Robot movement example

This is an example of robot movement from the japanese anime "The order to stop construction". The robot in this film is very unstable and its character is clear through its twitching motions as it looks like it could break down at any moment. These are possible movements i could incorperate into my robot as is a good way of making the viewer beleive it is real and has character.



Steam robots

Chess piece - Knight

MOTIVATION - BE THE BEST YOU

Some food for thought

Chess piece - Rook

King chess piece

I have now finished modeling the king, queen and pawn chest pieces. I will continue to practice these and re do them if neccesary but I am now going to model the rest of the pieces to have a complete set.

                                   



Modeling - Queen piece test

I wasnt happy with how the top of the queen piece turnt out so i decided to start again from scratch. I am much happier with my second attempt.

This is a comparison between the first model I made and the improved version.

What is steam punk?

Steam punk is a genre of science fiction where steam power is used as the main power source for industrial technologies. Steampunk has become a subculture with a rather large following and doesn't just refer to books and novels written on the genre.With it being based on steam power most of the work on steampunk is set in an alternate universe of the 19th century and will normally incorperate fashion, culture and art similar to that era. Steampunk is influenced by, and often adopts the style of, the 19th-century scientific romances of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and Mary Shelley. Scientific romances and now commonly known as science fiction. Several pieces of work adapted the steam punk style before it was ever given a name. Most notibaly was Metropolis , a 1927 film by Fritz Lang. This film was set in 2026 in towrering city skyscrapers and featured robots and a stylistic genre which was uncommon at the time.

Although this genre had been around for decades the term Steampunk didn't arrive until the 1980s as a tounge in cheek variant of Cyber Punk. Cyber punk is a post modern scientific genre which focuses on advanced technologies and mega corporations. Many films show example of the cyber punk theme such as blade runner and total recall. Cyber punk has a strong influence in Manga and Anime and is very evident in Japanese culture and is well accepted. Animes that are well known and have adopted the cyber punk theme are Akira and Ghost in a Shell. 

Ghost in the shell

Akira

Steampunk has often moved away from just recreating known historical eras such as victorian and wild west and  has moved into fantasy worlds which rely on steam power technology. This is often incorporated into video games such as Final Fantasy and the Elder scrolls franchises. 

The Dwemer race in the Elder Scrolls video games is heavily influenced from steam punk technology and features a lot of giant cogs and mechanics and uses steam power. I will continue to research both steampunk and cyber punk and any ideas will be posted on here. 

Modeling Chess pieces - Pawn

Although I was happy at my fist attempt of the pawn piece I knew I could do better so i decided to practice and try again. I am much happier with the results 2nd time round.

Steam Punk Chess Robot Project

My task is to Design, build and animate a Chess Robot and its environment in the steam punk visual style that can apparently think, decide, pick and place objects. Your piece should focus on a limited "set" as quality and relevance is more important than volume, think elegant still life that moves.

The short film will be a vehicle to allow us to develop many aspects of the Animation Production pipeline, specifically on the creative side of the medium.

We were given examples such as the 1999 film Wild Wild West which incorporates a lot of the Steam Punk style. 

As well as getting some practice in modelling the required objects for this project such as chess pieces I am going to do some research into steam punk and related designs.

Early web page design

For my Interactive project at Uni we have to create  a 5 page website about ourselves. The challenge for me in this project is to somehow make the layout relate to my interests and influences and not just a basic web design.

A lot of  cartoons , movies and culture I am interested is from Japan. I even began to learn Japanese at Uni before it clashed with my timetable too much. I thought it would be good to incorperate this into my layout.

These were made on photoshop just as examples of how it may look. If i decide to go with this idea I will go into more depth.

History of animation

An interesting link to look at on the history of video games how it progressed over the years from black and white to the millions of colour we see on screen today.

http://www.thesmokingjacket.com/entertainment/the-colorful-history-of-video-game-animation

Last chance first edit

Here is the first edit of my short film "Last chance" for my film project. I still knew I had to make a few adjustments with the colour and credits but I wanted people to get the general idea of my edit and to get some feedback.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYbWijVcv24

Last Chance

Here is my final edit for my version of "Last Chance"

http://youtu.be/QerJgBeMDTI

Lighting Seminar

On friday we had a lighting seminar on how to use lights correctly during our films and how they would improve the quality of our footage. The use of good lighting can make our film go from looking home made to something quite professional. We had a lecture first which explained some of the technical terms and showed us some examples. We were told about Coherence, Colour Temperature and intensity.With coherence we were shown the difference between hard light and soft light . Hard light is a directional light source which is more focused and brings the detail as well as casting shadows. Soft light is a omni directional light source and gives softer edges as well as shadows.

We were shown different examples of lighting that we can use and also how to adjust the lighting using gels which can balance the light source.

We also had a chance to experiment with the equipment and were given a chance to try it for ourselves. We were put into groups and with some help and advice were able to set up the equipment satisfactorily.  We were given a camera to see how it looks on video and also to learn how to adjust the camera settings with the lighting setup such as the white balance and the iris . The iris controls how much light is let through the lens. The more the iris is opened the more light is let in.

The first light set up we had to do was 3 point lighting which consists of a key main light, a fill light for shadows and a back light.

                                                                      Key hard light:

Fill light - soft light 

Back light - hard light 

Afterwards we had to set up a low key light which usually just uses 1 or 2 lights. The aim was to keep the light focused on the person being interviewed in the shot and not have the background lightened up.

.

Movie posters

In our seminar we discussed the stories of our films and had to quickly come up with some potential tag lines. This helps us to sell our film and by the 3rd week of the project we should know the script and the genre fully.

We came up with a few ideas and the tag line i thought of "If only you could turn back time".  I thought of this because its a common phrase used when people regret something they have done or which they could do something again. This relates to our story with Andy grieving over the loss of his girlfriend. It also does not reveal the twist in the movie and can simply relate to them breaking up.

After the seminar we met up with our leading male and female actor to take some photographs. This was for the props used in the first scene where Andy is grieving looking through some photographs. After finding out we had to create movie posters as well we thought it would be a good idea to take as many pictures as possible to give us a lot of freedom with our designs.

I have not really watched many romantic films so i researched into movie posters to get an idea.  After doing the research I used some of the pictures we took to create 2 movie posters.


 The movie posters I researched:

 

My movie posters for Last Chance: