Progress Report
I am nearly done with my blacksmith contest submission, but not quite. I have finished every scene I need to shoot, and now I just need to do voiceovers, sound effects, and visual effects. One of the things I ended up focusing on was set and character design. I tried to build detailed and interesting backdrops and make characters and props that fit the theme. A major part of this for me was reorganizing my lego drawers to a cabinet more accessible to me from my desk, which was very helpful. As of right now, I have also ordered a tripod to replace my older one. This tripod has a neckpiece in the middle so that I can choose the height of my camera view. This will allow me to get a wide variety of angles while also having a stable setpiece. Another thing I have been working on and hope to keep developing is my compositing and digital effect making. Basically, I will be adding sparks to parts of this stop motion, and hope to do more green screening down the road.
It was really interesting shooting scenes for a contest with a time constraint of 30 seconds, as this is probably the first-ever time that I have been intentionally shooting extra, and then cutting the clips way down to the length I need. I kind of like this concept as it really feels more professional than the bloated ‘as much run time as possible’ strategy I was using before.
Making the animations for this project really introduced me to diverse different types of scenes and movements, like sword-fights and many characters going at once. In many cases, I had to try quite a few times before I got the scene right. I really like this challenge in retrospect though, as it means I am learning.
I also did another video call with my mentor. We talked more about small little things on how I could improve my animation, and it feels like our talks are getting a lot more natural, which is good.
(Since this animation has no voiceover or sound effects yet, it will likely be hard to determine what’s going on, but my hope is just to show my animation and set-building, and we can look at the story and full project later.)
Beautiful Mind
Due to safety and privacy reasons, all video evidence pieces will be in a different document that requires a password to view. When the paragraph below mentions a part of our call, there will be a number attached which you can then use on the media document to find the corresponding video.
Ok, hat time. This chapter of How to Have a Beautiful Mind talks about six hats, which are part of a technique that helps those who use it converse more thoroughly and without bias. Basically, everyone dons a figurative hat of the same color, and then think and put forth ideas on the same topic, rather than arguing or addressing different topics at once. My mentor and I didn’t organize to divide our meeting into actual hats since that would be inconvenient to our type of conversation. However, I will be breaking down parts of my meeting and talking about which hat was likely dictating the conversation then and why.
The white hat represents information, and so when the white hat is on participants are meant to talk pure facts. An example of when we were doing this was when I he showed me a stabilized version of my video, and I asked how he did it. As such, we talked about an explanation of how after effects stabilizes it, and I was able to learn a lot of reliable information. (1)
The red hat represents feelings and intuition. One small time that we were both using the red hat was when he asked me if I wanted him to do the voiceovers, and at first I wanted to, but then I decided that I actually kinda wanted to try doing them myself. This was definetely a red hat moment, as there was no fact or logic behind my motivations, I just decided that I felt like doing it myself. (2)
The black hat is caution, and looking at what could go wrong. A moment that my mentor donned the black hat was when he pointed out a problem in my animation saying, “I feel like its missing a payoff”. In the end we realized it was because I had not yet shot the final scene, which would have a payoff. Even so, his caution was well placed and that would have been a substantial flaw if I had didn’t have the payoff. (3)
The yellow hat is looking for the benefits and value of something, and why it should be. An example of what I think was a very good use of the yellow hat was when he was critiquing a part of my animation. He talked about what I could improve, but then he balanced that critisism out by finding value and saying what I did do well, and why it should be well recieved. After saying, “I feel like whats lacking is that the lighting is kind of bland,” he then says, “The animation is good, especially with the peasant who hurts his hand, you’re showing a lot of personality and emotion.” (4)
The green hat is about being creative and looking for alternatives. One example of this is when my mentor pointed out to me that the boba fett helmet might be a big problem since I was enrolling in a contest with no licensed lego characters. Later on, we brainstormed ideas on how I could fix it, so that whole conversation was really led by the green hat. (5)
Finally, the blue hat is the organizing hat. We can see this hat in action mostly in the parts of my meeting where I ask questions that I have written down, or direct conversation to a point that I need help on or am wondering about.
Next Steps
After this blog post, I’ll mostly be trying to get the my blacksmith project done in time to submit to the contest. After that I hope to take a break from filming to do more studying of animation techniques and the twelve principles of animation, since animation month has started. I will then either continue on my wookie project, although I might retire it entirely as I am losing interest and the concept and story doesn’t really seem as great to me. If I do can it, I will continue to look for ideas for a possible replacement, and hope to get started on that within a week.
Wow, that ended up being quite a long blog post. Anyway, thanks for looking through this and I’ll see you in two weeks.
-Ben H