Good Will Hunting

I was watching Good Will Hunting recently for the first time, i had no idea what it was about but had heard it was a must see. From the moment Matt Damon answered the challenging maths question, I knew it was obvious it was something to do with him being a genius. It was obvious, the directer had to show what the film was going to be about at some stage and at that point it became clear.

Reflecting on my first directed film, Isolated, I had thought about my story not being so obvious. I asked many people for feedback on what they thought it was about, how i perceived the filming itself and what the message was and it was all roughly similar. The camera holding memories or the friend being haunted or scared. Watching Good Will Hunting made me think however obvious a story is its better to know whats going on than to not realise at all and take the wrong message from the film.

I can take this learning curb and in future work i will attempt to make my story more clear for the audience to understand.

Level of Detail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail

Jorge - Short animation

This short shows a robot or something from the future punch the camera and break the screen. The camera effects were created in after effects. The music goes really well with the build up to the character and you don't expect him to punch the screen. The sound is placed well and makes it realistic which i want to attempt to capture in my film. Where the tortoise squashes the hare i want a cd scratch sound effect to show how he failed to mock the tortoise.

Teddy Newton

Teddy's directional debut animation came with Pixar's short film 'Day and Night'

I think it's really clever how they include 2d and 3d animations and combine it together. The two characters were hand drawn and the animations inside the silhouettes were rendered in 3d.

Teddy was inspired by a lecture he attended back in 1970 where Dr. Wayne Dyer said;


"Fear of the unknown. They are afraid of new ideas. They are loaded with prejudices, not based upon anything in reality, but based on … if something is new, I reject it immediately because it’s frightening to me. What they do instead is just stay with the familiar. You know, to me, the most beautiful things in all the universe are the most mysterious."


I can understand why he was inspired by that quote. It's always difficult once being inspired, to go ahead and actually create a piece because there are so many boundaries to get past.

Cyriak

Learnt storyboarding and essays on post modernism
first animation in 2004 on queen picking her nose
did similar animation in 2009

worked in a office for 2 years and got made redundant as he didn't do anything

became a freelance
bounces around between doing his own thing and being commissioned for jobs

softwares used: photoshop - cutting out photos
and after effect for animating, and his brain for the ideas

he gets his crazy ideas from things he hates, things he likes and horrible things.

Cyriak comes up with strange, demented, good ideas and nightmares

Cyriak lives a very basic life and very much in the now.
doesn't remember two weeks ago and doesn't know what he's doing in two weeks time.

In his spare time he drinks tea, messes about, works on personal projects, sleeps and waits for clients, which he says wastes most of his time!

It's weird to think that animators are just every day people and live very normal and basic lives which doesn't make them superior to students learning animation. I always find it very intimidating by peers and professionals that their talents are far superior than mine, which i feel gets in the way of my work.
I think Cyriak's work is very unique and he's very talented but it's warming to know of his every day life and that he aswell struggles and stresses to come up with ideas at times. This inspires me to go and make a cup of tea when working.

Little n' Large Animatic

The animatics like a moving storyboard, I screen shot the positions i wanted to capture on my film and created the animatic. Which then made the filming of my animation a lot easier. Some of the camera shots i got i was comparing different positions i may want to use which makes it a little bit longer than i will film for but it's more or less what i want, without the background.

Little n' Large animation in progress

I took screen shots of my updated environment with my characters placed in their starting positions. I created more and bigger trees for a bigger emphasis with more sand to show more ground and more room for the hare to move around on. I feel it's fairly neat and once i put in a sky background with some clouds it will bring more life to the animation.

Her Morning Elegance

Oren Lavie sang and directed this music video. It's a stop motion animation piece that earnt pundits all over the world in 2009 and earned a grammy award nomination  for best short form music video, and won 9 awards including being nominated for 2010 grammy awards for best music video, Cannes and LA film festival.

The video took 6 weeks of scripting, 3 weeks of storyboarding in animatics, 48 hours of shooting. 2096 still photos were taken. 

The video really exaggerates the feeling you get when listening to the song itself. It's hard to hear this song without thinking about the video which is a good thing. It's very inspirational and took loads of hard work and has got to be an extremely difficult task directing. You have got to be a perfectionist. Being a fellow Israeli, i feel like the world is my oyster and no matter what religion or where you come from , if your work is good enough you can take the world by storm and inspire those out there.

Little n' Large Hare

The hare at first was a difficult model to create. I struggled using the extrude tool but after a while i was used to it and softened the edges, brought in the face to give the texture the toy itself had and to make it a little more realistic. I then added the UV map to create the same texture used on the hare toy to bring it to life. 

Little n' Large Tortoise

I gave the creation of the tortoise a couple of attempted until i got it right, but once i found my flow it was fairly easy. I felt the outcome was even better than i had expected especially after my first few attempts. The texture on the shell looks life like almost, if I had looked more into the textures for the rest of the body and placed real life UV mapping onto the skin it would look life like. 

Judging eachothers performances

This was very tense and so difficult. We had 5 questions to answer and mark ourselves out of 10 but had to divide the marks between 4 of us. It was hard to judge our own performances without saying i did more than you or you were less organised than me bla bla. We all had our own roles and each role was as important as everyone elses on our team.

Cinematographers Influences

Matthew Libatique - Requiem for a Dream

Wally Pfister - Momento, The Dark Knight, Batman Begins, Inception, The Italian Job

Roger Deakins - The Shawshank Redemption 

Jeff Cronenweth - Social Network

Tom Swindell

Tom is a freelancer cameraman and director. He filmed directed and edited this music video recently. I'm assuming it's about street life in Bristol, Wales. It's a very interesting video, it's all filmed in black and white. Everyone's got their fingers over their mouths and it mentions love and peace and life a lot, and everyone in the video seems to be happy and giving off a good vibe. The shots are quick and a lot of close ups, sometimes using POV shots.
The video fits very well with the video itself you could really get a feel for the video, whilst listening to the song which i think no matter how much relevance the video has with the song, as long as the song makes sense to the beat or the lyrics than its half way there to being a successful video.

I tweeted Tom regarding his video and he replied to me saying to look out for his messages on facebook when he needs an assistant. Hopefully i can broaden this networking opportunity and find some work.

- It was a while now since i spoke with Tom but so far no work has come about, i'm hoping whilst being in London for the summer i will be able to get in contact with him and find some experience in film directing