UCA D3DD Unit 3 – Digital Environments

Sigh. the last assignment was a complete and utter fail, even though i had told myself at the start that it wouldnt be, because the first one wasnt so hot either. this time will be different.

Phil spoke for a while about the brief explaining its important qualities. He then showed the group a series of highly interesting photographic fine art work, where parts of the actions implied in the picture were not fully in view as if the picture had be taken using the viewfinder on a camera. I found this honestly quite interesting in terms of the fact that is was not a photograph even though it seemed to be. he also showed us images where the design of the set, and the lighting was all manufactured around the position of the camera to give a final powerful image that suggests so many things but leaves us only guessing in the end.

Phil stated the best thing that we could produce in 5 weeks time is to have an image that is Abiguous, meaning as he puts it “its this, but its also this, but its also none of them”

very vague statement indeed, I have writen a list of things to look up and find more meaning, they are written below.

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Dictionary Terms

Online Webminister Dictionary 

– Ambiguous –

 

1 a: doubtful or uncertain especially from obscurity or indistinctness <eyes of an ambiguous color>

   b: inexplicable

 

2: capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways <an ambiguous smile> <an ambiguous term> <a deliberately ambiguous reply>

My input

Ambiguity is the term that means when somthing is not easily identifyable as a specific type of somthing, Humans are ambigious at the early weeks of birth, without looking at genetalia it is very hard to distinguish between male and female in the early stages of life.)

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– Uncanny –

1 a: seeming to have a supernatural character or origin : eerie , mysterious

   b: being beyond what is normal or expected : suggesting superhuman or supernatural powers <an uncanny sense of direction>

My input

things that people find uncanny can often only be found uncanny to the individual person, as our lives progress we learn and see things differently, our fears and sense of the world and how we percieve it are all different, so it is very difficult to grasp uncanny for a lot of people, without knowing everything about the people watching.

Uncanny is similar to strange and creepy but is none of the two.  

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– Mese-en-scene –

mise en scene is the way things appear in a certain way deliberatley to convey a certain point of view or perspective.

My Mise-en-scene is all about constructing the room and its equipment to help push my viewer to believe that the inhabitant of the room has trouble with the outside world.

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– tableau vivant –

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 – Agoraphobia –

1. abnormal fear of being helpless in an embarrassing or unescapable situation that is characterized especially by the avoidance of open or public places

Extention on Agrophobia

I have a mild fear of wide open spaces, although im not sure if the feeling is fear, or unfomfort. This is mainly because I have lived in big large citys my whole life, I have become accustom the bustle of people on trams, trains, planes, buses etc. I wish to take this slight uncomfort I have and create as my final maya product a scene depicting a small picture where sombody with abhorant Agoraphobia resides.

 I watched a very interesting video on the NHS website, about agoraphoba, and about other phobia’s in general,

http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/Agoraphobia/Pages/Introduction.aspx?url=Pages/What-is-it.aspx

it states that people can actuall be completely handicapped by there phobia whic i s the direction I really want to push my scene. Interestingly enough it also states that all phobias are cureable with almost the minimal amount of treatment, such as it mentions spider and snake phobia are cureable with roughly 3 hours of treatment, in this time it wont be fully cured but the phobia will have retreated a considerable amount.

cognitive behavioral therapy is used o help thoughs with agoraphobia rid them selves of there phobia, it takes longer than getting rid of other more physical phobia like the snake/spider phobia, but it is curable.

learning from the NHS website i leaned that there are two types of agoraphobia. There is Panic disorder agoraphobia, and Non-panic disorder agoraphobia.

Initial Sketch and Concept

For my final scene I was working with Agrophobia and uncanny in mind, so I tried to make my ideas form around the thoughts of strange and trapped

Ive had a few ideas in my head for my uncanny scene.

The first idea I had was a attempted reproduction of a genuine uncanny moment I experiacnced when walking back to the halls of residence. What happened was, when I was crossing the road near halls a the headlights of a car in the distance and a motorcycle quite close to be overlapped at just the right moment and to make the car in the distance appear to be horrifically and impossibly streched.

I have tried to redraw the scene but I got the perspective wrong, that image is below

I decided to go out and take a photo of the scene.

To actually be stood in the middle of the road for long enough for my camera to take the picture WITHOUT me getting ran over meant I had to get up at 5am on SATURDAY morning -_-, this wasnt nice, and its was very cold.

 HAHA it actually took me 22 tries to take the picture below because I was shivering so much, also for some unknown reason it takes 5 seconds AFTER you press the capture button for my camera to actually take the image.

My second Idea was a indoor scene where the scene depicts a area a agrophobiac inhabits and his state of mind, there is a desk that has a PC monitor on it, and outside the window there is the sand dunes of a desert with half buried lamp posts at random intervals, which is where the uncannyness and tabluex vivant come into play, there is also a handplrint on the window and marks on the wall next to the window where the person has been looking out into the world as he see’s it which is vastly unforgiving and frightning. 

Maya Scene

For my Maya Scene I have decided to do the scene from my second idea because i can relate a lot more to it helping figure out what I need.

I started off by making the window border and surrounding wall, I did this using a Polygon Plane object, and using the edge loop tool made a series of loops which eventually gave me the frame for the window, I used 2 verticle loops first then inside the verticle loops I did 2 horizontal loops. Once I had this square for the window frame I extruded the face backwards which left me with the image below.

 Next i wanted the Table I made in my concept art, however this was a standard boring old 4-verticle-legs type of table

 

 

 

 

Movies Section

Rather than simply just sitting there staring at a screen for 2 hours, going away and never thinking about the film again. I decided due to recent events that I should write notes on the films I watch, it may seem obvious, but i always over look the obvious things.

 

1. The Birds – Alfred hitchcock

I had never seen this film before (not suprising as i dont really enjoy zoning out for hours watching films) I was immediatly impressed by the smoothness of the film as a whole. The Frame rate was much higher than I was expecting, it was actually sort of strange to see people moving so fluently on screen.

Miss Melany Daniels, the main female leading character, seemed to charm people with her eyes and beauty, she does appear to have a sort of “Blonde Bombshell” kind of appearance. She meets “the Dude” (whats his name) and what was strange is the first conversation in the film was about events that happened outside our knowledge, so we immediatley plunged into there world as we realise that this film doesnt seem to have a start point, it appears to be just like sombody turned on a Video camera in the middle of a normal day where event in the world take place just like any other day.

It is then that “the Dude” turns the charm round on Melany as he uses his quick wits to outmanuever melay in there conversation then leaves promptly making her want more, so she goes in her car to find where he lives along with the 2 love birds that “the Dude” was asking for in the shop.

she then proceeds into the small village of “thingymbob” to ask where “The Dude” lives, she discovers he lives in a house separate from the rest of the village. When she asks what his daughter was called she got the names “Alice, and Lois”. Melany was told to go up the hill and see the teacher if she wanted to double check the name for herself, so she did.

The school Teacher seemed to be a very mysterious character, her name is “__”. she seemed to be seething and there was a mixture of jelousy and dislike for Melany when she told the teacher that she was here to visit “the dude” and that she had a present for his daughter (the 2 love birds). the teachers also seemed to be a little relieved (isnt openly suggested) when Melany states she doesnt really know the Brenners, nor will she be staying long. 

Also “The Dudes” mother also appeared to be seething over Mels arival, she later explains (as does the school teacher) why she acts the way she does towadrs her. This was because she didnt want “the Dude” to run off with Mel (or anyone else) and leave her all on her own. She also had a large hand in why the school teacher and “the dude”‘s relationship fell apart. This happened because (from what i can gather) the dude’s mother didnt like her, and so the dude just eventually lost interest.  

 

Long Weekend

This film was actually very scary…. the awful wailing sound from that sea cow was horrible (shudders) also the way that sea cow got closer and further up the beach everyfew minutes was VERY unnerving, even tho it had been shot, then buried. 

 

3D Pre Viz Section

This section is for another part of this unit which is doing a “Pre Viz” of an existing film scene or game cutscene. I am actually quite exited about this, it should be really good to do.

Pre-Viz is like the bare bones of a film, and is rapidly becoming one of the more important stages during film production

My Pre-Viz

the Film ive decided to do my pre viz from will be from Guy Richie’s “Snatch”

The scene that i am pre vizing is right at the end of the film, the very last fight of the film, between Horace “Goodnight” Anderson and Mickey the “jipsey bare knuckle boxing champion”.

starting from around the point where Goodnight anderson delivers a stiff cuppercut to Mickey’s chin and sends him flying in the air, and the cameras FPS increases and time seems to linger around for much longer than usual, leaving mickey hanging in the air for about 11 seconds before he hits the canvas.

The thing that is specifically being pre-Vized happens just after he hits the canvas, as sort of a metaphor for being knocked out he splashes into a dark void of water,

and begins to watch himself being beaten up by Goodnight above him in the real world, as he becomes slowly more unconscious he gets deeper in the water.

 before eventually snapping out of this trance and writing off “Goodnights” jaw. My Pre-Viz animation will end here.

after speaking with Alan it was said that this scene however still acceptable, is very subtle in terms of animation, so perhaps not the best choice for a Pre Viz, it is recommended that a scene with much more in terms of grandeur and excitement/action would be a more suitable choice.

Choice 2

My second choice was going to be a short clip from the movie Transformers (what a surprise ey)

the scene I wanted to previz was the initial introduction of Blackout, the Pave Low ME-53 helicopter that transforms and destroys the US Qutar operations base. AKA – Blackout

Notes:

I found myself hiding from Maya for a long time, not sure why, becuase it is very hard to use? if this is the case then using it would only benefit me surely, I have to get rid of renegade.

Personal Achievement

I managed to finally bring myself to uninstall Command and Conquer Renegade, this was absolutely necessary as it seemed to have become more important than my university work, and it was making me confined to my room for unprecedented hours, it is highly addictive and i just couldn’t do any work while I had that option, if ever i hadnt done the work it was down to this game, it was my mental escape route to nowhere, to many this may seem like a obvious minor thing, but this was a critical achievement, everyone asked if I was insane… because that was the only game i played, but i played it into the 4am’s even with uni the next morning, even when a fail was right in-front of me i would still find myself on Renegade, Online game-play is too much fun, it had become a threat to my university work, and too my future. Like how many people would spend days on World of Warcraft that would be almost me on Renegade.

I feel I my realisation and removal of the game on the Friday of week 4 was a little too late to really help me out for this project and all the projects before this one, my failure to realise that it is destroying the enjoyable first year of my university career has cost me many a panic attack, but I have found myself with so much more time to do my work without the idea of going on that cursed game, its like ive gotten rid of the rock on my shoulders.

Already the amount of referal papers i have in my room is just stiupid. Regardless of what anybody says, I feel proud that I realised and managed to take action before somthing very regretable happens.

bring on the fourth project!

UCA D3DD Unit 2 – Space

Unit 2 – Space

In this Unit i hope to pick up on my slow start and get on my work instead of letting it get on me.

This Unit is all about space within films and games and the way a scene or setting is created how that influences the mood within the specified medium. 

I have been given a book called ‘The Gormenghast Trilogy’ and it is writen by the author Mervyn Peake, the book itself is quite big, so I have been given specific parts to read designated by sticky notes throughout its pages. I must read around these sticky notes and gain a feeling for the the type of space that is being set and attempt to draw somthing based on the what i can make of the words of the book.

from what i can construct of the first paragraph there is a castle in the center of the image, the castle is on the top of a hill and there are houses on the outsite of the castlewall, the ones at the higher parts of the hill closest to the castle are actually connected to the castle wall, these houses are seemingly shanty townlike, with uneven roofs some of which are damaged.

the book mentions somthing called ‘buttresses’, i dont know what these are so im going to quickly look.

Buttresses

a buttress is a type of buildingside or wall support that extends from the wall either into the house like a fireplace and chimney stack, buttresses can also extrude outside the structure as a simple support as shown below.

This is an example of a external Buttress, if you look at this type of buttress you can see if it was an internal buttress then the lower part would be where the fireplace would be and the tall thin part above it is the chimney stack.

It doesnt have to be a separate other thing to be a buttress, like the fireplace being a buttress, any wall that connects to another wall acts as a buttress, because it supports the wall meaning it doesnt stand alone. 

(www.answers.com/topic/flying-buttress)

there are also more interesting versions of Buttresses called ‘Flying Buttresses’ that are used to help take the weight of the roof so that the actual walls of the stucture dont have to be as thick and can have much more devoted window space. they are column of material separate to the building with an extrution that conects to and supports the top section of walls. famously seen on old cathedrals such as notre dame. as shown below.

I have just realised that I have been looking at the wrong part of the book sadly enough, the part im looking at deals with the interior of the castle, rather than the exterior, so i will quickly move on.

 

Chapter 1 – The Hall of Bright Carvings

What I got from reading over a little of this chapter is that everyone in this strange city, makes wooden models of varying shapes and designs, all these sculptures and their creators are brought once a year into the walls of the castle and placed on a massive white shelf that protrudes from the interior wall of the castle, they are then examined thoroughly by the ‘Earl of Groan’. at the end of this examination the Earl will have picked 3 out of the hundreds that will then be placed into the hall to be displayed for 1 year.
The Hall of Bright Carvings – Scene Breakdown

there are 3 sculptures in here.

An emerald horse, i presume it means the colour ’emerald green’ and not the precious stone emerald.

a Black and Olive Head, im not sure about the size of this head however, whether its a realy tall head, like thoughs found on Easter Island, or if its a small head, like a life size sculpture.

I think i imagine the head sculpture to be roughly the size the Moai head is in this picture (link)

and somthing called a ‘Piebald Shark’, im not at all aware of what this is so again i am going to try and find out.

Piebald shark – this threw me quite a bit when i searched for a meaning or an image or anything that could identify what this is. This is because there is a song called ‘Piebald Shark’ and a load of the searches were ‘Piebald Shark, Streaming now!’ ‘Listen here’. So I broke it down, i already know what a shark is (i hope :P) so I am searching for just ‘piebald’

Piebald – and according to ~w~i~k~i~p~e~d~i~a~ piebald is the black and white pattern that some animals have on there fur/skin, example below of a Piebald mare.

so a piebald shark must be a shark with black and white patched skin, which is of course highly unusual.

– The hall Itself –

The hall where the scultures are kept is a long atic style room, im thinking possibly either square with a rounded triangular roof that shows the cieling lofts. Or a very wide triangular room that also shows cieling loft work. more on overall design later.

there is a single window at the end of the room opposite to where you would come in, this window is small and has shutters over the top of it pointing down not letting in much light. by shutters i believe it means somthing like fixed wooden blinds with a frame around them. I honestly didnt KNOW these were called shutters, but i guess i must have heard of it vaugely in the past, shown below

in side the room there are 7 ‘chandelabra’ hanging from the cieling that appear in set intervals along the length of the room, they light the room and keep it bright, the candlesticks on these candelabra are white.

The last thing it mentions is that the floor is boarded, it doesnt say how its boarded, if was going to hazard a guess id say that it would be paralell board floor instead of other methods that can be found shown below.

However all of these look, in terms of colour, very modern, and I dont get that feeling at all from the book, I get a dark-mysterious-place kind of feeling thats very peculiar in its setting and circumstances, a little gritty and incomplete or damaged/worn so the wood flooring would be large dark floor boards that are not polished or reflect light very well, matt sort of texture. Although, this room seems to be of particular importance, maybe a shiny polished surface would be somthing to think about and adapt when i start making my scene.

I started to draw my scene and my god, its taken me ages to get a no very impressive looking scetch that sombody else could probably whip up in about 30 seconds.

Above is the appauling sketch, I was going for a more rounded approach to the cieling this may vary as I may add horizontal supports coming out from the top of the curve in the roof to make the hall a square shape, just to see how it looks.

Before that I will take this curve roof idea forward, I scanned the sketch pad image, cropped and rotated the picture slightly in Photoshop then imported the picture into Flash.

I then began to trace over the lines that I had drawn in pencil using the line tool with blue ink so that it stood out more clearly

Using this method i feel a lot more incontrol of my work, however i did think looking and at the new image – and thinking about what it will look like completed – that it lost part of its soul, wierd.

  

At first I was doing both sides of the room separatley, even though the two sides are identical. so to save time I simply began to work only on one side, I then copied, pasted and mirrored this to give me my hall. Again i believe i may change the way the hall is currently set, because i think right now the “hall” looks more like a “corridor”, I may broaden the walls a little, but for now it stays as is.

in note. in the book it states this scene as an ‘attic style room’which means that it not looking so broad may be a good thing.

Instead of making the walls broader I will make the features of the room, i.e. the window, chandelabra’s and the rug smaller, to make the room seem bigger.

I am now working on the Candelabras in my scene, there will be 2 visible, in the book it says there are 7 all together, but my scene is focused mainly on the end of hall where the 3 sculptures are.

I am making them using a series of ellipsis that are squashed appropriately to give the illusion of perspective as shown below.

I have then copied and pasted this shape and scaled it down and placed it underneath this one to give it more grandeur as i think having 2 rows of candles would make the room actually ‘bright’ instead of the hall of ‘dim carvings’ haha.

Also Im not pleased by the corridor effect im getting from this scene, so i have attempted to change the things i said i would a few days ago, the size of the rug and the candleaberas. I kinda got a little Flashtastic so i forgot to save any screenshots of what it looked like before.

 

Chapter 12 – The Attic 

This chapter is about a girl named Fuchsia and a little journey she has semmingly through her own mind in relation to the things she passes in the attic, but also physically as she navigates the Attic. The Attic is divided into 3 sections.

-Personal-

after having many sleepless nights over how im going to actually DO this work, i decided to try and throw away my worries and become “arty” I tried with a pencil at first, but they were destroyed. instead i found that when i use a Biro pen that i have to just go alone with it, this is because i cannot remove any mistakes, without Flash, i felt helples when creating the images on paper, and each one took me around 35 -60 minutes to complete, even though the perspective has clear mistakes and views arent inspirational.

The Attic – Room 1 Broken Storage

The first section Fuchsia passes through is a space filled with old objects, many of which are broken, there is an amazing amout of items in this room, they tower high protruding from every wall leaving only a limited amount of space to manuver in. 

in the passage it lists quite a few items by name that may be unsefull when im drawing my scene. i will creat a image board based on these named iteam to see if that helps when recreating this scene. (because if im honest im gonna need all the help i can get with this).

I image this room to be similar to the ‘Hall of Bright Carvings’, Long and straight box like with a triange roof, only the Attic is very dark, it says there are a few thin rays of light that cut into the room, giving off a warm morning glow from the sun and it rises outside, but it does not mention it there are any windows, borded up or not, so im going to assume that the light is getting in through small gaps in the slated roofin up in the rafters.

this picture seemed to take a life time to draw, as I got more and more sick of seeing the ‘corridor effect’ that I seemed to just produce without realising until it was too late I decided to take my tutors words and really try and make them work for me. “really be creative, throw the camera perspective way up high, or right down low to get some odd angles”

well this is where I feel I have done just that, even tho I dispise the image because it has too many flaws i believe it at least gets across the position of the camera way up on the rafters in the upper part of the Attic cieling, i tried to bring a great more perspective in this picture 

The Attic – Room 2 Fuchsia’s Stage

 This room is at the end of the first section of the Attic and is completely barren an devoid of clutter, this room is Fuchsia stage room, where she imagines characters and animals of her own creation and design acting out whatever she can dream up. apart from the rooms construction features, stone, wood board flooring, lofted rafters, there isnt anything else in the room.

I do believe that the emptiness of this room given the right angle of perspective could make for a really good piece of space concept art, I would either do a tryout of a straight perspective shot down the center of the room, and if that fails I could use that as the basis for the First room, only of course adding clutter and rundown objects. Otherwise i think this room would be best shot above the rafters on the cieling looking straight down 90 degrees, or having the viewpoint on the floor looking aross the length of the room to really bring out how much space and freedom there is, not only in the scene, but in the girls mind.

This room is a good room to accentuate the sense of space as it is all about being an open area for the girl to play with her imaginary friends on this ‘stage’ the image took me about 35 minute to do, as i was not confident about how i wanted the camera, so i went for a top looking down kind of view, however, i do believe i failed to recreate the feeling i got from the book because i made another apparant corridor space, which is making me feel massively depressed. there is supposed to be a spiral stair case connecting to that window/door in the wall at the end of the room.

I tried to redraw this scene trying to get more of the great ‘space’ potential into the image but I failed miserably again, instead creating another corridor type perspective, the one thing I could sort of imagine after reading the passage again was the look of the stair case that lead to the 3rd area of the Attic.

Since this second picture is no better than the first i decided to use the first picture of this section to illustrate the colours i see when reading. I chose this one because i have th higher probability of getting somthing out of it without discarding it,

these digital pen things are SO annoying, not only are they annoying but htey seem to only work on apple macs, what make this worse is that i cant save any work i do on a apple mac to my external harddrive. i spoke to the technicians about this and they said it was because i needed to format my hard disk then make it compatable with the MacOS. which is just absolutley out of the question, i have nowhere to put the stuff on that harddrive, so it cant be formatted, if i lost anything on it id cry for a undetermined amount of time.

onto the work again heres what i got out of this picture.

it took my about 5 to 6 hours to do this believe it or not, and I was so sick and tired of it by then that I was feeling the rage.

I added supports running down the side of the walls, as it didnt look right otherwise, the main thing thats missing however is a source of light, and I just couldnt get one in and make it look like ive not just ruined the picture at the same time so I left it out. The room is supposed to be lit by a few shafts of light coming from cracks in the cieling, these lights are described as warm and orange that bright up the spot they hit very well but dont flood the area, so it remains dark and plain.

I tried to imagine what I would be able to see if I was in that situation, and when I remember walking around my house at night when i was little because id had a nightmare, i remember details being missing from things during night, and everything seems to blend in with eachother. this is why there is no change in the shading around the room, because i didnt know how to put the light in it would be strange to have shadows in the room when there was no light to cast them.

The Attic – Room 3 Fuchsia’s Secret Place

this is Fuchsia’s destination, a place where only she knows about, a attic veranda, that has the most fantastic view of the castle ramparts and looks out over the citys hundreds of rickitey buildings and into the distance.

the image about took me around 30 minutes to do, i tried to capture the large brickwork of an old castle with some sort of view from the window that is mentioned in the book, a warm sunrise with the sun showed just peaking up in the distance and the faint lines of distance “rickety” houses. also the table where Fuchsia sits to look out of the window, i did not draw her in. 

Chapter 34 – The Room Of Roots

This is a hard one to picture if im honest, the writer talks as if the room isnt real and it is actually a painting, but not only that the language is very hard to understand. It may be because of lack of sleep or other personal factors, so i will revisit this after ive done on the Attic and The Hall of Bright Carvings.

These are some of the vague notes i managed to gather from the totally vague description from the book,

only a few weeks later to discover that this was the completely wrong section of the chapter, and that the part of the chapter I am supposed to be doing is at least 5 times more vague that this section.  

???? what is he going on about in this chapter… i can get a sort of jumanji feel from it, at the part where they release all the jungle vines and trees from the board and it spreads all over the house making it look dark and wild.

However I cannot find any external images to help me goddam draw the thing!! 😡