Journal 4/27

This is the video (and the part 2 and 3) that I'm using to learn to do the smoke effect in maya. It is really helpful.

I plan on doing it manually, then trying to make it into a code afterward.

The Plan

Here's my plan for the final:

1) get a video and break it into frames using ffmpeg
2) use the photoshop effect I created to make the figures look a bit silvery
3) in maya, create a smoke effect and render that out into frames
4) combine the video frames and the smoke frames into one, where the smoke will take over the video
5) throw it all back together as one video using ffmpeg.


That is the plan. Hopefully I can get it to work.

Journal 4/24

This video was just posted on the Harry Potter site:



I think that the way they transform Ralph Fiennes into Voldemort is fascinating. Even though they use graphic effects to remove his nose, they still do his makeup for the rest of his face. What I can't help thinking is why didn't they just use the effects for his whole head? But the answer starts to seem obvious: everyone in this movie works together to make the best possible outcome. The makeup artists are so precise and creative, that their work might be better than what the graphic designers could do. Each person does what they do best, and they all work together like a well oiled machine.

Journal 4/21 & possible idea for final

There is a scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in which Harry and Hermione are these weird smokey figures coming out of a locket. They are all silvery and it's quite surreal. I know that when they did this scene the actors were actually covered in silver makeup to make this effect. However, I have been playing around with "camera raw" from adobe and have made a similar effect on a picture of myself.
click here for link to picture

I am planning on playing around with photoshop this weekend and hopefully I can recreate this effect. If I am able to do that, then I will try and put such an effect on a video clip for the final project.

Journal 4/21

As the end of the semester approaches, I have been looking into the 1st cohort's capstone project Haley. I truly look forward to seeing the actual movie, but for now I will focus on the trailer. I find it fascinating how they basically superimposed 4 images to make a single frame: Haley on the hill, the Albuquerque skyline, the cgi smoke burning the skyline, and the robotic arm. They obviously had to do this on multiple frames (and here I'm speaking specifically about the skyline and the smoke added onto it), so it makes me wonder what programs were used to blend the two images together.

Here's a link to the website with the trailer: Haley

journal 4/14

Tonight I was watching Pirates of the Caribbean, and I realized just how much time they had to spend to make those three movies so wonderful. The majority of the scenes, especially in the third one, took place in front of a blue screen and all the effects were added in. I can't help but marvel at how they got everything so perfect down to the finest grain of wood.

Here's a quick showing of some of the effects, to see more I believe they show a lot on the special edition dvds.

Bash Scripting Tutorials

Ok, this one is giving me a whole lot of trouble. I have found a few things that work and some things that don't. I am getting one specific error that is preventing me from accomplishing for loops, so I'm going to ask about that on Tuesday (google isn't being a big help).

Here are the ones that I like that work:

http://www.panix.com/~elflord/unix/bash-tute.html (the simple example at the top) and here's my script: click here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oBXCQtwao0&feature=relmfu (this plus a few others to manipulate images- links on side of video) and here's mine: click here


Here's the ones I wanted to try but they wouldn't work right:

http://www.arachnoid.com/linux/shell_programming.html This one has a lot of different examples that would be very helpful.

http://www.linuxconfig.org/Bash_scripting_Tutorial#Read_file_into_bash_array This one would be very helpful for arrays and for loops.

Bash Shell tutorial

I found a simple but helpful youtube video that helped me understand how to manipulate a file in the bash shell.




This is my history that I was able to get doing the history > apr10_history.txt (the first two lines I deleted because it was the same as lines 3 and 4).

3 dir
4 ls
5 cd temp
6 ls
7 mv apr5_history.txt apr5_historymove.txt
8 ls
9 cp apr5_historymove.txt a5_hmcopy.txt
10 ls
11 rm a5_hmcopy.txt
12 ls
13 mkdir test
14 ls
15 rm -rf test
16 ls
17 ls apr5_historymove.txt
18 man znew
19 znew --help
20 history > apr10_history.txt


I will put up the other tutorial shortly.

Journal 4/10 (Another one)

Going along looking at photos from great (yet unknown) artists, I went to look at my friend Scott's flickr stream. He is a photographer, and his pictures are incredible. He has such an eye for perfect contrast. I would post one of his pictures here, but he has the copyright lock on it. So I will just put the link to go see it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sc_wilson/3351578341/in/photostream/

My favorite is the one that will pop up first, a lantern with beautiful shadows.

Journal 4/10

I had a friend post a picture of this person's animation on facebook the other day and I couldn't help but look some more. I have to say, this is some of the most extraordinary and realistic animation I have ever seen.

Here's a link to this person's (Sam Wrich) website: http://www.samwirch.com/

Bash Tutorials

If it already hasn't become apparent, I like simple things. Simple tutorials are the easiest to understand and are the only ones that keep me calm while scripting. I found two that are fairly decent and show some simple scripting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGvvJO5UIs4

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/03/introduction-to-bash-scripting/