Our Introduction to Creative Technologies lecture had a guest speaker, an information scientist (I think was the title, I can't double check right now as the slideshow online is currently corrupt). We lightly touched upon diverse subjects including quantum entanglement, which I will research further as I had a theory that such knowledge opens up possibilities in the (distant) future of communications devices that don't require radio and operate over any distance. Much like what you see in any Sci-fi show where spaceships communicate even though they are light years away. But I have no idea what I'm talking about, perhaps I should research before posting...

So on Tuesday we started preparation for the 3rd project, Serious Fun". A new-to-us tutor with a background in illustration introduced us to character development with examples of work both her and other people have done. Our first exercise was to draw character concepts. Yes, with pencil and paper. I imagine this came as a welcome relief to some members of the class as we've been hit hard with a lot of technology lately, and this was calling upon different skills in our multidisciplinary degree. Despite having a technical bent, I also used to draw a lot and paint and took art through out school, and as a kid drew cartoons (which I still have) so this was quite enjoyable too and a change. It was also mildly frustrating because I'm fairly unpractised at drawing and coming up with a character was challenging. It's different from being a kid though, as a kid cartoons and fictional anthropomorphic characters were part of some natural interest, but of course now what perhaps came naturally without much conciousness of wider issues has factors to actively consider attached. For example, the character has a function, a combination of identifiable qualities and social features. Well my cartoon characters from childhood had all of that, but I didn't sit down and consider them before I made the character. It's all very well to just draw some freaky little fuzzball and say "he/she does this and that" but as an adult there has to be some sort of point to the character. Why does it exist? Yes I know it exists because we were told to make it, but why else? What's it's purpose? What is it trying to say? I like that kind of stuff, but sometimes it can trip a person up trying to be creative. Perhaps I should have just drawn characters and later explored who they were. Or perhaps I could have come from another angle, and come up with issues I'd like to express and then design characters around that. Well I tried various combinations of the above, I also wanted to  create characters that were not disney/cartoon like, with big eyes etc. We were going to animate these characters later and it was obvious that we'd be conveying something like emotion with them too. A human-like face is pretty boring really, it's much more fun to convey emotion from objects or perhaps even lifeforms that arguably don't possess any emotions.

I wasn't really happy with any of my characters because I wanted it to fulfil a purpose and I was probably being a bit pre-emptive with what we'd be doing with that character.

In the afternoon we were to choose a character, develop it further and make a flipbook of about 2 seconds at 12 frames per second. So 24 pages.  I'm not entirely sure how many pages I made my flip book, possibly a few more than 24 pages, I've scanned in the pages and put it back together for your benefit.

It's just a character I made the purpose of the flipbook. (Edit: I've just noticed the youTube re-encoding has dropped some frames making it look like the block that falls on the worm just appeared out of nowhere UGH!)

On Wednesday we were to bring plasticine and a digital camera. We were asked to make a 3D representation of our chosen character and and create a stop-motion animation of it moving. I've never done this before and it's funny, there have been times as a kid I'd love to have been able to do this kind of thing but was never able to. Now the technology is completely available to just about anyone. As a kid I did make a few flip books, except they weren't meant for flipping. They were meant to be turned into real animations at a later date when I had the technology. A few years ago I scanned in two typing pads of a character I drew many years before, mainly so I could throw out the originals. I have a pile of tif files on this computer as a result.

Anyway, we used our camera's to take a sequence of shots and compile them using Quicktime Pro, which has a menu item to do just that from a folder of images sequentially numbered (so make sure your camera is naming the resulting images sequentially). I discovered my $2 shop plasticine was useless and an hour later that the city's shops appeared to all be out of stock, but once of my classmates was nice enough to lend me a small amount to  do my animation. I still didn't have a character in mind but used a snail that I'd drawn randomly as it was easy to mould. I didn't really plan what it was going to do, perhaps move to the camera, check it out and move on. So I started doing that, and considered how a snail might move. It's movements probably aren't representative of how a real snail moves but it has more of a human element to it, bobbing it's head as it slides along.

The camera has manual focus but when you set it, it permanently superimposes a square of the focused portion close up in the viewfinder over the picture, making it difficult to see the rest of the frame. Surely you can switch this behaviour off, but I don't know how to yet, so I set the camera to Macro Focus (close up). As the snail got closer it got more out of focus as the camera was focusing on the background. This did however give me the opportunity to explore animated focusing and make it appear deliberate. When the snail stopped at the camera, over  few frames I slowly bought the camera into focus with the manual setting. Unfortunately as one point the camera auto-powered down and lost the manual focus before I finished the film so the snail goes out of focus again. Anyway, at the end I was going to make it slide off, but decided it might be amusing to make a rocket appear from somewhere presumably a door on the shell so the snail suddenly became turbo-charged, and perhaps a camera pan for good measure. I had some time before afternoon presentation so I put the result in Adobe Premiere Pro and added some sound effects and titles. One last slight snag was that Premiere was set to 25 frames/second so it interpolated the frames that were missing, which made it look silly when our tutor did the frame-by-frame analysis on presentation. Tech issues... always annoying. The solution would have been to set up as a 24-frame movie and set the field options to not interpolate (in the menu it's called reduce fuzziness I think). You can't just set a movie to 12 fps as far as I'm aware. Well, it's not immediately obvious how to anyway.

In the afternoon after viewing the videos, we were asked to get into groups of 3 and combine our characters and make a 10 second movie (120 frames) considering how the characters interact. Along with how they move etc.

Our group came up with a basic idea, the characters were my snail and another person's blue Yeti and Ninja. The Yeti is eating from a paper bag full of food (which was an inanimate version of the 3rd person's character) when the snail approaches, the Yeti turns around, sees the snail and runs away Meanwhile the Ninja magically appears every now and then from behind plasticine "trees". The final result has a few things I was personally not happy with, I felt there was a lack of consideration given to how long it takes to react to an environment and some movements were far too quick and spread out, but we managed to get 128 frames. I took it home and put it together adding sound effects and I also actually slowed down the action by 80% because I felt parts moved far too fast. But as it was already 12 fps I couldn't slow it down further without making any jerkiness totally unacceptable. The end is a bit disjointed but it seemed to be well received by the class.