Digital Culture




T shirt design based on Mcluhan's "hot & cold" theory. He describes that cinema is hot medium and television is cold medium, high definition requires less effort to absorb the information from the media but restricts our creative imagination, low definition requires more work to understand the medium but gives us more space for imagination.

My idea is based on the hot & cold, high and low definition. The mouse is seeing a shocking image from the TV screen, front of the T shirt has a sharp image of a tiger, however at the back of the T shirt is a cat looking at the mouse trying to figure out what the mouse is watching, the cat seems confused because its watching the tv in small/low definition and trying to work out what it is.

For the second choice, I chose Mcluhan's "Understanding comics" theory, the image above he describes it as "it's a printed copy of a drawing of a painting of a pipe", the idea is that the medium can be described in many different ways that are applicable to the facts.

Bradford Animation Festival - continued -

Pixar’s Paul Mendoza

I’ll talk about what he said in the event, he joined Pixar’s when he was 18 when he was still in the animation school, at the time it was still 2D animation what they’ve learnt and 3D isn’t much of a hit yet, he then found a trial job at Pixar’s working for a week whilst still in school. After he decided to work part time there along with his studies in school, but then it became a nightmare for him because there were so much work load for school and work and he was working like 20 hours a day. He then said that he’ll work at Pixars full time as John said that they will teach everything there including all the 3D stuff.

His first work was on “A Bug’s Life”, one thing that he mentioned that surprised me is that at the time, there was no IK solvers on the 3D software they use so they would have to animate and tweak each motion frame by frame. Pixars built their own 3D engine/software to make their films.

Pixars film were based on a mature theme that not only attracts children but adults as well. In “Finding Nemo” the theme was based on father and son which was a rare concept in filming industry. In their film, they want to be realistic so that people can relate to themselves not in a visual way but in a more emotional way.

Ratatouille was another film he worked on, which was one of my favourite Pixars film, I wanted to watch it again after he talked about it, he showed us some of the storyboards that he created for the film.

Well the talk meant quite a lot to me, now I know a little bit more about life in animation, it’s definitely what I want to do, working for a big company would be a dream come true even if I have to work 20 hours a day! It has got me motivated more and gave me a better idea of what I want to do in the future, there’s a lot of research and planning needed to be done at the start any many test and trials through out the career, “can’t do” is not an option!

Bradford Animation Festival

Today has been a great day! Events I went to are;

10:30am - Professional 1

12:00pm - A Caring Eye

14:00pm - Pixar's Paul Mendoza

16:30pm - Gary Jackson: Model Making

19:00pm - Music Video/Other Videos

Well lets start off with the freebies we got at the start with free t shirt, bag and leaflets and a pass with my name on. We queued up for the 10:30's Professional 1 event and manage to get seats.

Professional 1 -

Inside Pictureville is a small cinema, the first animation was called "Big Bang Big Room".

Big Bang Big Room is a stop motion animation about evolution of our globe, it uses graffiti and paintings on buildings and painted over again and again to make a stop motion animation which was pretty amazing because its something that we never seen before that’s been done, I wonder where they got the permission to paint the buildings to streets to bridges and everywhere!

Mother of Many

This one was a bit weird, its about this woman’s daily life in midwifery, it is a 2D animation, has some strong explisive scenes, was ok didn’t stand out that much.

A Lost and Found Box of Human Sensation

Depressing and grey, it has some symbolic scenes with the robots shaking hands with the main guy at his dad’s funeral showing emptiness and loneliness.

First person narrative talking about his sadness and no matter what he couldn’t get over it. It is set in a dark city in a gloomy environment, 3D animation.

Probably one of my favourite one as it felt so real and emotional.

The Twin Girls of Sunset Street

A rather creepy one this, these two old granny kidnap kids and eats them. Yet again another depressing animation using stop motion. Story focuses on the kid who’s terrified seeing another kid getting eaten. The kid tries to escape at night but then gets caught, but the 2 granny fights over the kid and spills the candle and lit the room in fire and the kid manage to escape locking the door behind him, in the end the 2 granny died together and the kid escaped. I liked this one because it had suspense especially with the facial emotions.

Pivot

The Pivot reminds me of “Mirror’s Edge” video game where you run away buildings to buildings, the style are a bit similar too. A man with a camera captured another man who just killed someone, the man with the camera then runs away whilst the murderer chases him down with a gun, they run through a lot of small gaps and does a lot of stunts, in the end the man with the camera picks up the gun that the murderer dropped and shoots the murderer, but then another man capturers the first man with his camera and so the cycle continues. 3D animation cel-shaded.

The Name-less

It was about a boy who wanted to explore the world, this one is probably my least favourite because it was slow, quiet and it really dragged, definitely not for a casual viewer to understand what is going on

The Eyes of the Lighthouse

2D mixed 3D animation effects, set at the light house with a father and daughter. The daughter has unique power that can control the sea.

Pixar’s Paul Mendoza

This was probably my favourite event. Paul talks about his experience working in Pixar’s

Finished model

Animation and Kinetics

The head wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, although it was chaotic to get the shape right at first but in the end it was easier, in the tutorial video, the head is a round smooth one but on mine is a plant pot. What went wrong is that I tried using vertex to mould the round shape instead of using the edge tool. I even considered just creating a sphere and cut out and place it onto the model, but that isn't really the polygon modeling, its more like combining models together so I went for the challenging way. In the end everything was good, I'm happy with the model except for the nose which I am currently dealing with...

At first I struggled with the claws because I wasn't sure how to model it, then I decided model it using the same method as the legs where you bridge in between and extruding the legs.

Taxonomy of shoes


Re-enhanced version of my first page to fit in with the presentation.

My idea for this project to show how different part of the shoe comes from different part of the world joining together showing the process, therefore I came up with the idea of shoe assembling together, rather technical but lets see

Storyboard of the shoe, this is part 1 to it, the second part is a narrative to show where the shoe lace coming from but I haven't included that in the final piece

This is a diagram and the models I am going to make, just to get an rough idea on how to animate the parts assembling.

Plans for 3ds max ready to model

these are some of the parts modeled in 3ds max

This is a prototype I made for the shoe testing out the motions on how each part works

Visual Studies - Identity
Previous project for visual studies was based on typography that represents ourselves, this time we are to produce images that expresses us to the audidence about ourselves, here are some examples I chosen;Home - To start off I like to express my background by using this image,which has a image of Manchester in which I was born in and raised and a picture of Hong Kong which my family are from, I have used a red colour for background colour to symbolize warmth and home

Networking - Secondly, this image is to show my online profile accounts that I have on the internet. The image has 2 layers, I copy and pasted the same photo and cutting out the 2 screens replacing it on the edited photo. The green background is reference to the green glow on the modem showing connection around the world. The typography is influenced by the MS-DOS on the computer.

Anime - Here is a list of my favourite animes, list of all main character from the series.

Drawing style - This image is to show my drawing style, heavly influenced by manga. On the drawing board is a drawing of fantasy arts which I also like very much and the background is to show my workspace.

Food - The exaggeration of this is to show the passion I have for food and my way of expressing my sense of humour in a caricature way, also influenced by manga style

Professional - This poster is to express my professional side, I used a glow coming from hand referencing to contemporary video games, animes and films symbolizing skills and abilities with list of programs I use, typography in this piece can be improved by adding more glow and effect.