I have this beautiful set of The Lord of the Rings that caught my eye as I was looking around the apartment for something to shoot. I wanted to surround it with objects that felt like they were a part of the story and luckily I have a couple of prop replicas from the movies. I set the objects on a pillow covered with a black blanket for a neutral base. For the backdrop I put a picture of this painterly landscape on my TV and pushed the objects right up in front of it. Unfortunately it was very difficult to get everything in the shot without showing the frame of the TV.
I tried to frame the books at the center and make it clear that they were the focal point of the image. I had an old timey wooden chest in the frame but removed it because it pulled focus. I think with better lighting and a larger screen you could actually create a really cool effect this way!
The Superbowl is famous for having excellent ads; other than a few notable viral hits people rarely go out of their way to look up ads. Speaking as someone who has never seen a Superbowl I can tell you that I have actively looked up Superbowl commercials in the past. Here’s 5 arbitrary ads I found in a Youtube video, including the two I’m going to highlight:
Anthony Hopkins gives the performance of his life for some Cold Brew
The Coors Light train ruins a bunch of dry things and crashes into a family’s home
Vince Vaughn and Tom Brady encourage sports betting
Martin Lawrence lifts a golf cart over his head with the help of Oikos’ greek yogurt
The Budweiser clydesdales risk their lives to deliver some beer
Stunning.
Oikos Gives You Super Strength
In this ad Martin Lawrence and his buddy Shannon Sharpe crashed their golf cart into a pond. Mr. Sharpe recommends a tow truck but Martin Lawrence, enraged by his friend’s poor driving and boosted by the power of Oikos’ incredible protein-packed yogi, lifts the cart over his head and carries it out of the pond. Wow.
Pros
Snappy dialogue. The banter gets you right into the story and the actors are giving pretty good performances. I gather that Shannon Sharpe is a sports guy, not an actor, but he actually holds his own for the brief runtime. Martin Lawrence is of course wonderful.
It’s pretty funny. I love the absurd premise, it brings me joy. Eat Oikos, get strong enough to lift a golf cart. Simple.
Cons
For the amount of money they spent on the ad I’m sure they could have made lifting the golf cart look better. As it is it looks like its being held by a wire over Martin and while he does his best to sell it, it looks bad.
Personally I think the ad stands on its own without the added sting at the end with generic music and a narrator telling you Oikos makes you strong. You don’t have to tell us, I just SAW Martin Lawrence lift a golf cart.
Sir Anthony Hopkins Unleashes the Dragon
I’m just glad I got to hear some acting advice from the great Anthony Hopkins. Actually, I’m also glad to see he’s still alive; I could have sworn he had passed. For this ad academy award-winning actor Sir Anthony Hopkins prepares for his greatest acting challenge yet: being a football mascot. I had to double check this was a superbowl ad because he’s definitely running around a football field, not a football field. Anyway, at 86 years old it turns out his strength and agility on the field come from drinking Stok Cold Brew.
Pros
It’s funny. Sir Hopkins’ delivery and the cinemetography make you feel like he’s prepping for a big dramatic role, he’s actually running around in a dragon costume, everybody chuckles. I like a funny ad and I like an ad with a story to tell. This one delivers. And obviously, Anthony Hopkins delivers a performance worthy of 10 superbowl ads.
I also just think it’s shot well, especially in the beginning. It really highlights the pretentiousness of the first half before they give you the reveal.
Cons
No notes. I’m trying to find something to comment on. I think if you took out the fact that it was an advertisement this would function as just a great comedic sketch. The bit feels slightly disconnected from the product, but only just. It still makes me want to buy the cold brew, but I’m a sucker for cold coffee.
If I had to nit pick, the cinemetography and editing fall a little flat when we’re following (clearly not Anthony Hopkins in) the dragon costume on the field. The editing jumps around around, lighting feels off, crowd looks small. But that’s pretty minor.
Over all both ads are just solid additions to the always-wonderful superbowl commercial legacy.
Like pretty much everyone I’ve ever met I have a ton of unfinished projects. Or unstarted projects, in many cases. So it was easy to brainstorm a list of potential ideas. These are a mix of recent ideas I’ve had inspired by my classes at the SCCA and old projects I’ve been meaning to make for sometimes years.
A lot of these are directly related to my main hobby: creating and running tabletop roleplaying games for my friends. I’ve been running Dungeons and Dragons (and other, similar games) for almost 10 years now. I would love to find a way to share some of the incredible stories that my friends and I have created. That’s where ideas like the podcast and the “game diary” come from.
That’s the idea I explored for this excercise so I’ll give context: a game diary is essentially a summary of what happened in the game recorded either to share with others or just to keep track for yourself. You could write them down in a blog like this one or record yourself. It might sound weird but there’s a market for this kind of thing.
My personal favorites create visuals to go along with it. I’ve seen games turned into comics, puppet shows, or simple animations/animatics. The Legend of Vox Machina, produced by Amazon, is a show based on a game like this.
The Cold Road by Zee Bashew is my favorite example of what I’d like to create.
Without Amazon’s budget, I’d rather create something along the lines of Zee Bashew’s The Cold Road. It’s not fully animated, more like an animatic, with excellent sound effects and narration to bring the story to life.
Why this?
What I took away from Andrew Nedimar’s talk was that his personal projects were for him, not to further his career. I don’t see something like this becoming my life, I just think it’s a really wonderful way to bring the stories I love to life and share them with people outside of my small friend group. Also it would just be fun. That said, I think they would teach me useful skills as well.
I’d love to do design work in any of the overlapping circles that make up this weird venn-diagram: games, animation, video, fantasy, Youtube, etc. I think it would be hugely beneficial to learn more about how these things work and start to build my own online presence in the field.
Mood Board
I pulled together a number of inspirations for my board as well as some art from my first attempt a couple years ago. I got as far as putting together a 2D puppet I could rig for animation before getting overwhelmed and giving up.
I had this idea that I could use tokens on a map, like in the lower left, to give a general overview of the action and cut to rigged animations for more important moments. It was going to be a lot of work and I had no idea what I was doing.
Going back to school has shown me that I can do things I didn’t expect were possible. I’d love to give this project another try.
An Augmented Reality scene constructed in Adobe Aero
Background
For SCCA’s AR Module we were assigned the task of creating an AR scene in Adobe Aero. The constraints of the project were fairly broad with the suggestion of creating a holiday card using the built in assets and text in Adobe Aero. I chose to challenge myself to create an interactive scene using primarily found assets.
Process
Learning as I went, I customized a 3D model using Heroforge and downloaded it as a Unity3D file. I used Unity to apply textures to the model, exported it as an FBX file and used Blender to cut off the base of the 3D model. I used to Mixamo to apply animations to the model and downloaded those to use in Aero.
Within Aero I assembled my newly animated 3D model, the Android M4X, with a number of other assets sourced from Artstation, Sketchfab, and Mixamo itself. Every object had to be brought into Unity to apply the textures and export as an FBX file. Utilizing Aero’s system of triggers and actions I set up interactive elements. Tap on M4X and he’ll wave back at you. Get too close to him and he’ll start punching. Hit the door and he’ll be attacked by a mutant monster. Etcetera.
This was a time-consuming project but I was buzzing with every step. I surprised myself with how much I enjoyed digging into these programs that I had barely touched in the past.
Results
I hope one day I can show off a piece like this and claim that I constructed every object by hand. For now what this piece shows is my ability to learn on the fly and use a variety of complex programs like Unity and Blender to create something brand new. It also shows my ability to manipulate objects in a 3D space and set up triggered interactions to create a compelling scene.
I don’t have a huge sample size but the friends and family I showed it to loved it so the data is positive.
January 2nd was Science Fiction day and in its honor I chose to create an AR “Card” using Adobe Aero depicting a sci-fi scene. I spent hours listening to an extremely quiet tutorial on Youtube to make this work but it was the most fun I’ve had in weeks. This is a many step process but I’ll try and walk through it.
Heroforge
Meet M4X. He’s an android from the distant future.
This is Heroforge, a website for designing miniatures for tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons. You can fully customize your characters from a variety of fantasy and science fiction races with a huge range of clothes, armor, and gear. I knew you could download STL files for 3D printing from Heroforge and I had a feeling you could somehow use those to rig an animation in Blender. For the record, yes you can do that, but I found a much easier way to do it for this project.
I used this tutorial by Derrick Black on Youtube. First I bought the 3D Digital model of my custom mini from Heroforge and downloaded it as a Unity3D file. Using UtinyRipper I unpacked that file. I’ll be honest I don’t know what this step did but it was necessary.
In Unity I was able to import the mesh and texture files as a gameobject. I created a new Material and applied it to the model. Each of the textures unpacked from the Unity3D file could be applied to the various layers of the material. I still don’t know what an Albedo is but I must have done it right because everything looked good in the end.
Within Unity I used a plugin called FBX Export to (as the name suggests) export M4X as an FBX file. With the FBX file properly textured, I uploaded it to Mixamo.
Mixamo is a website owned by Adobe with a large collection of stock animations and a few pre-rigged characters. I uploaded the file and realized I’d made a horrible mistake. By default Heroforge minis come with bases attached so they don’t fall over when you’re using them in tabletop games. I forgot to remove M4X’s base.
Mixamo’s auto-rigger did not understand what was happening down there. The result was a mess and any animations stretched the base between the feet. I’d already paid for the Heroforge model with the base, if I edited it I would have to pay again. So I took the FBX file into Blender.
I’m no Blender expert but with a quick tutorial I was able to figure out how to select and delete vertices. It turned out to be really simple. I managed to remove the base while keeping the feet intact and uploaded the fixed model to Mixamo.
Much better. You’ll notice the “Send to Aero” button in the upper right! Unfortunately it just tells you to download the file normally and suggests you use it in Aero. This is the point when I realized I wouldn’t need to animate the rig myself. The tutorial suggests using the rig from Mixamo in Blender but I didn’t need to customize anything for my purposes! The animations were right here for the taking.
I spent the rest of the night downloading animations, fixing error messages, and setting up triggers in Aero. I grabbed a ton of other sci-fi themed assets from Artstation, Sketchfab, and Mixamo itself to build my scene. I grabbed some ambient music and a couple of other sound clips off of Youtube with a Chrome extension. As a quick note, for every 3D asset I grabbed online I had to go through Unity to apply the textures and export the FBX file.
I added a ton of triggers and interactions. Some were really simple, like starting the ambient noise and having M4X stand up and start to idle when the scene starts. Others, like that monster of nested actions, were obviously more complex. But I really loved working with Aero! The way actions trigger and queue up feels really intuitive to me. Everything I imagined I could add worked exactly the way I expected it.
And here’s the final product:
This was a lot of fun! It was a real exercise it troubleshooting. I really want to finish following that tutorial and learn how to rig the model for Blender but that’s a project for another day. Happy Sci-Fi Day I guess!
