Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Ideas and Inspiration...

Ideas and Inspiration can sometimes be quite annoying. They tend to come when you least need them, when you're overloaded with a billion other 'more important' things, when your brain is at a fever pitch whirling away in 10 different directions at once. Kinda makes sense, I suppose. So what happened? Well, I guess it started when Microsoft finally released a Beta of Expression v.4 (which they have code named 'Acrylic'). It's a vector graphics program that was created by a small company called Creature House a decade or so ago, which Microsoft wisely purchased in 2003. It's a totally sweet beautiful drawing application that I've used as my primary drawing application for a number of years. I used it to make all of the artwork for my first animation, a (still incomplete) 3 minute rock video for a song called "Secret Agent Girlfriend" that I did back in 2002.

Expression has a much more powerful approach to vector drawing than Flash does - it has B-splines with Nodes that act as anchor points for the curves you draw. Multiple views of a drawing can be defined by shifting the position of the nodes in the drawing. Expression can interpolate between the views, providing the basis for animating the sequence of views, and can export these animation sequences as a Flash .swf file. You have to really 'dumb down' the drawing to just vectors and gradients, however, losing much of the beauty that comes from using the natural media and photo integration techniques that Expression is so good at. (There's also the, uh, 'minor problem' that Acrylic no longer supports exporting animations to .swf format. More on that in another post...)

So what does this all have to do with ideas and inspiration? Well, Acrylic has added some pretty cool new features that I wanted to explore. It was the trigger that made me finally purchase a graphics tablet - I'd been holding off for a while to see what happened with the Tablet PC market, but the price premium over a normal laptop is still quite steep and the graphics tablet digitizer capabilities aren't as sophisticated as those offered by Wacom's Intuos line of graphics tablets. So I picked up an Intuos 3 4x5 tablet. Here's the first picture I've done with it:John Coltrane


I've been learning how to adjust tonal values in drawings to make light sources appear like they are glowing, and this opened me up to some ideas along this line of thought. I've also been writing a lot of music lately (e.g. see the sidebar for blogs on a number of these songs), including a song called 'Pattern Recognition'. This is one of the best songs I've written to date, and has some pretty good visual imagery in it. Other inspirations include the iPod commercials with the silhouetted dancers (now THAT's a nice way to make animations simpler!)



the graphic artist Jordi Labanda,

Jordi Labanda


photographer André Gallant's Dreamscapes,
André Gallant


a sculpter named Giacometti,
Alberto Giacometti

a Google image search for the word "luminous",
luminous.jpg


Carlos Castenada's "luminous eggs", Edvard Munch's "The Scream", and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm not even aware of.

So, to make my next plunge into animation seem somewhat less pointless, I decided to blog the creation process. I'm hoping that I'll be able to catch the wave of 'Sparkle' technology as I slowly put together the story board, create multi-view strokes in Acrylic, learn about XAML, Avalon and Flash, refine my animation technique, learn more about visual screen writing, etc. It'll probably take a couple of years to do the 2:48 of animation, since i'll only be able to squeeze in a few hours per week. And I'd like to create some tutorials along the way so that I don't forget what I've learned and so that anyone else interested can also benefit from the effort.

Dreaming in Technicolor

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