Chemical Brother's Star Guitar Chronogram

From watching the Star Guitar video I found the chronogram task a bit tricky. Usually with chronograms it is the relationship between the movement of the camera, the movement of the subject and the spaces they are in but with this one the camera doesn't move - it is stationary on the 'train'. The space of the train is implied but doesn't actually existing and the landscape that moves past the train is just a series of layered planes put together in after effects.

I started by trying to build up one of the scenes from separate images as I thought it would have been built originally. I set this up so from the perspective of the camera within the train the scene looks believable but as you reach the sides of the images, past the field of view of the camera the layers start to break down. I then mapped out the objects in plan form to create what resembles a musical score as each of the elements relates to part of the song and lands on certain beats. This hasn't come across particularly obviously in the drawing though. The drawing is also only a snapshot of what the whole chronogram would be.

I might carry on and add some text onto the chronogram but I'm having a bit of an overlap between summer freelance work and starting back at uni so I'm trying to juggle the two at the moment.

Slow Shutter Speed Test

I looked a lot last year and over the summer at super slow mo photography from Marey's original experiments and photographic sequences through to using Twixtor to create intermediate frames in video to fake a super slow mo effect. These methods looked at creating high numbers of still images of moments of the motion that can be brought together as video frames to create the impression of motion when played at a high enough frame rate the eye stops recognising them as individual images but as a continuous representation of motion. The image above is a still from a video I made of an instant during the act of hitting a punchbag.

I wanted to look at the idea of motion capture from the opposite perspective, by using a slow shutter speed to capture and entire sequence of motion in one image. The images below are of the same act of hitting the punchbag but using a 2 second shutter speed. Shooting like this in normal light blurs the motion so much that the motion becomes almost invisible, with only stationary or slow moving elements becoming visible.

To invert this so that the motion becomes clearly visible rather than stationary objects I shot in the darker using different coloured lights to identify the motion of the two objects; red for the punchbag and white for the hand. The outcome is an image showing the motion trails for the two elements. The thickness/intensity of the motion trails represents the speed that the object is moving at that stage of the motion.

The image below was taken with a 10 second shutter allowing a series of punches to be captured. The punches of the fist are clearly distinguished from the withdrawing of the punch by the width of the line showing that the punch is quicker than the withdrawal.

Prism at the V&A

'Prism presents an alternative view of London, exposing unseen data flows in the capital through a sculptural, immersive interface suspended in the V&A’s uppermost cupola. The installation is an investigation into the virtual life of the city, and our own often ambiguous relationship with the data that controls our lives... digital artist and film-maker Keiichi Matsuda's Prism presents an ingenious window on that complexity, using data to depict the ever changing nature of the capital. His formidable digital installation at the V&A - a giant, sculptural lantern - is made up from a series of screens through which fast moving data streams are visualised, coaxed into unfolding shapes and patterns of light and colour.'                                                                 LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL

The V&A has opened up areas in the roof space of the museum that have perviously never been accessed by the public for the Prism installation by Keiichi Matsuda. The prism sits in the pitch black room below the cupola above the main entrance hall. It is lit up by live information streams which are represented by moving and changing projections onto the facetted fabric faces. Information such as the energy being used by 10 Downing Street, the depth of the Thames, the number of Boris Bikes being used and the amount of pollen in the air are represented on the prism.

Slow Motion BMX Edit

First full slow motion test edit using Twixtor. Its been a learing curve. After playing around a lot with the settings for Twixtor in After Effects it seems the most important factor in whether fottage will work with it is the way it has been shot in the first place. I hadn't realised this before filming the footage so the outcome wasn't very good with Twixtor. At least in the future I'll know to film at super fast shutter speeds on a high contrast background at 60fps.

Slow Mo Test

Running some tests in Twixtor for after effects to see how super slow mo looks. Since filming this clip I have realised that to get twixtor to work smoothly its best to shoot at 60 fps with a fast shutter speed and small aperture. Unfortunately my bog standard hitchi HD video camera does none of these things resulting in a blurry outcome from twixtor....

Final Film

Film is in the process of uploading, eta 09:30am Wednesday 23rd May...



Been having issues rendering this one out of Premiere..h264 compression was messing up the brightness of the film so had to render it out with png compression making it rather large. Its currently uploading to youtube but saying its going to take 5 hours...Hopefully it'll be up by the morning.

Panning Pod Repeating Sequence

Panning Pod Sequence

Plugged Pod Sequence

Final Portfolio Pages

This forms the 5th and final section of my reports. It should be read with the City and Landscape, Professional Studies, Design and Detail reports and the January Portfolio.

Final Portfolio 2012

Draft Portfolio Page Examples

These are a few examples of the portfolio pages I am working on. I'm trying to combine the technical stuff with some more renders and concept bits to differentiate the portfolio from the Design and Detail Report.

Glowing Pods Video Test

The video was a test for the glowing pods sequence to go into my final video. It is supposed to imitate a timelapse of the building at night. The pods are flickering a bit too fast at the moment, I was intending for them to be lighting up individually as if someone was going inside them working out and then the glowing stops when they leave.

I used the still renders from the previous post and composited them together in After Effects. I used the Trapcode Plugin Shine on the pods to give them a better glowing effect. I used the Trapcode 3D Stroke Plugin to create the car lights, on top of this I applied the Starglow Plugin to make the car lights glow and the Wavewarp effect to add random movement to the lights. I used the a png file created from my selections render to create a mask to make the car lights reflections in the windows of the building [and the sky reflections]. The sky was some stock timelapse footage. I applied a gradient to the lower part of it and adjusted the hue to match my video.

Glowing Pods Sequence

These are a few of the still images of a sequence I will be using in my film of the energy pods glowing at night as they are used by gym members. The green and purple image is a selection sets render allowing me to select the glass and pod materials to easily edit them in post processing.

Blender

Just about got the whole model into blender now. The lighting has been tricky to set up for this scene. I have only applied two materials so far, the metal mesh which uses an alpha map and the translucent material for the pods above. I had to delete the metal mesh walkway from the floor above as it was creating really noisy light effects as the environment light passed through it. The render took about 50mins so I'm still going to have to look at other ways of speeding up the process. I had to increase the samples from the default 3 to 14 to reduce other noise in the image but there is still a bit of noise - this is slowing down the render significantly. I still have a lot of other materials to apply so the rendering is going to get even slower - not sure this is a very practical way of making the video as a second of animated footage is going to take a day to render...

Blender and Sketchup again...

After spending the last week trying to export my sketchup file to a format that I can import into blender I have finally got the entire model into blender... but the file is 1.8GB! Blender doesn't recognise the instances of componenets that were created in sketchup meaning every piece of geometry in the model becomes part of a huge mesh in blender.

To get the model into blender I had to break it down into 20 smaller parts in sketchup before exporting each part as an .obj file. I then had to import each of these parts individually into blender but couldn't get them to import properly into blender 2.6 or 2.62 (the most recent version) so had to go back to version 2.49 to import them. I then saved these as .blend files and appended each one into a master blender model - the model that is 1.8GB - without textures. The model is too slow to do anything with so I am going to try linking the different parts of the model into a master file rather than appending them - linking references the other file whereas appending makes a new local version of the file within the new model. Hopefully doing this will mean the model runs faster, I will be able to apply textures and materials in the smaller models and they will be referenced into the master model... that's the plan anyway.

Mini Skimboard Edit

The sea was flat so i got the skimboard out for a quick session. Made a quick edit to reacquaint myself with the video software before starting on my uni video.

Design and Detail

Design and Detail Report

The third and final section of the Design Realisation Report.