The Prominence of VFX

I discovered the book Digital Storytelling by Shilo McClean, which scarily seems to answer a lot of my questions about VFX and narrative.
She classes VFX in 8 categories - Invisible, Seamless, Documentary, Exaggerated, Fantastical, Surreal, New Tradionalist and HyperReal!

Mostly I have been stuck talking like a critic - in terms of prominence and spectacle but this beek has really opened up the language for me!  McClean has anylised of 500 films to come up with these categories and I am forever grateful.

Going with these I was able to look at things a different way and think about why it is that spectacular effects can draw such negative criticism.

If there is a scale of prominence upon which each of these effects can sit, or rather a scale of awareness or activity, with regards to plot then the plot becomes the deciding factor in what is or is not acceptable to an audience.  This ties right back to Stephen Prince's idea of Perceptual Reality because an audience can be asked to believe almost anything so long as the correct conventions have been set up before hand.  The plot weaves a line through this scale, running the gamut of VFX in the process.  Should any effect appear to have more weight than the plot will be inevitably right right of course and it may be hard to recover an audience from such a thing.  The planet example above is the perfect metaphor - the more "mass" the effect has the greater the gravitational "pull" it has on the plot.

Animex 2015

Harry, Jack, Pip and I all went down to Middlesborough to attend Animex for a couple of days!

It was excellent - there were talks from Ed Hooks, VFX artists from The Mill, MPC, ILM, Framestore and Zach Parrish was here all the way from Disney!

It was pretty cool to get to talk to a few of the companies - I really liked the sound of The Mill; Tom, the recruiter made it seem awesome!  They do a lot of adverts and I like the idea of doing shorter kinds of projects like that I think it might be challenging!

And I got on really well with the girl, Millie, from MPC she was hilarious!

I tried to discuss my honours project idea with many of them but a lot of them have worked as artists mostly on the post production side of things so didn't have much to comment on the things from the pre-production side, although Millie did put me on to her friend Simon who at least got what I was trying to say.  I get the feeling though from much of what they say that it's a kind of an amorphous process so in some cases there is flexibility for input and in others not.

The talks on things like Groot were completely mindblowing and it was fun getting a bit of insight into Disney's processes from Zach!

Great experience to get to the festival!  

Also Song of the Year now btw =P

Iain McCaig Interview

I really liked this!

It's great to see the enthusiasm of someone who has worked for so long and still loves art and his work so much.  The comments on movement and story were quite useful.  I like the idea of looking at characters at a turning point, where some sort of great change may be happening.
I think as a focus on story and character for my project this might give the characters the meaning and be a useful form for giving the narrative some depth.

Dust Trail...

I tried another photo manipulation to achieve some sort of effect.  I tried to make it look like the I was appearing mid walk out of particles of dust.  The first attempt looked a little static so I tried giving it a little motion blur.  It goes a way to improving it but it could be better.  I think something of a bigger, more variable trail might give a better impression but it is an interesting test anyway.

Presentation

We had more presentations today!

I discussed the ideas of the the chart, my two ideas for a story and what Brian had told me about story in general as well.

I said I agreed with Lynn that the magic showdown one was more interesting but I don't actually believe that.  I would much rather do the adaptation idea even though I was dead set against adapting anything originally.

The main thing though is that there could be the potential to get lost in unnecessary things like dialogue and trite notions so I definitely think the other choice is better that way.  It's the least developed of the two though so that is going to be difficult.  It has moved so far away from the original idea already which was a lot more shallow in terms of scope.

The rest of the presentation was fine though with not much to say.

Effects test 1

So I made a couple of images to experiment with the style of how people with powers might manifest themselves.  With the first one, I tried to achieve something of an antagonistic character.  The cool blue of the lightning and the bright blue colour in the iris give the image a rather sinister feel, as does the grey colour grading on the skin and overall.

In the second image I tried to match the quality of the colour with the first image but wanted something friendlier than the electricity.  I think the first image is more effective than the second one in what it tries to communicate; the second could do more to show the identity of the person.  Perhaps a different pose would help but it may be difficult with so very little in the frame.

Five People Adaptation Idea

I tried to work through an idea of how to adapt this book in a unique way.
My initial idea looks a little like this:

In a more detailed way it shows a young girl having entered the afterlife having her journey interrupted and the opportunity to return to her life is presented to her.
I like the idea a lot, although like the other idea I am having trouble with coming to an ending but that is okay I think it will come in time.
This one has less chance for spectacular kinds of effects but there is definitely scope to utilise some kinds of invisible and seamless effects!  The trick will be to not make things arbitrary or stereotypical, which is difficult around religious-style themed stories.