notes from underground

We finished our final render at about 9:45, putting us 2nd in order of hand-ins and one of only two groups to beat the official deadline. w00t! Dan Byers has been in the art building media lab all day, re-doing the sound effects; the current soundtrack that we turned in was OK, but really not that special, and didn’t incorporate our frenetic recording session last night. Dan, Alice and I all piled into the Techhouse work room, and spent a good half-hour banging shit around, making metal clanking noises, me and Dan yelling at each other and screaming into the camera to create battle sounds, and culminating in my drop-kicking a threaded metal rod all the way down the basement hallway, into a wall. It made a GLORIOUS sound!

I’m back in the MSLab for now, which is kind of ironic given that we’re technically done… after this year I don’t know how much I ever want to see this room again, I’ve spent more time in the lab over the past few days than doing anything else, including sleep. I’ll escape around 3:15, I think but in the meantime I’m waiting for Dan to turn in his final sound file and studying Japanese poetry.

Professor Viswanathan’s Japanese Lit course is tomorrow morning at 9am. We get extra credit tomorrow if we know a hokku (what later became “haiku“; originally, hokku were the first verses in renga, or linked verse, and the only stanza that could stand on its own.) I memorized a hokku by Matsuo Basho (who else, honestly ^_^), written in 1689.

Ah, such stillness:
that the very rocks are pierced
      by the cicada’s drone!

shizukasa ya / iwa ni shimiiru / semi no koe

This winter, if I find myself with too much free time, I think I should register with Wikipedia and rewrite some of their articles on Japanese poetry. Most of the definitions are woefully incomplete.
I really wish I remembered the Tale of the Heike better… I read all but the last 100 pages, but those are a pretty significant 100 pages. I’ll hit them up over break, but das intahrweb doesn’t have a proper summary of the actions of the last third of the book, so i suppose I’ll go to Barus and Holley early to try and discuss it with a classmate. I think I’ll be better off than most on the essay question, though… she’s planning to give us webs of quotations and make us link them together through common themes. I like that stuff. Really, as long as this exam is better than my Japanese Language final earlier today, I’ll be good… that was death.

I’ll post a few sample clips from the animation up on Thursday, after the official debut showing in Lubrano at 4pm. In the meantime, SO relieved to get it done with! Just this literature exam and a philosophy paper between me and home. It’s a wonderful feeling

Shot 18, involving our White Knight hero realizing that he cannot, in fact, get through the metal detector with a sword. It’s not a high-quality render; in fact, the knight appears as black. This is not good, but the timing is correct and aside from a small camera movement, it’s all happy motion-wise, which is my job anyway. The file’s linked here:
Shot 18, No Textures, Low Res Render
It’s a quicktime file, MPEG-4 codec. It’s under 4 meg, so it should be pretty easy to download.

I’m pretty happy with the animation, but it took longer than I’d expected, so tonight’s going to be hell.

Current ratio: 7 hours of animation time to four seconds of footage. w00t.

The project we’re working on for our final is a comedy piece dealing with a knight in armor, who has to find some way to get through security. I’m responsible for animating the sections where the knight, realizing that he carries a sword and is made of METAL, takes himself apart and puts his sword and the armor through security.

Worked last night on the first part of that shot, where he backs up from security before deciding to put down his sword. Spent four hours on it, got it looking OK, then it got messed up… spent another three this morning, still a little jerky and maybe even slow, but it’s there. Take a look if you’re interested.

I’ve uploaded both the original animation of my first try at the clip, and the more successfully animated version (with more fluid movement). Hope they work, they’re in quicktime format:
Good animation, bad texturing
Bad animation, good texturing