The best things in life...

Ok, not a post about machinima, but these are the things that get me out of bed in the morning.

Steven and Jeanie have both posted about favourite films on their sites, so I thought I'd add my own (and couldn't resist adding some more). I know this must appear as a fairly self-indulgent exercise, but Steve has a theory that the films you make subconciously project or at least give a glimpse of a world view. I guess it's the same for what you watch in many ways - not necessarily the content, but the way a film is structured/shot/edited - How many times have you said, 'oh (insert name here) would love that' - it's not entirely based on the subject matter - otherwise a good few people I know would be serial killers. I think we watch, or at least make favourites of, the films/books/songs/pictures that mirror our selves, or at least allow us to access that part of ourself.

AfterLife: this is genuinely the most affecting film I have ever seen. It's truly beautiful, and I could watch it for ever. It's about a halfway house between this world and the next. It uses documentary stories and non-actors, and is filmed in the most amazing way. It has stayed with me ever since I saw it, and if you watch it, I hope it does the same to you. I had to get it on import, from amazon.com.




Be Good Tanyas: Be Good Tanyas make me so happy! Check out www.begoodtanyas.com - it will make you happy too...



Peanuts: Peanuts is brilliant, but you know that already!

Picture Day!

I've got quite a few new pics to show of Second Life avatars. All the characters are nearly finished and ready to go.

Sara and Makiao have been scripting a system which allows our machinima 'actors' to change expressions instantly. I supplied them with a range of faces - simple expression things, which are mapped onto an invisible obje ct which sits over the centre of the face - here's the pics, with notes...

This first one is us meeting in world to look at the face mapping system. Sara is dressed in her punker/skater-girl outfit, I am dressed in my usually big-girls blouse dolly attire - I really need to get something more macho, I'm beginning to feel like a virtual Grayson Perry - and Ricard is, for some reason, dressed as a large coke with bendy straw.

More pics...




















Meet the family...



Here's the characters, all ready for their face mapping. This image doesn't really do them justice, cos it's from a fairly rubbish computer, so Nana's glasses for example render as hexagons instead of circles. But still you can see how it's progresses - It's a pity the Sabina character is hidden behind nana and grandad, next time I'll make individual portraits. What's really made my day with this project is how easily my 2-d character designs became 3-d - the translation is great, which i didn't think it would be. It's actually made my drawing better too, because working on building objects from really simple shapes makes you revisit drawing 101 about structure and proportion.

And in Real Life News....
In my profile bit right at the beginning, I mentioned I shared a shop with a friend. It's called Eye Candy and it sells all sorts of sweet arty stuff. We launched an online shop at the start of May, which coincided with SideShow, a kind of fringey add on to the British Art Show. Active Ingredient, the company I used to work with (one day, when drunk, I will type in a long post about what exactly I mean by 'used to work with'...-that's not a promise, more a fear...), set up an online streaming project called MAKE TV. Me and Nicola (who I share the shop with) decided to do a weekly QVC-style shopping channel, desperately selling our wares. Last night was the final one, and we decided to stage a row on air. There'd been an article in the Guardian on Saturday about TV channels that no-one watches, so we wanted to spoof that... I'm archiving the webcasts at the moment, and will link to them soon. It was a really good laugh, and we hopefully got more people watching than the folks in the paper. On Saturday, I went over to Steven and Jeanie's to play banjo and watch TV, and we watched some of the worst telly on earth. - You become hypnotised by the desperation of some poor media graduate sat for four hours trying to get drunks to ring in to answer some riddle so cryptic, I'm sure Dan Brown is penning some shit best-seller about it now, or at least getting his wife to. It's like working in a call centre, except no-one's calling in. I worked in a call centre, which is another long post to come, and it was desperate - trying to sell bad software to people who either had better stuff, or didn't want it/know what it was, or own a computer...

Anyway, I'll post a link to the archives soon, in the meantime, here's Jeanie and Steve's daughter Betsy watching us online...

Messing with my Head

Here's those pictures I promised of me and Sara and Makiao working in Second Life... We're trying to work out how to apply seperate textures for different parts of the face. I've made vector file images of all the faces in 6 different expressions and we'll use a script to call the correct one when we need to. Even in Second Life, I feel like a bit of a goon dressed in my big dolly outfit while the others flounce about in their cool club gear!





In the bottom picture, you can see a purple disc - this is a posing stand, so you can build directly onto your avatar. It makes life a lot easier. If you don't use it, your character reacts to mouse moves as if it would in game, so dressing it is a bit like trying to put socks on a dog!

Machinimation

Had another meeting in Second Life with Sara/Cory the other day and a guy called Makiao (his second life name), who is a wiz with all the scripting and more advanced stuff. I've got some great pictures which I'll post soon - they're on another computer.

As I said in a previous post, I'm thinking of doing some machinima of my own once Ricard's project is finished - I can't wait to be able to tell you more about it, but it's all under wraps currently until it's launched. We had a discussion the other day about second life/machinima as a film set, and it's quite interesting from an animation point of view. Because it's real time, you are able to shoot/reshoot/set up/try different things on stage. - With animation, you painstakingly work out exactly each shot and make it just like that, there's really not much room for the happy accident. I realise I'm generalising here, but I'm thinking of my own experiences as an animator.

I've been thinking a lot about how to use actors in animation, to pull out the nuances of how an actor not only speaks, but moves and emotes - I'd like to look at devising with actors to make cartoons. I find scriptwriting quite difficult in isolation - well, not difficult as such, but it's not so lively. In live action, there is a long tradition of improvisation being used to block scenes and pull out new ideas - Steven Sheil and Chris Cooke recently spent two weeks workshopping with actors to tighten up a script for Chris' road movie. As well as getting some top celeb gossip (I'm not sure if I can write about it - I'll ask Chris how much trouble it will cause!), they got some good stuff.

When I was at University, doing lots of live art/performance work, I found devising with a group to be a really good way of building a project, and exciting because it doesn't always work, and requires really hard thinking and listening/responding. In thinking about ways to devise for animation, the live art approach started to reappear - I think because Live Art and animation share some common points - and some extremely differing ones -

Why Cartoons and Live Art are similar:
Character/Performer as Statement.
Play with narrative/timeline.
Play with continuity.
Non-naturalistic staging.

Why they're not:
Anything can happen in either. - Except in animation, you've already thought of that ages ago.

I really like the idea of the spontaneous gesture in animation, or something that gets to the honesty of the actor/character - possibly subconciously, most likely accidentally.

I realise that's a really short and probably not informative description of the idea, but I'm writing about it for my MA and will post a full version soon.

Anyway, maybe machinima is a way to do it - It's live, it's got real time cameras, shots can be set up again and again, and I get to say 'Can we try that again, this time with feeling' - I'm going to build an avatar that looks like one of those old style movie directors with plus 4's, a beret and a monocle! i've got a few ideas for films floating around at the moment, and after i've finished ricard's film, i think i'm gonna have a go. I've built a whole wardrobe of nice outfits, and hopefully with some linden scripting skills i'll be able to make some good stuff. i can see that although second life is fairly limited at the moment, as in we are still a long way off from pixar or peter jackson style cgi, it will only get better - and films will get much more sophisticated. How long till we see the first game engine made cinema release or telly programme? - I'm sure it won't be too long, or even with us already, and I've just not seen it.

Some trivia: currently listening to Old Crow Medicine Show, Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, and Be Good Tanyas (always listening to the Be Good Tanyas)

Settling in to second life

Hi - Not much time to write, but here's a couple of sketches from the character developments for Ricard's Machinima project.

Have been thinkng myself about making some Machinima experiments using my characters.

I've been thinking about using it as a way to make mock-ups for more traditionally animated films, a quick and dirty way to block moves and shots.

I realise that's not a purist attitude to machinima, but I'm not sure how an audience would engage with a longer, more heavily narrative piece than most of the things I've seen from Machinima.

Ricard's project will be a good testing ground. - The website for it will be up soon and you will be able to see the work online.