16/3/2011… So it was a Wednesday

So I thought I might do a sort of upload of what I had done for the day. I decided in this quite late on (like now-ish) because I realized that I actually got a fair amount done today. Which was nice. So to start of I’ll show you the progress of the 3D model I am working on for some 3D animation:

Then later into the day I attended my usual life class on a Wednesday and did the usual art stuff. Only I didn’t. Instead of using generic charcoal with the boring and dull black and gray textures, we dived head first into COLOUR. My lord the lesson was the brightest and most enjoyable i had ever had. I managed to churn out some pieces I was also happy with for once (I’m a skeptical artist and also dislikes using any medium that isn’t a 2B and pad). here are the pieces that I did in order of completion:

Not too bad in my opinion. the idea was to use colours to portray the various tones of the model without using shades or other black tones. I used yellow for the brightest points, red for in between tones and the dark green for dark tones.

Then finally the designs for our upcoming stop motion animation. I decided to have a go at putting together a schematic for the cupboards. honestly, I don’t like it. It doesn’t show enough information for it to be accurately designed and also its my first attempt at making a schematic so it was kinda shoddy. Well here it is anyways but i hopefully will have a better designed one by tomorrow:

Well that is all the stuff that I accomplished on this faithful (it’s technically Thursday as I finish this) day. Hope to accomplish more tomorrow.

Stop Motion in Motion

After putting the second armature together, I then took it into University so that i could get some help from my friend Alex in putting the clay on it. It doesn’t sound like a complicated task but honestly I wasn’t really sure how to approach it from the beginning.

After it was finished (to the best of my ability) I and all the other animation students then used our models to animate. Not a high fancy, eye startling animation that would make Wallace and Gromit look bad, but a short sweet animation (about twelve frames long) to establish how good… or bad our models had been developed.

First off, here’s my animation. Just click the right arrow at a rapid rate and you’ll get a sense of the motion. I’ll work on trying to find another way to export into a working animation:

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Okay so it was incredibly bad, but it was the second time I have ever done that. This however make good establishment of what went right, which was very little, and what went wrong, which was a lot.

To begin with, the armature was designed with the wrong material. I kind of picked up on this from the beginning of design but I didn’t think too much about it. But the wire that i chose for it was indeed too strong, even when un-drilled. There was a lot of effort put in just to bend the arms and legs, more than would be considered reasonable. SO the next model needs to have an armature that is either easier to move (straight wire with a pivot for the joints for example) or a wire frame that is easier to bend (like copper wire etc).

 Also the type of material that was used to cover the frame and make the body, which was modeling clay, didn’t seem to want to stay stable on the frame. As a result the wire armature kept ripping out of the clay as though its skeleton refused to bend with the rest of the body, although this maybe another point to the armature being too tough. I would probably go about fixing this by either considering a different type of clay, more practise with the clay currently at use or by using a different type of material altogether (Such as latex such as Tim Burton‘s models, an actual model structure with fully opposable limbs such as the ones in Robot Chicken or by using unusual materials like what Jan Svankmayer did in his animation Meat Love).

Most importantly, I have to better plan my animation model for the next design, with better ideas of how I expect it to move, what will be used as the counter weight, what its heaviest point is, what positions will need aid, its height, strengths of its structure, weaknesses of its structure, colour, movement, expressions, complexity of animation etc.

Making an Armature Part 2

The frustration of developing new skills. After Drilling the last rods of wire, I clipped of some more wire and knotted it (with great difficulty) into what could be described as a crude noose. I did this twice, this would serve as the feet. I hot glue gunned these to a drilled piece (clipped to size) to act as the hip. This proved a little ineffective as it had great difficulty standing up.

I then glued the long drilled wire to act as the spine, which in turn had the arms glued to it about two-thirds up. Pretty much straight after this point I scrapped the original armature.

I trashed it mainly because it was loose, fragile, difficult to bend without extreme pressure and all in all a poor first try at designing an armature. But this did not stop me.

I began construction on  designing a different model that I had sketched out and planned in case this one proved to have severe complications (The legs are way to small and the arms are quite large, putting the whole thing out of proportion).

I again drilled a long piece of wire, but applied the pliers half way down so that only half of the wire drilled round itself. The part that wasn’t drilled bit would then act as legs:

I then wrapped a single piece of wire around the top part of the spine, to act as arms which was glued to stop it from moving (it was tightly wrapped first so that all the fixture would not be just from the glue as it can be slightly unreliable).

I then took small, finer wire and span this round as well (This was done by hand as it would have been desecrated by the drill) and then wrapped round the ends of the arms to act as fingers for the hands. Each arm had three fingers for each hand and also glued to keep them in place and to act as a base for the hand. The top of the spine was bent down so that I would be able to support the head.

This seemed to work out much better, which is good because I really didn’t want to make another . This is what this armature should end up looking like once its fully covered in clay:

Making an Armature

There are a number of ways to design an armature. You can cheat and buy a professional one from websites such as AnimationSupplies.net (Not cheap). Or building it in a similar design using odd materials, such as modelling foam and screws, nuts, bolts and wires etc. Another is the primary wire method which is the approach I plan on taking.

Here are a few videos to the approach I plan to take to making my armature:

How to Make Wire Armatures for Stop Motion

Building a Stop Motion Monster: Making an Aluminum Wire Armature (part1)

Building a Stop Motion Monster: Padding the Body (part2)

Building a Stop Motion Monster: Finishing the puppet (part3)

Building a Stop Motion Monster: Making the Latex Skin (part4)

Everything you see in the Building a Stop Motion Monster video is pretty much everything I’m going to do. I’m writing this as I construct the model.

First off, use none rusty tools. Pulled out a set of pliers opened them in great effort to close them again, I caught my finger in them and now hurts like heck.

Secondly don’t fire the drill too fast, besides losing most control of it and it spins the wire in less than a second but it also winds it over its self so it’s just a mass mound of messy wire. Also try to make sure that the wire is as straight as possible. The more bent it is before the drilling, the more curves it’ll have in it. Also as you drill the piece, try to gently pull the wire away from the drill with the pliers. This straightens the wire more as it curves on its self and will make it easier to use for the model as it will have less bends in it to worry about.

I’ll be adding more information later within this post… Or I may start a new post marked part 2 with the continuation of how i have developed the armature. First, I have to go buy the other materials to finish it off as I couldn’t get hold of them before.

MONTAGE!

This is my, slightly confused, photography montage:

So this is my montage photo. The original ideas was to develop a montagep hoto portraying different aspects of one spot in four different directions (north, south, east and west). Unforutnately that didn’t come out as effectively as I hoped.

What I have changed my concept to is various fairly or well established structures of hull. In the montage is the fountain of queen’s garden, Mick Ronson Memorial Building, KC Stadium, BBC building, Park Street Flyover and the Council Flats.

The reason to why I changed my project’s concept was because during my efforts to take the photos, I found it really difficult to find spots in which effective photos could e taken from all four directions.

The montage was made by laying images above each other, each to its own layer. Then each image had a mask applied to their respective layers and, with the paint brush tool’s colour set to black, coloured over areas that I didn’t want to appear in the montage. This cleared the areas that were coloured, like a fading mask.

…

Collectiong Materials and changes

I have collected the photos that I plan to use for my montage. Unfortunately, through collection the photos I had to make a radical change to how I planned to produce the photos for comparison.

The original idea was to establish a location and, facing north, then east, then south and then west, taking a photo at a parallel angle from the ground. Then each of the photos of that location would be compared to each other. Then a new location would be chosen and the same idea applied, performing this development at least three times.

Although there is a change, the initial idea is the same. The only thing that is being changed is that instead of producing multiple little montages, I will be producing a single large collection of locations for comparison. Also I have decided that a photo of several directions is although effective, it is not as effective in the style that I originally chose to perform it in. So instead of taking a photo of north, east, south and west directions, I am now going to take several photos of an area that can be connected via the photos, but give a different impact of impression.

This change, I believe, is more effective as it allows me to compare the photos, while making acknowledgement that they are within the same distance of each other so that they have a different effect on opinions of an area.

As an additional note, I had planned to try and update the posts for this blog as frequently as possible. Unfortunately, as a result of bad time management and consideration to the difficulty of some pieces of work as part of my other projects, I neglected the photography blog. Understanding my mistakes, I  plan to make better use of my time to establish progress for this project and consider the necessity of other projects at times when they actually need completing, to efficiently complete all work that I am currently working on.

Once the first set of photos have been appropriately editted to fit into the blog, I will then begin producing the montage sequence and establish the comparisons within.

After looking at a few photographer’s work and analysing what is expected of a montage photography project, I have developed what montage I plan to do.

My basic idea is to produce several small montage collections, compare each of the photos in their own collection and discuss the impression given by the photo.

These are the specifics of what I plan to do for this project:

I will begin each montage by choosing my first location as the main point of the specific collection. At this point I will use a photography camera and pin point north, south,east and west and these will be the directions that I will take the photos for the mini montages. The camera will remain in the same spot for each picture of a specific montage group, except for the direction it is facing. When i take a photo, I’ll then turn clockwise to the next direction until all directions have been taken.

Once I have the photos for each montage set in Photoshop, I will then discuss the specific details fo the photos in a comparison. Details such as the impression of the location, what feeling I get from what is in the image and compare the photos in respect to the fact they are in the same basic location.

What I hope to achieve from this is to show that a person’s opinion can change about an area (specifically in this case, Hull) merely by looking in a different direction and not looking for specific key points of the area.

While performing this plan of idea, I will also attempt to produce a landscape view, that is three hundred and sixty degrees round, of a specific location, similar to the ones produced by Jonathon Wells.

Montage Photographer Number 1

http://benjaminlim.net/phoblog/category/architecture/

This is the link to the first photographer that I decided to use as a method to evaluate an idea for my own montage photography. This would hopefully allow me to better understand what it is I am hoping to achieve from this project but also what I need to present.

I will begin by firstly establishing the types of photos that this photographer has chosen to take.

From a clear observation, the main subject of the photos are architectural structures. More specifically, ones that relate around the KLCC (Kuala Lumper City Centre). The photos are taken at different angles, aperture lengths, shutter speeds, ISO ratings and time of day.

What has been done here is that the photos, with the various different settings, have established a different view of the structure, giving a difference in perspective of what can be seen. This can have an effect on how the structure is perceived because of the different ways in which it appears in the photos.

Example, photo 1 shows the towers to be of a large perspective, because of the low angle. It also makes it appear to be distant, as though it was captured from a far length. This gives me the impression of a set of towers that are so incredibly monstrous in size that you have to stand from such a long distance in order to take in the full view. This makes the towers seem more impressive because of this thought.

Second example, photo 6 shows an up close shot of the small tower stood in between the larger towers. Because of the lateness in time in which the photo was taken, it gives the feeling of cold. however, because of the brightness of the photo and the lights of the towers, it also feels a bit exciting, as though it would be something you would find as you go through Las Vegas.

This is important as an analytic example as it allows me to consider the idea of a type of comparison I can do for my own project. I.e. a montage sequence in which the photos give a different impression or perspective of a location/target even though nothing structurally or naturally has changed other than the time of day. This will hopefully be reinforced by a different photography that I will analyze.

EDIT: I posted a link to the photos because I can’t place them on this post. This is becuase the photos are not mine and I don’t have permission to freely distribute them on my blog.

Other Photographers

So I decided it would be a good idea to consider other photographers who have already done their own version of a montage photograph collection. This would hopefully then give me a good idea of what type of approach I would want to take when producing my own collection of photographs for my photo montage.

The idea is I will look at several other photographers, look at what the theme was within their montage and also compare them to each others work. I will also be making a note of what effects, styles or concepts they have done that I do and don’t like. This approach is important as it will allow me to make a clearer understanding of a photography montage but also how I could present my own work clearly and with an understandable theme.

Just Getting Started!

Hi. This is the first of many posts that I will be… Posting, hopefully daily, to keep you up-to-date on the progress I make with my Photography Montage Essay. I was expecting to start this blog sooner but unfortunately, when I was given the project to start off with, I wasn’t entirely sure what it was I was meant to do.

So anyway, the plan behind this first post was to just establish what the project is about. What was asked of me was to gather a collection of photographs, taken by me, that had a connection. I then had to explain, in the form of an essay, what differences, similarities, connections, comparisons etc, each photo had with one another.

So obviously the first thing I needed to do was come up with an idea. I had to be able to produce a fair quantity of photos which had a related topic and would allow enough information to discuss within the essay. Once I had this idea, I could then discuss the topic in the above mentioned categories.

So this is the official start on this project, as of this very second that this first post of my blog is done. I will hopefully have a clear idea of what I want later, maybe in tomorrows post.