Let’s talk Superbowl Commercials

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.

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.

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

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!

How did we decide on a theme?

We settled on Movie Theaters almost immediately! Theaters have a lot of information that changes often: what shows are showing and when, what are the movies about, etc. We thought we could easily make that information more readily available with panels! Plus, Theaters are everywhere and it was pretty convenient for purposes of filming. I chose the Siff Cinema across the street from campus since there isn’t a theater near my home.

Building the Panels

We agreed on some basic info we wanted to include in the panels: The movie title, rating, genre, and showtimes on one panel. A few still shots, the basic plot, and the principle cast on the other. And in the middle, a trailer! The idea was that as you were watching by the theater you could see a movie poster and want to learn more, so you scan a QR code and instantly have everything you could want to know.

We connected over slack for the overall shape and composition of the panels, which I built in Illustrator. I picked a couple of colors from the poster of the movie I’d chosen, Poor Things; a subtle cream and a light blue for an understated look.

For the trailer I found a short trailer on Youtube and used a Chrome extension to download it at the worst quality possible. The file was just barely too large so I cut the trailer down in Premiere to make it fit. Then I just assembled everything in Eyejack, et voila!

It takes a lot succeed in your career and pay off your student loans! And like a swiss army knife you need a lot of tools on hand to reach that goal. Here I’m gonna make like some ikea furniture and break down… some of the tools in my tool belt.

To know what tools I need, first I need to know what I want to do. I spent the first quarter just happy to be here, unsure of what my goals really are. It’s starting to set in that I need to think ahead if I want to actually end up with the right tools. I’d hate to end up with nothing but a hammer when my dream is sawing, for example.

My passion in life is telling stories that entertain people. One way or another I want to get involved in an industry that indulges that passion. Movies, animation, game design, book covers: these are where I’ve set my sights.

So, what tools do I have?

A big ol’ creative brain. I may not have flexed this skill professionally but I’ve been making shit up all my life. I love Dungeons and Dragons (and other better-but-lesser-known rpgs) and I’ve been running games for my friends for years. I’ve spent hours painting world maps that only 4 or 5 people will see, dreaming up obscure lore for gods and goblins, detailing the intracies of ork culture, and writing twists to shake my players to their core.

Improvisation. I yes-and with the best of them. Inevitably, despite careful planning, my players will zig where I expected them to zag and I need to come up with the culture of the obscure world they crash-landed on and bring a character to life that didn’t exist two seconds ago. Outside of games, this skill makes me quick on my feet and capable of winging-it when I need to.

Theater?? I’ve been acting in shows since I was 10 years old and I’ve been in dozens of shows. How does this apply? I’m figuring that out, but it’s in my belt. I’ve also done multiple voice acting jobs which are at least tangentially related to some of the fields I’m interested in. Theater does teach you: teamwork, memorization, communication, listening, research, vocal control, and how to use your body. Some of those are definitely useful skills.

What am I working on?

These are the skills that I have that need work.

Illustrator. Thanks Jason. I’ve started down this path but there’s a plenty of work ahead. I had dabbled in Illustrator before this program but it turns out I didn’t know the pen from brushes.

Photoshop. I’ve used Photoshop in the past for painting so I have a general understanding of the layout. I know how to import custom brushes use multiple layers to built up a character illustration. I know Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool that I’ve barely scratched the surface of and I’m looking forward to learning more.

Elements of Character Design. This is more of a pet project but it’s definitely something I’m keen on learning more. I’ve got the basics of building a recognizable silhouette, using a strong color palette, shape language, etc. A lot of this is theoretical knowledge that I need to learn to put to practice.

Illustration/Art. I have vastly overestimated my skills in the past, but I’ve also created some stuff I’m pretty damn proud of. I’ve got a lot of love for traditional art and illustration and I’ve claimed to be an illustrator in the past but I need to put in the mileage and turn into an actual tool in my belt.

What do I need?

I don’t know! But here are some things I think would be useful or I just really want to learn!

Animation I recently tried my hand at animation and it was excrutiating and made me want to throw my laptop across the room. But then I finished and hit the play button and it was like magic. Whether this I use this for motion graphics or character animation I really want to learn this skill.

So much I don’t even know yet. Sometimes I feel so ignorant when I try and talk about what I want to do after the program. This is just a case of not knowing what I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe the elements of design that I’m missing. I’m excited to find out.

I took the prompt of “Stone-Age Home Entertainment” and attempted to get Bing’s AI (powered by Dall-E 3) to generate the image. The scene I wanted to see was this: A couple of Neanderthals are watching a big stone television perched on the tusks of an unamused Wooly Mammoth. I avoided specifics in my description because I’ve used this generator before and I know that it gets finnicky.

Each prompt generates 4 images which I’ll include because they’re fun. The first prompt I gave the AI:

Two neanderthals watch a stone-age tv perched on the tusks of a wooly mammoth. The wooly mammoth is not amused.

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So the idea of having the TV on the tusks was just being missed entirely. I assumed it was because of my word choice: “perched” is a weirdly specific word that apparently brought birds to mind. I also wanted to make the results more cartoony and less realistic so I added my favorite Neanderthal-cartoonist to the prompt.

In the style of a farside cartoon. Two neanderthals watch a stone-age tv. The TV is sitting on the tusks of a wooly mammoth. The wooly mammoth is not amused.

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Stylistically closer to what I wanted, but definitely not Farside. Though I should probably be glad they aren’t stealing from Gary Larson. The TV is still not on the ground. I have at this point fully given up on the idea that it would somehow show the Mammoth’s face through the frame. I decided to add a perspective to the prompt to try and get that over-the-shoulder shot I wanted from the beginning. I also changed “not amused” to “annoyed” to try and get a more intense expression on the mammoth.

In the style of a farside cartoon. A stone-age television is being held up by the tusks of a wooly mammoth. The wooly mammoth is annoyed. The camera is looking at this over the shoulders of two neanderthals.

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Okay well that thing is kind of a mammoth, and it is holding the TV. The over-the-shoulder shot was surprisingly successful although throwing the word “camera” in the mix added some freaky hallucinations in the first image.

Overall I’ve found in the past that Bing (or Dall-E) does best with open-ended prompts that don’t get too specific. If you come to the generator with a specific image in mind you’re going to be disappointed. As a little experiment I just fed them “Stone-Age Home Entertainment” and got this frustratingly nice image:

Clearly this technology has a ways to go and I have to work on the prompts I feed it. Too often a bit of language I used (perched, camera) became an unintended element of the cartoon. However, as a way of quickly iterating on ideas and generating inspiration it’s a very useful tool.

Also, I know Midjourney and some of the more powerful paid image generators can create some pretty impressive stuff. I can imagine those tools would be incredibly useful for generating textures and images for designers to manipulate further. I just wish corporations weren’t jumping at the chance to replace real people with AI.

I had the idea for the Timeloop Wizard pretty quick. I’ve been wanting to dabble in animating for ages and just needed a deadline to force myself to do it. As for the Wiz himself, there was no doubt I’d animate some sort of fantasy malarky (I’ve been inspired by these shorts especially) and as soon as I thought about the looping nature of the video it just clicked.

I struggled with learning how to animate from scratch. The tutorials I found were really complicated and most assumed some base level of knowledge I just didn’t have. Finally I found Adobe’s tutorials for animating in Photoshop and ran with that even though the instructions were frustratingly vague. I ended up making the animation as simple as possible, building the wizard (Zyrtec, the Magnanimous) in a series of layers. His body didn’t need to move so that was all one layer with his head and hat. His moustache, eyes, and eyebrows all went on separate layers so I could move them independantly.

I recorded his voice in Audacity and threw it into the timeline and tried to sync up the bobbing of the moustache but it’s pretty awkward. The Timeline works much faster and more intuitively than the frame-by-frame animation but everything moves with this odd smoothness by default and I just didn’t have the time to work out how to fix it. The eyes were a weird challenge. I wanted them to grow wider when he was freaking out at the end but I had to stretch and squish them to get them to fit on his face.

The whole project was a ton of frustration, fun, and a huge learning experience. For a first attempt at character animation I’m pretty happy with the result. Once it was done, exporting it and using Eyejack was a breeze.

Maybe someday he’ll be free of Melatonin’s timeloop. We shall never know.

As a cis white man I’m sure I’ve got a veeeery unique perspective to bring to whatever team I’m a part of.

This is actually something I’m sort of self-conscious of sometimes: what do I bring to the table? What’s unique about me? Especially in the industries I want to work in, games and entertainment, there are probably enough cis white guys without me frankly. With that acknowledged, we can safely stuff that down and forget about it until my next good existential-dread-cry.

What is my perspective, what colors my approach to design? I come from a background in theater, and despite being a reserved individual most times that does color the way I interact with others and see the world. One of the great skills that comes with theater training is thinking critically about the media we consume. Why did the author write that play, at that time? For what audience? In design we are asking similar questions all the time. Who is the client, what do they need and why, what is the context, who is the demographic? So it’s useful to me to have experience thinking that way. I don’t know if it makes me unique, but maybe I’m grasping at straws here.

I grew up in a pentecostal christian house. The church taught me to be empathetic and put others before myself. Then I grew up and saw that the church at large wasn’t playing by those rules. I’m still grappling with that and what it means for what I believe. So far it’s made me curious to learn more about our world and why we’re here. I guess I carry that with me too.

I’ve worked a lot of jobs that I hated, a few that were nice. I desire mainly to work in a field where I can use my creativity and enjoy what I do. (And be able to afford living.) Is that a perspective?

I think what I’ve learned after writing this is I don’t really know. I’m carrying a lot with me and it all colors what I do. It doesn’t feel unique but I know that my own personal jumble of baggage, talents, hopes, fears, and dreams is mine whether I like it or not.