Long time coming

Creating animation is less difficult and more time consuming than most studio courses, at least that is what I tell my students in the VCOM 363 sequential media class. Going through the process of selecting a narrative (story, joke, etc) that is visual in nature, creating a storyboard, planning the making process, and executing the animation, not to mention the refinement process is more than one student seems to be able to handle in half a semester. At least it seems as though the final results don't reflect the efforts it take the students working at it.
The first problem is efficiency; students have a great deal of difficulty modifying the work they do to plan or refine projects. Even though they are forced to plan out projects and write out steps, benchmarks, goals and time management plans the still want to short-shift this process so they can get on with "making". The planning process is also inefficient because they do not take time to think about the process to making, or how they will proceed to making, or how they will legitimately cut time by reusing materials that they have already generated, backgrounds, characters, props, etc. Because they have not thought about it they commence with making and the endless discard, remake, discard, remake cycle begins. One the one hand they are not so committed to the work that they don't know when to through out an idea but on the other, they discard so quickly that they toss potentially good work. This can also be part of their inability to analyze and determine when something is valid and use it, while discarding the stuff that is superfluous.
The second problem is seeing quick results; I have found recently that I get more traction with students if I can demonstrate the practice quickly to them and have them attain an small amount of success early in the process. For example, using foreground, middle-ground, background principles a scene can quickly come alive with good results from small amounts of time and effort. It is critical that I follow up with the deeper more extensive explanation of those results, coding, principles, or theory that underpins the overall effect. Then the student is most likely to learn and achieve the deeper concerns I want them to attain. Some retain the information they have learned and others do not because of the first problem of inefficiency, the time laps between the demonstration and the need to use it is so long they have forgotten the success they had earlier.
The third major problem is interest; no you will not be an animator however, you may not be able to hire one, or you will avoid it because you can not do it yourself. This is the basis of my first book which could be titled "You think your kid is so smart! The electronic thumb generation". Yes our kids and students born in the 1990's do plow through a ton of information. Most of it is useless or forms some kind of tacit knowledge at best. This is ok but not what school is designed to do nor should be modified to accommodate. Knowledge needs to be explicit and formal for students to be prepared to the working world... Interest wains when we move from quick results to deep learning because of their inability to focus and maintain interest or seek out what is of interest in a given subject because they have a tendency to reject.
Two months in we are soon to wrap up the first of the projects. I don't see better results than when I made this a 4 week project. It is not apparent that they have learned any more about process either. Rethink this project again.

Sequential Media - VCOM 363

I have protracted the course from its original form and extended the projects, process and teaching of methodology for the students. I expect the final versions of the projects to be of higher quality in form and tempo as well as narrative. The Muybridge experiments are still involved in the early process of the animation production. This is followed up with a greater emphasis on character development than in earlier years of this course with the addition of the five profile drawings. The final product to be included in the first phase of this first project is the storyboard as seen in the examples shown in class. All three of these deliverables should give the students a foundation for fleshing out the final animation.

The Muybridge experiment will start fluid walking animation for the character. The side profile of the character may cause the animation to continue from this POV but with close direction on the storyboard I hope to encourage students away from two dimensional story telling.

The five drawn profiles is meant to encourage emotional definition of the character. Students should start to feel what the characters are feeling at some point in the story. This should come across in the way the character is drawn and then extend into the movement of the character.

The storyboard services as a plan to tell the story in a way that communicates humor. Comedy is difficult and not easy to describe visually. Relying on the story or joke the students have brought to class will have to suffice as a measure for how they will plan the animation. It is not a course in story telling or creative writing which seems best left to the students in the class to judge the comedic value of each project. Discussion on how to emphasize punchlines, or exaggerations, or reactions to dialogue will continue with the critique of timing and pace of the story.

Design is Existential - Minus the Individualism Stuff

I was reading about the famous playwrite Samuel Beckett and considering his most famous play Waiting for Godot and thought about the absence of creative motivation or what some might call their muse that has gone missing. Many critics and scholars of the theatre have referenced the dichotomy of the characters, Estragon and Vladimir in their admiration for Godot to their vague understanding of him or even if they were to ever meet him. This seems to follow Beckett's relationship with writing or at least his existentialist tendencies.


"An existentialist theme is that of anxiety, or the sense of anguish, a generalized uneasiness, a fear or dread which is not directed to any specific object. Anguish is the dread of the nothingness of human existence." T. Z. Lavine.

Many designers "fear" of not being avant garde or even aujourd'hui, threatens our existence as design beings. It is not the object so to speak but our awareness of the "current" and "cutting edge" we are both in and out of that we fear. I have consistently approached my design with the notion that the content and context of the work would guide my observations to analyze my creativity, and the aesthetic result would be relevant to these subjects. I think this still resonates with me but I look at contemporary design with some disconnect and envy. If I have ever tried to be "current" or create using the visual language of designs I have recently seen it feels appropriated. Creating may support the axioms of existentialism but it is evident designers have, and will continue to, muster the bravado to put the work out there for everyone to critique. The older I am the more I admire the courage of designers who continue to push the definitions of design that gives me the courage to move forward with my own. It is not in the interest of setting the new avante garde but just to say, I did that, in the most conscientious way I can and maybe just to take a step towards getting over the fear.

Multi-media Design I

The return of this course is welcome to the Digital Information Design program. It has been two years since we have run this class and should see a new approach to the design and development of sequential media for the web. This marks the first entry to the blog for the class.

Games in flash

This worked better than expected and my hat goes off to my students and their willingness to stick to the objectives set in the class. After the Symphony project we embarked on simple games in flash. I had delivered a very basic shooter game to demonstrate hitTestObject and hitTestPoint in flash as well as the Point class to distinguish multiple points on an object to detect collision. With this as a starting point for the development of the code and the keyboard input they had learned from the symphony project they had the basis for any number of games. The project called for extensive descriptions of the story, motivation of the 'player' and the environments, and characters in the game. This also followed some discussion of the nature of 'Flow' (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) and how games can induce this state of mind. The results for a majority of the class were significant. They will be on display in April in the Lewindowsky Gallery at Winthrop University.

As a final note concerning the class I have come to the conclusion that the demonstration model that I have been following works well if only the principles are explained and the start of the code format has been established. If students are forced to finish and offer suggestion about how to complete the exercise they seem to pick up the general concepts of coding if not the syntax. This is critical in that the concern for typing it in correctly falls away. I ask for the general concept of completing the code, what the benefits for doing it that way are, or how can it be more efficient, or if that falls into best practices. This all hinges on the fact that I know more than one way to skin that cat and can guide them to a successful solution. I typically have my method and a predetermined solution but often that is not how students think about the order of coding and yet still offer innovative ways of getting at the same thing done. This is an enlightening way to teach because (as many of us have experienced) I have learned a great deal from my students.  

Charlotte symphony has visuals

My VCOM 362 class just finished a group project for the Charlotte NC. Symphony that generated mini-animations using keyboard input. One student "played" the animation generator (animatorator?) with the Symphony ensemble which was displayed on a large screen over the stage during the performance. There were many comments and congratulations on the work the students had done and the final visuals that were displayed. Thanks to Dr. Ron Parks for his invitation to produce something for his piece of music, "I thought I had better let you know".

This is not a new idea, I had just seen another version of it at SIGGRAPH 2009 (at least my 3rd) where a young man used 3D animations. His controls allowed for pan and tilt views of colored explosions as well as forward/back/left/right motion. The audience was somewhat skeptical of the final product that they were experiencing in part because of his lack of experience with the visuals and also because of the monotony of the repeated animations. There also seemed to be a disconnect between the selected 3D objects and the music (mainly jazz - it was in New Orleans).

We had the advantage of restricting the animatorator to one set of visuals that pertained to the lyrics of the song which happened to be a love letter. Illustrations that related to the song were also very specific. We had a short rehearsal before the final production which helped to set the tempo of the piece but could have been better had we had time to practice. You could see that with the same dedication to playing an instrument one could be an accomplished player.

Technically speaking we had set up the applet with a number of arrays to separate the various stanzas, giving us more flexibility to introduce more images, texts and animations, etc. We did not use the full keyboard in order to simplify the playing and we generated random 2D coordinate positions on the screen to give a more spontaneous feel to the visual. Once an object was placed on the screen you could populate around the origin of that object by repeating the keystroke. This gave the player more control over concentrations of the objects so that the overall composition of the screen had some focal point and balance. We assigned an 'erase' key so that objects could be removed from the stacking order and so we could minimize the amount of objects at quiet points in the music or we could populate the screen for more visual impact and create visual excitement at high points in the piece. Other controls included scale and orientation. We also set tonal value (white through black) to each object and no color was used.

I will post some screen captures in the coming days.

Progress on blogger feed snippets

I have been working on the snippet project to get a small portion of these posts included on my website. This really is for another client of mine who has a blog and a website and would like to combine the two without leaving one for the other. Within the blog you need to create an rss feed that broadcasts to the site that will display the snippet. Flash will take the xml code that is posted by blogger and parse it into the page. Using the Namespace class and connecting to the Atom directory within Blogger to link the blog to the flash page.

// myNamespace:Namespace = new Namespace("http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom");

Now connect to the feed using the feeds/feedburner.com link generated by the rss to populate text fields in the website. You can restrict the number of characters and the number of text fields (snippets) that are displayed on the site. Send me a note for more detailed information.