3D News

Floating Point

Tim Formica [Room335] ·

As I had said in a previous article, you can animate all you want, but if you don’t have a good story to tell, you can have the best animaton in the world and hardly anyone will care. I came upon this animation on Vimeo the other day and it gave me a good laugh.

It’s easy to see the large amount of thought that went into it. Subtle things like when when the native runs into the jungle to get the birds, there’s a long camera shot where you see the leaves of the trees rustling and the birds flying away in fear along his path . The story also moves along at a good pace and is well timed on the scene cuts and has excellent camera angles.

Keep in mind, this is Coodle’s first animation he created to gain entry into a University. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you have any critiques, please, keep them constructive and friendly. Sometimes the tone of the critiques left on this site are a bit harsh. This site is about learning, sharing and celebrating each others Blender accomplishments and I never want to stifle anyone’s creativeness, becasue of harsh criticism.

See Coodle’s letter below.

Tim


Floating Point from coodle on Vimeo.

“Well, my name’s coodle aka Konstantin and I have applied for the MultiMediaArt studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg, Austria. For application you have to do a multimedia project, for example an
animation (stopmotion, 2d, 3d) or a real filmed movie and they choose the best ones and invite the creators for an interview. This year’s theme for the application project was “Flotsam” and they gave you the start of a story you had to continue in any way you want. My animation “Floating Point” is my contribution to this selection procedure.

It’s my first animation so far, I have created a few models before that but didn’t texture or animate them. It was a very hard task for a beginner but thanks to the nice documentation, the huge amount of good tutorials and last but not least the nice community of Blender I got so far.

Animating the character probably was the most fun though I had to kick out many animations due to the maximal allowed time of three minutes. Another bad thing was: The more I animated, the more I wanted to send my rig to hell. I definetely have to learn better rigging though I really had put some effort in
this first rig and looked for good solutions in rigs like Mancandy…

Storyline. The concept, creativity and ideas behind the movie are the primary criterions of the University’s selection and I had several ideas. I chose the one that tangents me most: the manipulation and the change of life by the media, no matter if it’s TV or computer and internet. For me, internet is a big chance but also a method of “drowning” in all the stuff you can watch and read, especially for an artist. It would have been hard though to do the story with a computer because it allows more interaction which makes everything more complex.

The rough storyline: indigene finds a satellite TV on a raft and unintentionally activates it. It shows him a new world with glancing things and at first he is creative and tries to rebuild the things he sees on screen. At
least the TV takes more and more the control over him and he receives so much impressions he can’t assimilate them anymore. He’s almost floating through the world of shiny pictures. Then he suddenly spots an image that is well known to him but he can’t distuingish between reality and virtuality and so he takes
the film about an indigene tribe as real and attacks the TV. After it’s destroyed he kind of wakes up and finds himself back in the real world. He snaps because of what he has done to his beloved island…

I used Blender 2.45 for the animation and rough video sequences, Gimpshop and Crazybump for the textures, MonkeyJam to check if the animation works, Premiere CS3 (I used the trial though I really hate Premiere but the CS3 worked surprisingly good, mostly without bugs) for the cut and last but not least
Audacity for the sound.

In Blender I used almost no proxies and no libraries, especially the proxies didn’t work the way I wanted when I started the project. Not using them was at least my biggest fault because in the end I had to edit each shot separately…

I rendered the movie in half-HD size (864×486) and used the nice little BFR2 Tool which automatically renders your shots one after the other.

I’m looking forward to creating new 3d stuff and hope you can enjoy my movie.

Thanks a lot for your interest, if you have questions, just ask! I had no idea what to write here but I have found some things to talk about at least.

greetings,

Konstantin

Author Tim Formica [Room335]
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