is a much simpler version of Final Cut which I found much easier to use as every command gave a description of what it did as there were only afew options to choose from. However, to be able to use the effects and do multiple things at once i would have to upgrade to a better version which costs money i dont have. I was useful for today though as I would have had to wait till tomorrow and made this short video at college.

The video shows various shots that I want to use in my final music video. To show someones journey I want to focus on their feet as this emphasises the fact they are walking. I also want to use a contrast of still scenery shots and up close shots where I move the camera. I have found that my camera struggles to stay in focus when I have filmed things quite close up which for most people would be one of the camera disadvantages but I like the way the images move quickly in and out of focus sometimes because of the way the unknown image is revealed to you.

making the most out of Blogger

I created this blog in september as a part of a personal and proffesional development brief and only now i have learnt that you can alter the page to look pretty much how you like it. It allows you to show alittle bit of individualism and communicates parts of your personality in the way that you can change the colours and layout. Here is how my blog used to look:

So as you can see I have drastically changed the colours to something more lively and also added afew gadgets which i had no idea existed until afew mintues ago. I added a slideshow of other peoples pictures from their blogs so i can easily discover and find out about new blogs; and also i have added a wikipedia search bar as i thought this would be quite useful for researching my communication technology brief.

blogging technology?

This is just a post to moan about communication technology really. In particular - Blogging. I think its a great idea, enabling people from around the world to exchange ideas and experiences, and also in my case to document my findings about communication technology. But I have spent the best part of 4 hours putting 2 posts on my blog! And I know I'm not great with computers but do I know i was doing everything right, yet it kept going so wrong. It takes upto 40 minutes to upload videos and even embedding a youtube video wasn't easy as it wouldn't show up on the preview. Putting everything down in a blog seems to me alot more hassle than jotting things down in a sketchbook, but for this brief considering I'm working mainly with video I admit that Blogger is the best way to document my findings, but I thought I should mention some it's disadvantages.

video elective

In my video elective we have been asked to make a music video. It has been the perfect opportunity to use my new video camera and get used to how it functions and also learn how to use Final Cut Pro to edit my video.

My idea for the video is to follow someones journey through the kind of natural environment that inspires the music that is accompying the video. To include alot of footage in the short space of a 3 minute song i want to speed up the whole video when i edit it.

I want it to look something like the first minute of this Animal Collective video for their song Peacebone, just ignore the rest of the video - it's really wierd.

Animal Collective - Peacebone - Animal Collective

thaumatrope and phenakistoscope

Slightly more advanced than the thaumatrope, the phenakistoscope relies on a theory called the persistance of vision. This describes the phenomenon where you can still see an image a split second after it has disappeared from you line of vision due to the impulses in your brain being slower than the speed of light (which enables you to see things). For a phenakistoscope to work you need to view it by looking through the slits at the edge to seperate each image. I have filmed it twice, once in front of a mirror, filming the reflection through the slits and once filming the images directly to show that if you don't view it through the slits it does not work. The visibility wasn't that good as the slits were quite thin, so the actual image is quite hard to work out but if you look carefully you should see a bird flying. It is simply a series of images that all differ slightly, shown consecetively at high speed on a loop, this creates the illusion of movement. It is also very similar to a flip book or stop frame animation. It did although have many limitations, such as the fact that only one or two people can view the moving image at a time; also the amount of images you could fit around a circle is very limited resulting in very short repetative animations. Although very simple techniques, both the thaumatrope and the phenakistoscope enabled people to experience moving images/illusions for the first time, and from these came the ideas that invented the first film camera.

Thaumatrope

I drew two pictures of a bird on either side of a piece of card and by rotating it really quickly the images blurred together to make it look like the bird was flying. The outcome, however, wasn't totally successful as I think the two drawings weren't perfectly in line with eachother, resulting in a jerky image. I really like the idea though because you can see how this idea progressed into film as we know it today. This really simple version of just two images rather than 25 frames a second helps me understand how film works.

I have begun this project by researching the history of moving image. Before Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, there were other more simple inventions, such as the Thaumatrope and the Phenakistoscope, that were the first to create a moving image. I have made my own version of these inventions and filmed their effectiveness.

Sandow the magnificent was one of the first people to be immortalized on film, by Thomas Edison in 1894 

using his invention the kinetoscope which was the first moving image machine to use 35mm film

Communication Technology

For this brief, Communication Technology, i want to explore primarily video. I have a strong interest in photography and want to take this to the next level by exploring moving image. I have recently been bought a video camera and have begun shooting a music video for my video elective. 

I want to learn in detail the different functions available with my new camera, research where film began and where it is going and also look into the other technologies used in the film industry. I also want to take this opportunity to get to grips with Final Cut pro as it is a vital skill i really need to learn if I am to focus my efforts on video.