Alien: Creating and Animating using Maya 2013

Week 1: Reference and building the mesh

Coming back over the summer it was difficult to get back into using Maya, but after a couple of sessions i managed to get into the hang of it. Initially having troubles with extruding the body from the head, i managed to grasp it and feel relatively happy with the shape and scale.

Week 2: UV Editing and Texturing

I learnt a new way of uv mapping, which involved cutting the edges and unfolding the map. It took a while to get to grips with the process in which you need to do it in, but by week three i was up to date with a textured alien. I had to make sure everything was mapped including the inside of his mouth, even if i was only going to darken it out, so you wouldn't see though it's head.

Week 3: Creating the skeleton; Joints & Rigging

I must have lost concentration in creating the joints as i didnt follow the process 100% correctly. i missed out on a few finger/thumb/hand joints, aswell as the forearm joint. This came to haunt me later in the binding process when i wanted to add rolling the forearm and clinching the hand movements.

Week 4: Creating controllers; Skinning & Binding

Every step of the tutorial was so important as if i'd missed one controller the animating would become a lot more challenging, as if it wasn't challenging enough. having the changes of colour on the controllers helped me achieve the correct process.

I entered a few troubles when binding the ik handles and parenting the joints. I got very confused during the tutorials and the process took a lot longer than i expected. Just one minor mistake like chosing a different type of constraint would affect the rest of the animating so i had to make sure it was 100% correct. One mistake i encounter on was when i was setting up the groups for the reverse foot lock, which i had done correct. i made the mistake of applying the set driven keys to the ik handles rather than the spacific groups i had made. This wouldn't allow me to have the feet animate in the way it should do.

Due to me having troubles with the ik handles i left the alien alone for a little bit whilst i got on with my environment. When it got to the deadline i had only just managed to make the alien walk and jump. The walk wasn't to a great standard.

If i could go back and start the alien again, i would make sure the joints were all correct, with none missing. And i would take more time out to animate the alien, and to have sorted out my ik handle troubles sooner. Overall i was pleased with the look and satisfied with how i animated it.

SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis is a useful technique for understanding your Strengths and Weaknesses, and for identifying both the Opportunities open to you and the Threats you face. Used in both business and personal context it will help me find which areas i should be most concerned of myself that will drag me down, and which areas that will carry me forward in life in general.

The outcome was somewhat, not surprising for myself. I've always been told my organisation skills were pretty poor and my time management is clearly not great if I'm cramming most my work in the last few weeks before a deadline. Being intimidated by projects and feeling overwhelmed isn't a new feeling for me either, however it is an emotion i've only recently began to accept and understand why i've always had mental blocks in front of me when it comes down to starting a project. This effects my time management and organisation.

I'd forgotten to mention my processing problem in my threats and weaknesses. I struggle to take in instructions and follow guidelines, even after being told i feel i needed to be reminded on instructions. This was something i was made aware of towards the start of secondary school but have only recently understood some ways it has effected me. For example I have songs that has well over 100 and 200 plays on Itunes and still don't know any of the words. I am booked in for a dyslexia test this November so I hope to find out a lot more about myself, and i'm starting to ask more questions.

Panopticism COP

Lecture 3 - 25/10/2012

Panopticism - Richard Mills

'Literature, art and their respective producers do not exist independently of a complex institutional framework which authorises, enables, empowers and legitimises them. This framework must be incorporated into any analysis that pretends to provide a thorough understanding of cultural goods and practises.' - Randal Johnson in Walker & Chaplin (1999)

aim:
-to understand the principles of the panopticon
-understand Michael Foucault's concept of 'Disciplinart society'
-consider the idea that disciplinary society is a way of making individuals productive and useful.
-understand Foucault's idea of techniques of the body and docile bodies.

Michael Foucault (1926 - 1984)
-madness and civilisation
-discipline and punish: the birth of the prison

The emergence of forms of knowledge - biology  psychiatry, medicine etc legitimise the practices of hospitals, doctors, psychiatrists.

Foucault aims to show how these orms of knowledge and institutions like the prison, asylum, hospital and schools, now affect human beings in such a way that they alter our consciousness and that they internalise our responsibility

Disciplinary society and disciplinary power

'Panopticism'

Panopticism named after Jeremy Bentham’s building called The Panopticon, proposed in1791 – designed as a multifunctional building eg hospital, prison, work house, asylum etc.

The Tate Modern was originally a Panopticon prison

Has an effect, that is completely opposite from a dungeon – where your hidden, locked away in the dark alone, where your forgotten about. Whereas the panopticon is very open. Because your constantly reminded that your being watched, there’s no point in miss behaving because you’ll be spotted.

The panopticon internal………

Panopticism – hence the manjor effect of the panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power (Foucault, 1975) (a machine for the automatic functioning of power)

Allows scrutiny

Allows supervisor to experiment on subjects

Aims to make them productive

Reforms prisoners

Helps treat patients

Helps instruct schoolchildren

Helps confine but also study the insane

Helps supervise workers

Helps put beggars and idlers to work

The link between this lecture and the gaze and the media, woman now act in a certain way in the gaze of men. Prisoners, workers in the panopticon act in the way of the industry.

What Foucault is describing Is a transformation in Western societies from a form of power imposed by a ruler or sovereign to…. A new mode of power called panapticism.

The panopticon is a model of how modern society organizes its knowledge, its power, its surveillance of bodies and it’s training

Can spot this system of panopticism in everyday life, there’s a form of panoptic power in everything.

Eg. open plan work space, changes the behavior of the workers. It’s about visibility and being scrutinized. Once you notice that you start to discipline yourself and changing your behavior.

In a pub, you start to behave consciously or sub consciously in a responsible way if it’s an open plan. A place away from scrutiny where you can relax more, like in a shelter.

The IT staff can go onto peoples accounts from their computers in the college. They can check history of websites, documents, even key strokes per minute!

Relationship between power, knowledge and the body

‘power relations have an immiediate hold upon it (the body); they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’ (Foucault 1975)

Disciplinary society produces what Foucault calls: -‘docile bodies’

Self monitoring

Self correcting

Obedient bodies

Disciplinary techniques

That the techniques of discipline and ‘gentle punishment’ have crossed the threshold from work to play shows how pervasive they have become within modern western societies

-no coincidence that theres usually a big, visable window at the gym. Makes the person working out want to show off their health and physic

Foucault and power

His definition is not a top-down model as with Marxism

Power is not a thing or a capacity people have – it is a relation between different individuals and groups, and only exists when it is being exercised

The exercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be resisted

Where there is power there is resistance

Facebook is an area where your under constant scrutinity

Things to take away

Michel Foucault

Panopticism as a form of discipline

Techniques of the body

Docile bodies

BATMAN The Dark Knight Rises EXCLUSIVE

When being asked what i'd like to do when i'm older, or the path i'd like to head down in the future, my first initial reaction is to say film. Originally I came onto the course for my interest in animation and fascination of game making. Over the past year, being behind a camera, as well as being able to be practical and getting out there to produce short film is something i'd like to extend on. In any big project we do I find myself very overwhelmed. Jumping over those hurdles of ideas, creativity, being able to write a script down on paper and to and show it on camera. Then post production. It's all a big process that can pull you down when you can't see the final product.

For me when watching a movie, I get that butterfly feeling that brings me down and forces questions in my mind. 'Am i capable of writing something like that?' 'Could i come up with interesting camera shots like that?' 'Would i be brave and confident enough to hand out different roles within the film industry and act like a director?' I struggle to get my head round how such a massive production is taken place, and so when I was asked to write about what skills i'd like to learn this year I felt that i needed to go and visit like shoots. See for myself how the role of the director or d.o.p is fulfilled and is that a serious route i'd like to go in the future.

There are many skills i'd like to better myself out and this includes many of the practical side of things rather than the pre and post production side. Getting behind a camera for example, shooting great images or taking complete control of how i perceive and script to create a piece of film that's seen with my eyes.

To help me gain experience and confidence, i'm going to be looking for film sets in the UK where I could be allowed to have a look at whats going on and how the set is being run. An internship or placement is something i'd like to atleast attempt to carry out at some point over my education studies. I'd also like to create various short movies of my own this year so I could really gain on my experience from last year and build on my set of skills and knowledge.

Making of BBC Olympic theme tune and trail

The BBC ran a campaign to create a soundtrack and use the music for their theme of the Olympics over the summer. Creative agency Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe Y&R developed the concept and the animation was created by Passion Pictures and produced by Red Bee Media. The landscape of the United Kingdom inspired the animators to transform the surroundings of both rural and urban locations into a giant sporting arena inside the Olympic Stadium. When i first saw these adverts during the course of the Olympics, i was amazed at how well the music complimented the animation and how it really captured many aspects of the high emotions running through London and the UK at the time.


This video is mainly focusing on the soundtrack, and how Elbow took the concepts of the animation and the development of how they managed to produce the end product.


Their task; to create the soundtrack and theme tune for the Olympics. Telling a story; comes from the script written by the agency.


The agency wrote a script, and the animators then did an interoperation of it. Pate Canderland, the animation director said theres a classic 3 X stretch at the athletics which he wanted to work around. If you take sprinting for example theres the waiting, the gun that goes off, the running and then the finish line. He could then work on the emotions of all steps in the course, at the same time Elbow wanted to incorporate these same emotions in the music.


Elbow started off just by tapping their own legs and making a beat, slowly making a rhythm and moving on from there. It had to be epic and over the top. They creating the music from the storyboards. The first thing you hear in the soundtrack is the brass fan fair, the first 5 notes represent the 5 rings of the Olympics sign. The aim was when people heard these notes they knew it was the Olympics. 

Inspiration comes from anywhere and every where. During the course of writing the lyrics, Guy Garvey was most inspired when Pete baby daughter walked for the first time. He took that feeling of pride and passion and wrote the lyrics about being there with you and backing your team. At the Olympics there are so many more losers than winners, Garvey felt it was only right to include the sadness of losing, yet let the music make you feel reassured. Elbow were purposely chosen for the writing of the music as you can feel whats going on within their music, it's ups and down and the emotional attachment to their writing.

As for the animation, Pete was inspired by the lighting on the streets outside his office. Born out of London and the UK, it's the small things aswell he felt that had really inspired him like the mood on the streets and just people walking around. You can see how he's incorporated this in the animation itself. Understandably he wanted to pay as much respect to the athletes as possible, creating fantasy superhero yet at the same time realistic characters in the animations. He mentioned it would be a classic theme to include sunny skys for the Olympics, but instead they wanted to create mood by showing overcast skys with sun breaking into the gaps.

By throwing in a gospel choir it made the music more powerful and emotional. It was the coming together as all of the UK as viewers of the olympics.


I've wondered a long time, when making a short film that what would be more suitable, creating the music first or making the film first. For a band as talented as Elbow they quickly got off the mark with a quick beat that they could then build and add on to over a period of time. I can take the inspirations of the quality of work that was done both with the animation and soundtrack; they wanted an epic, emotional sound to compromise the large scale event, and when i was watching the Olympics i felt all of this. Thinking of sound for our animation with the two characters, we don't expect to use much dialogue, and with the type of mood we're going for i think a simple piano soundtrack could work but we will decide once the animation is complete.

The Gaze & The Media COP

Lecture 2 – 18/10/2012

The gaze and the media

‘according to usage and conventions…. ‘

evidence of womens body being looked had, going back to nude painting of hans memling ‘vanity’. Womans face reflecting in the mirror is rendered wrong. Strange distorted view of her face.  Mirror placed in her hand as a distracting device.

Image 2, focul point is inbetween the knees, were lead to imagine shes thinking ‘how do I look’

Lectuer on depicting woman and how do they look

Alexander cabanel ‘birth of venus’ 1863

Mythological painting, of woman as a goddess of the sea. Sendimental and virginal picturing of the woman

Interesting position of the man, reclining on a wave. Covers her own eyes and face with her hands – quite often used in advertising and photography

Sophie dahl for opium – reclining figure, ¾ of picture taken up by the naked body

More contempory than the paintings

The advert was deemed too sexual

Image was turned when published because it too emphasis off the body and concentrated more on the face

Titian’s Venus of Urbino 1538

Very casual, not active positioning for the hand

Manet – Olympia 1863

Hand is assertive, refers her to a prostitute, flower in the hair, neck tie, exquisite cloth, being offered flowers, position of her body and the way she looks at us (head positions for example) she lifts it as shes addressing us.

Ingres ‘le grand odalisque’ 1814

Made into a poster

Manet – bar art the folies bergeres 1882

Woman standing with arms open, perception is us standing infront of the bar, with her behind it waiting to serve us. We see her from 2 positions

Jeff wall ‘picture for women’ 1979

Rosling coward 1984

The camera in comtemporary media has been put to use as an extension of the male gaze at woman on the streets

This kind of idea that’s repeated in billboard insudtry – used so much that it now goes unnoticed. It’s in the subconscious, acceptable.

Use of sunglasses means the figure, the woman cant look back at us. Instead of the hand from years ago, the eyes are now covered by a fashion accessory, glasses.

Eva herzigova, 1994

‘hello boys’

Rosling Coward 1984

The profusion of images which characterizes contemporary society could be seen as an obsessive distancing of women, a form of voyeurism

Peeping tom, 1960 – extension of idea of where voyeurism can go.

Im in your movies …

Marilym: William travilas dress from the seven year itch 1955

Cinema is a perfect environment for voyeurism (the practice of obtaining sexual gratification by looking at sexual objects or acts, especially secretively.)

Artemisia Gentileschi Judith beheading Holofernes

Cindy Sherman ‘ entitled film still #6 1977-79

Includes mirror in her hand, but facing the other way

Caught her in the act is not quite clear

Leave audience not quite sure where to look at

Theres an awkwardness in the picture with her hand by her chin

Know it Sherman in the image

Effective position as in we don’t know what to think of the image

Barbara Kurger ‘your gaze hits the side of my face’ 1981

Sarah lucas ‘eating my banana’ 1990

Self conscious

self portrait with fried eggs 1996

tracy emin – money photo 2001

gaze in media

Amanda knox trial

Amanda knox is a witch? Sorry, are we living in 1486? – joanne smith, guardian 2011

Knox/sollecito case

Social networking is used to preputuate the male gaze/the gaze of the media

The body is broken into gragments coud be female

Plays on teenagers bodys image

Susan Sontag 1979 –on photography

Paparazzi shot of princess Diana

Reality TV

Appears to offer us the position as the all seeing eye the power of gaze

Allows us a voyeuristic passive consumption of a type of reality

Editing means that there is no reality

Contestants are aware of their representation (either as tv professionals or as people who have watched the show)

The Truman Show 1988 director Peter Weir

Discovers his life is actually a stage set and everything that happens is a staged event.

Big brother, it’s the male and female bodys we look at

Voyeurism therefore becomes everyday

People offer themselves as a passive experience

Looking is not indifferent. There can never be any question of ‘just looking’