M dot Strange

Here is young filmmaker right on the edge of things. M dot Strange is an American animator who rose to fame with his very own independent film "We Are the Strange" which premiered at Sundance 2007. M dot is an animator first and foremost and he is probably one the most extreme cases of self taught, secluded talent. He made his first film almost entirely on his own, in his bedroom over the course of three years. His fan-base is select and loyal and thus his notoriety is pretty much contained within the internet alone. We Are the Strange was released solely online so that he could retain the rights to his work and he has since made money from DVD sales and merchandise.

A brief history of Warp

As I'm sure we're all aware, Warp has been at the forefront of the the independent music scene for a very long time and in recent years the independent British film scene too...

The label was started at the height of the birth of rave and electronica music in 1989 ("the second summer of love") by Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell who were at the time running a record shop in Sheffield. In short they were very fortunate to begin with thanks to their second release getting into the top 75 in the British charts. Beckett and Mitchell continued their success with a string of successful releases, with more chart entries. Their success seemed to be down to the way in which they marketed their acts; more like rockstars than electronica geeks thanks to magazine features and live tours. In 1999 Warp films was set up as a sister company and has now become one of the leading producers of British Independent Cinema with such titles as "Four Lions", "Happy go Lucky" and "This is England".

Vimeo Awards

The Vimeo Awards 2010 - Complete Show from Vimeo Festival on Vimeo.

Liars "Scissor" from A Bruntel on Vimeo.

Last Minutes with ODEN from phos pictures on Vimeo.

A friend of mine showed me the awards other day. All the entries are well worth a watch and from a budding music video and (indie) film maker's point of view (mine) this is a good showcase of what's shaking in the edgy creative world of Vimeo. The way I see it, you have "the golden age of Hollywood" on one end of the spectrum and Vimeo on the other in that if the golden age was a closed industry that required numerous connections and funds to enter (and still does), Vimeo requires comparatively very few. Seeing as I'm neither a Coppola nor a Rothschild, Vimeo is made for me. It is also I feel a platform that would harbor any of my creations regardless of my background simply because I feel that whilst I'm sure it started off as a platform for those who couldn't afford anywhere else, I believe that in many cases it has become the optimum platform for certain breeds of edgy viral art. For example, could you really see any better place for a motion graphics artist to showcase their latest three minute wonder? I couldn't.

Unity Sound and Animation

Today we went through some simple techniques for adding sound and animation to our game environments. First we added sound simple ambient sounds to invisible objects, making sure they're looped and then we added sounds to be triggered when objects come into contact the player character. The most useful was the walking sound script which we added to our player character. After finding a suitable footsteps sound I cut it up into its individual hits and then combined the individual sound files with a script that made the individual files sound on each step of player character movement. After all that we finally covered a little animation which was very simple; the architecture of keyframes and graph editors for X,Y and Z co-ordinates was nicely familiar.

Baking Animation

Today we were introduced to an essential little trick used for importing animated objects into Unity. The technique is known as baking.

An example of a baked animation once put into unity. When triggered the robot brandishes his gun.

In Maya you select the geometry, making sure that all the keyframes are selected and then export it as an FBX and click on edit preset. Then you simply make sure that the smoothing groups, animation, and bake animation check boxes are selected as well as making sure that its exported as FBX 2009. Then you simply export and save in the scenes folder. Once that's done it's simply a question of importing it all into unity and if you've had different animations on the same timeline then ensure that the keyframes boundaries you select when importing into unity are correct.

A Goal...

A friend of mine showed me this the other day. It's a cracking tune anyway but the video makes it really interesting. Right now I feel that directing a video like this-this kind of style, this level of technical skill, this kind of audio visual synergy-is a realistic enough goal to set myself to achieve in the not too distant future. Of course I can't say this with a great deal of conviction seeing as I'm only an After Effects novice but I nevertheless get the feeling that the techniques involved here are quite straight forward. With a fair bit of knowledge of how to use a high speed camera, careful masking and some solid Maya work a video like this doesn't seem too far off.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Right now I'm reading a book that is widely regarded as the best thing to read if you want a gritty, warts and all description of the inside of the film industr. The book, "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" by Peter Biskind covers the last golden age of Hollywood from about 1967 to the start of the eighties. I'm about one hundred pages in and you can tell that this author has seen a thing or two. After reading only a few pages one starts to understand that Hollywood is far from the perfect, glamorous, culture cornucopia that we all look up to and more of a paranoid wreck of a city that just gets by through satisfying its increasingly demanding and insecure ego and pandering to the every whim of equally paranoid fat cat producers. Before starting reading this book I had Hollywood movies in mind as an ultimate career choice. Now I can safely say that I have next to no interest in working on big budget (possibly American) films for the simple fact that they are more often that not driven by insecurity and greed rather than artistic ambition. Then again if I keep this attitude up I might never get a job. Still I recommend that anyone considering going into the film industry should read this, if not simply to check that they actually want to.

The book was so good that they made a documentary about it, here's a clip.

Effective Virals

I thought I'd go through a few of my favorite viral adverts and talk about what makes a good one.

This first one-one of a series-was admittedly shown a fair bit on the T.V but I feel it deserves recognition as a viral advert as it got pretty popular on Youtube. You could say that it was a viral advert that happened to be shown on T.V. I think these ads had such great viral appeal because they were both abundant and had a killer jingle at the end. They were also short and sweet. If you combine that with the raw bread and butter of actually being funny and well directed then I feel there's a formula right there for a successful viral.

This viral for Diesel is my personal favorite. It's just clever really. Obviously this would never be shown on T.V so this means that this ad only reaches certain people. Due to its nature-edgy, provocative and daring-it would probably be more likely find its way to people who are of that nature; like mined people will share it amongst their friends. Also anyone into animation will find this amusing. So buy making such a niche advert, Diesel have cunningly ensured that their edgy, niche clothing brand strikes right at their target market.



It is purely a coincidence that two out of my three favorite viral adverts depict scenes of a sexual nature. This last advert has a similar edgy appeal to the one above I feel. I think it really works well though thanks to its more humorous angle on proper condom use, in previous year such ads have often been a little too scary or preachy. What's also brilliant about this video is that it magically manages to be both explicit and innocently cheeky at the same time.

Warped Reality 4, an Oddworld

I never actually played this game, but I nearly did. During my hardcore gaming pre to early teen years when I was a Die Hard Playstation and then-when it came out-Xbox fan I had an unshakable compulsion to buy a lot of magazines. They always seemed to be telling me to buy Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey and later Oddworld: Munch's Odyssey. From the artwork it seemed as though this game series was a light hearted comical one (like any platform game) but then I looked a little closer at Abe's face and saw his slightly worried expression and sewn shut mouth. I don't know exactly what this game's about-and at this stage I don't want or need to know anything more than what the pictures like the one's beneath tell me-but I certainly have a slightly clearer idea of the kind of warped industrial wreckage that my character could inhabit.

You see despite this being a fantasy world, there are still plenty of familiar elements to it. Everything from industrial to woodland settings gets a dash of quirk and technicolor.

Warped Reality 3, Darker Stuff

I played a little Condemned 2 the other day, it's a pretty grim affair. It's of the good old "action horror" genre, best known for containing games like "Resident Evil" and "Silent Hill". All done in the first person-I forget the plot exactly-it's the typical case of being lost in a dark mysterious building with various deranged zombified creatures baying for your blood, whilst you only have minimal and primitive defense mechanisms. I'm looking at this game really to ask myself how I would go about adding a good dose of horror to it. Obviously I won't be adding psychotic zombies to the mix but I plan on creating an unsettling experience through the clever use of sound design and various threatening objects that evoke signs of an unnerving past. A nice combination of eery David Lynch esque noises and my character's broken home should do nicely.

Warped Reality 2, Predator

Another popular depiction of a different viewing of reality is the classic "Predator Vision" from the Predator movies. This technique works well for the Predator character as I feel it reflects his simple "survival of the fittest" mind. For those of you who don't know, Predator is a large extra terrestrial creature who indulges in trophy hunting of various species. I have only seen Alien vs Predator but It's fair to say that that all Predators are simple minded killing machines.

When we are shown what the predator sees it feels rather befitting in that his vision leaves out fine details and only shows something not far off from a mere silhouette. The various displays around the outside of his visor provide him with all the raw details he must need to eat, sleep and kill. In a slightly less twisted way I think my character could live this way-obviously without the killing part. Seeing as my character has a rather twisted past and no eyesight, what we see when in his environment is visually quite simple yet containing a rather dark undertone due to his haunted psyche creating unpleasant images within his mind's eye.

Warped reality 1

During my crit we (me, my tutors and my classmates) came to the conclusion that my character looked rather warped and darkly psychedelic and in no way photorealistic enough to be placed in an accurate Bhopal type setting. So we then came to the conclusion that things might work well if we make the game environment equally warped. We then proceeded to discuss various ways in which this could happen and one of them entailed Max Payne's nightmare sequences...

Both my character and Max Payne have rather troubled pasts so I feel that a warped reality riddled with flashbacks should work. I'm really referring to the bit in the above video when he's walking along red lines but I suppose the rest of the dream sequence is still a good example. I feel the sound design will the the most effective bit If I go for this kind of twisted experience.

Part Two; the environment

My character is now complete and handed in so now I need to design an environment for my character to inhabit. Seeing as he was the only surviving victim of the Bhopal incident it would be a good start to look at images of chemical explosions and industrial wreckage...

So firstly here are some images of the Bhopal and Chernobyl aftermaths that should give an idea of the mood.

and of other choice bits of industrial catastrophes...

The Texture

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So I opened up my U.V map in photoshop and started drawing on it. To give me an idea of where things were I drew with the UV in black first and then removed them when it came to applying it to my 3D Maya model. Of course it was a mega case of trial and error when it came to marrying up the points on the texture with the right points on the model but I got there in the end.