Weekly Comments

     Render Wrangling seems like it wouldn't be my kind of job. This week we finished our class competition I felt like i was going to run out of time due to my rendering mishap. What made me happy was that I FINALLY figured out how to uv map, I am really excited to fool around with it. What aggravated me this week was that my rendering had paused overnight, so i ended up spending half of the deadline day rendering. I am excited to learn about rigging, so I can bring my Characters to life!
     My link of interest this week is to writing scripts for animated shows. I think he describes how the process of writing goes generally whereas to the protagonist stands in the story.

Mercedes Super Bowl Ad

     Robert Stromburg, was hired to create a sixty second commercial for Mercedes for the Superbowl.It included a twist on the story of the Tortoise and the Hair. The challenge was not only mixing the animated characters with real life environments, but condensing the whole story into 60 seconds while still keeping the human characteristics of the animals. 
     I really liked the article, because it shows how technical a 60 second ad can become. It really hits me as to what a challenge it must have been to condense but still have the audience understand what is happening. It became especially apparent when Robert stated "Rather than playing with multiple expressions and meanings in one shot, I have to realize what that frame is trying to say." I really think the commercial was very effective as to what it was trying to do, because it stepped out of the normal luxury car commercial and made it more fun! What I enjoyed the most out of the commercial was the amount of life that was given to the animals, similarly to the flour sack exercise we did in class.

Extra People, Without the People.

     A common mistake among film makers is the lack of extras in a scene, because its hard to get a large amount of people in a scene without a big budget or a lot of friends. But don't be in doubt you can always fake out the viewer! The first way is to group your extras together instead of spreading them apart, it will look more natural as people group together when they interact. Second, shoot with a long lens, it adds more depth and gives an illusion of more people being in the shot that there actually are. Third is to create a parallax effect by having people walk through the scene, crowded places are not still, so adding people moving on different planes of the shot makes it seem more lively.Fourth taking multiple shots and masking them onto one shot is a way of doing it with VFX. Lastly get close shots of your extras, it shows there are more people there than the main characters.
     I didn't know there were so many different ways to add more characters to a scene without actually gathering no more that a few people. I think this will be super useful next year when I am working on my project, I would definitely want some populated scenes. It seems that lots of TV shows use this technique for crowded bars,where they put pockets of people behind the character. I hope these techniques drives indie films to have more crowded scenes, because often indie films seem awfully vacant.