Raising the Bar

For the last project this semester, Noah Campbell and myself have been creating a deep sea submarine in Maya for our nonlinear edit. This has been a very detail oriented project where we have focused greatly on our modeling and asset creation for our submarine and environment. I personally have worked primarily on the Submarine for our project and Noah the environment.

Overall I am very happy with our work on the project. We have full rendered and animated our project and are currently editing it in Premiere Pro. A little look ahead of our project can be found here:

We have been trying to focus on creating and representing the feeling of being deep underwater. Focus heavily on using darkness and the lights of the submarine to show the world around it. Overall, this project has been very satisfying to finally see in motion. As well the many angles and changes we have created. Im am greatly looking forward to showing our work in class on Monday!

Switching from Television to Streaming

So over the past few years there has been a large shift between people watching direct television to streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video and many more. It is almost becoming overbearing with the variety of  streaming services. There are often new ones popping up offering new content and shows to watch. These services sometimes fit and meet the standard television structure. Or they develop a new one based on what is necessary.  Many of the mainstream services like Netlfix and Hulu feature standard television or their own produced content. However, I want to take a look at the more unknown streaming services or ones not commonly used. This will be looking at companies such as Polaris, Seeso, and VRV.

These companies have all featured various paid for streaming shows of different formats. Some feature the occasional free pilot episode to get viewers interested in paying for the service as well. However, one thing that often separates these from television is they feature internet celebrities. Many of these are ways for people online to take their content and make money outside of the YouTube format. Which can be very help and lead to more quality of content.

One of the older shows I wanted to talk about was called Table Flip. This show featured members from the YouTube channel GameGrumps. In this show they played a variety of tabletop games, and featured an assortment of online personas. This show while it lasted created a large interest for tabletop and board games. I think this show created a good deal of success for the channel. I think this type of service provides a chance for different types of entertainment to exist. Many shows like this one wouldn’t function well on television today due to the types of people who prefer streaming.

Another show that was featured in alternative formats was HarmonQuest. This show was based around Dan Harmon and many of his friends playing dungeons and dragons. Dan Harmon as many people know has worked on shows such as Community and Rick and Morty. This show I think is something else that couldn’t exist without internet following. Dan Harmon has had much a following behind him and his work over the years, with the type of audience interested in dungeons and dragons and specifically Dan Harmon is very niche. More and more of these shows developing on services such as Polaris, Seeso, and VRV need these types of audiences, for without them many of these shows wouldn’t exist.

24 Hour Animation

So this post is a bit later than when I normally post my blog for the week. That’s because I wanted it to be about my beforehand thoughts on the event. In a little under 4 hours from now, myself and 4 other group members from the Animators Guild at GVSU will be taking on a challenge. This challenge will be the task of creating a 30 second animated short  within a 24 hour time limit. Now last year I had to complete a full minute of animation in a semester. While that was  a very challenging and time constricted task it makes me wonder how the next 24 hours will go.

I can admit, I am very excited for this event. I think that this will be very fun for us and a great way to test our group at project completion under massive time restraints. I think this will be a fun time for the 5 of us as we struggle and succeed. However, I am nervous as anybody would be going into this type of event. We will have no idea what the topic of it is until the very start and have no time to prepare besides setting up equipment. I don’t worry about us not succeeding, we have a good team and great faculty standing behind us to keep us moving. Its more just the nervousness created from not knowing what will happen and what could go wrong or right.

Either way, this is exciting and I am really looking forward to working on this project with my peers. I cant wait to see where the night takes us and what we will have created by tomorrow. We will be utilizing tech such as Dragonframe to focus on stop motion techniques. We will also be utilizing some techniques of claymation, paper cut outs, hand dawn, and possibly even 3D animation. But until then I will wait until the calm before the storm ends. Wish me and my fellow animators good luck! I will be having a follow up post on this next week!

Finalized Animation – The Lives We Live

This is it! The final project I have created for my Animation 2 class!