Matt's Blog

I came across this link to a selection of free video’s on youtube of character reference. The clips also come with a helpful grid overlay with syncronised front and side views. I don’t currently do too much character rigging or animation, but this find has encourage me to do more. There are about 60 clips on the youtube channel of people doing a sample of typical computer game type movement. There are boxes on the floor that are pushed, various kicks and punches as well as a few drunken walk cycles too. The models are athletic male, female, large male and large female.

There isn’t as large a range as I’d like, but they are free and inspiring.

Also, I found this tutorial for creating walk cycles for computer game engines using sprite sheets, although the same technique could equally be employed for motion graphic and video work. It uses Daz3D which was released for free recently (download it here). The tutorial can be found here on the great blog www.gamefromscratch.com. You will also need The Gimp digital image manipulator software (open source photoshop), which I have blogged about previously. Again, that can be downloaded for free, from here.

Bookmark with the following services;

Hide Sites

If you were to choose a complementary filmmaker to Jim Jarmusch, you’d be hard pressed to choose a more fitting one than Aki Kaurismäki. And, again, oddly, I wind up watching one of his films following Jarmusch’s. “Le Havre“‘s plot is pretty straightforward, a washed up bohemian has withdrawn from the art world in Paris where all he “made” was his art. Currently working as a shoe shiner in France, he befriends a young African illegal immigrant and proceeds to do all he can to help him.

As plot devices go, we’ve had the true life “Diary of Anne Frank”, the airman fallen behind enemy lines and kept secret from the authorities etc storylines before, yet here it is reinvented and given extra relevance in the modern age. Check out the trailer below, which sets the tone pretty well.

Overall, it’s a lovely humanistic piece, with a droll sense of humour. That the story itself concerns itself with the lowest social class, the very people supposed affected by immigration (as stirred up in the corporate controlled rags), and also often immigrants themselves is a telling irony. That the day after watching this, Francois Hollande was elected as the socialist leader of France compounds (in practically every sense of the word) the fairytale present in the film and serves as good as any suitable metaphor I could possibly hope to conjure.

Bookmark with the following services;

Hide Sites

Location, location, location...

This was, quite oddly, the last of Jarmusch’s films that I had yet to see, odd because perversely it was his first feature. It wasn’t by my own conscious design either, and I use the word odd (clumsily) as much to offset the perceived oddball quality of his work as it was a pleasant fortuity to see this now.

Jarmusch is little mentioned in the mainstream media and never really mentioned in the same breath as other of his more populist stylistic brethren, especially considering that he has consistently produced work so entertainingly, and resolutely offbeat, over the past 20 years. Quality of this grade is all too rare.

I’ve read claims of directors apparently emerging fully formed with their first films, and as I type now I can’t really think of any examples actually more fitting than Jarmusch. It’s arguably richer in some respects than what follows too, there is a malevolent air, a palpable fear and an anxiety, and whilst that may be attributable to the adolescence and mindscape of “Permanent Vacation”‘s protagonist Allie (Chris Parker), it is nevertheless missing from Jarmusch’s later work. I wouldn’t mention it other than through the fact that it is so successfully communicated. Whilst anyone familiar with Jarmusch could point out that there is evidence of this in his later work, I’d argue that there it is handled and confronted with a mature rationale (such as perhaps the ominous dog witnessed in “Ghost Dog”) whereas here we’re very much in an unresolved, but amply signposted, limbo. All this is really besides the point however, Tom DiCillo and James A. Lebovitz provide some great low-fi, stark cinematography with the kind of framing that has come to be expected.

Chris Parker (above) ably channeling/aping Jarmusch is one of the film’s many highlights. These moments offset the deeper troubling aspects of living and experiencing a bohemian lifestyle, all ably and abstractly portrayed. That Jarmusch hardly takes the time to even address anything remotely straight, never mind slight it, is all the more credit to his art and long may it continue.

Bookmark with the following services;

Hide Sites

The full Adobe CS6 suite has just been announced, including all the juicy information on what is new. You can find the After Effects CS6 whats new information right here. This release seems to address some key issues with the software that have been overlooked for the longest of time. The focus will of course be on the new 3D extrusion capabilities and renderer that is now included with After Effects, but as to how this will fare in terms of graphic card capability only time will tell. This, followed by the new camera tracker, global performance cache and rolling shutter effects are potentially exciting stuff, but, as always the proof is in the application.

Whilst they may be the headline grabbing feature of the new After Effects, it appears that some requests for the software have been answered. More control over mask feathering(!), HD versions of the CC (Cycore) fx and improvements to scripting. I’d be interested to hear what these improvements are, but guess will have to wait for that.

I’m eager to see and trial the software to see if my setup can handle these new improvements and to see whether they work as advertised.

But then, there is also Speedgrade which promises to be the revolutionary addition to the CS6 pack, at least for me. I just hope it comes with or encourages some cool IOS apps to interface with it, or even some new, affordable or compatible control surfaces.

Bookmark with the following services;

Hide Sites

CS6 - Not quite yet set in Stone.

Adobe are offering a free public beta of Photoshop CS6 which can be found here. You can install and choose “try”, this will give you access for 7 days, after which you will need to register online. I have no idea how long the trial will be running, but if you’ve got the time / hard disk space available, why not give it a download?

Among the new features being touted are the improved UI experience, some new blurs (field blur, iris blur and a tilt shift blur), content aware fill and move as well as some improvements to cropping and stroked shapes. I must admit not many of the changes/improvements really appeal to me personally, perhaps I’d appreciate the crop improvements and some of the layer filtering options, but they are not deal breakers. I’ve not seen mention of the much touted motion blur compensation and correction filter, but maybe that might come with the full release. I’ve embedded a youtube video overview below of some of the features in the Photoshop CS6 Beta.

Unfortunately there is still no public beta for After Effects CS6. Although an announcement about a feature being heralded as “to be one of the biggest advances to Adobe After Effects in over a decade” is due next month. You can read more about this mystery feature due to come with After Effects CS6 here . Will it be a node based compositing workflow? 3D? Either way, the keynote will be held at NAB 2012 on the 15th of April, see the schedule here.

Bookmark with the following services;

Hide Sites