largento
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Posts posted by largento
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Martin has a section of his forum dedicated to A:M and some of its greats.
It's a kind of archive of the past, though. I don't think it points to anything new.
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This would be the facepalm:
This would be a forehead slap:
And I think this would be burying your face in your hand out of grief:
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That's the thing, I'm not sure which it is. Is it self-frustration or frustration at an external thing?
I do think a slapping your forehead requires hitting it enough to make a noise. I would think a face palm is more like lowering your head and placing your hand. I see online that a distinction is made between fingers being splayed for a face palm and being together for a slap.
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Funny that slapping yourself and the face palm have different meanings. The face palm means someone else has done something stupid or embarrassing. The forehead slap means *you* did something stupid or forgetful. The former mimics having a headache as if the other person is causing your brain to hurt. The latter is like you are trying to inflict pain on yourself as punishment
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Not too specific in the criticisms. Mostly along the line of profanity-laced statements about how it was the worst thing ever. :-)
I just made a mental note not to go back. I used to try to post links to The Wannabe Pirates on Reddit and they would just vote them down into nothing, so it's clear I don't have an audience there.
So, yes, I would not like to dwell on the negative.
One of the cool things I got to play with this time was using volumetric lights and lens flares to make siren lights.
I think it came out pretty cool. The trickiest bit was rigging it. I only made one flashing siren light and used constraints to attach it to the sign (which had already been animated.) I kept running into issues where I would accidentally lock the bone used to turn the lights around. In the end, they didn't do a full 360 turn, but went halfway and then would come back. That worked out great.
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Thanks, everyone.
This has certainly been a roller coaster ride. This is the first time I've ever parodied something where I heard back from the person responsible for what I was parodying! Thankfully, he loved it and helped me spread the word in ways I couldn't have hoped to do. I still have about 30 minutes before the first 24 hours ends and the video has 5,227 views. That's compared to Amutt Time only having 1,300 views after two YEARS!
The comments that have been swirling around there and on Facebook have been overwhelmingly positive. Reddit, however, the exact opposite. A lot of instant hate there. But there are literally hundreds of comments for the positive and only 4 on reddit when last I looked.
Krypton Radio made it their video of the day and the accompanying blogpost described my Stalled Trek parodies as "pretty much all gasping, hold-your-sides-laughing funny."
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I'm not a fan of this lawsuit. I've got to assume there's more to it that meets the eye. It claims to be solely about infringement, yet there are plenty of other fan films actively in production who are more blatant. They use the entire original series characters, exact duplicates of their sets and the music written for the series. Prelude to Axanar was relatively light in that regard. Hold up you hand if you've ever even heard of Garth of Izar? :-)
Whatever the case, my thinking was this was a chance to parody what I think is a great fan film and the circumstances they find themselves in.
The real problem was to get it done and out before some kind of resolution was reached. :-)
I sweated bullets on that. :-)
The puppets are a bit more elaborate than my previous movies. I thought it was more important to at least make an attempt to make them look like the characters and yet still have that puppet look. I think it's kind of an evolution.
There's some extra fun in the planet shot for longtime followers. If you look in the lower left, you'll see Krok, Spott & McGruff from the original Stalled Trek and the Jetsons buildings from my sci-fi image contest entry. All the other buildings came from the Jack Kirby-inspired buildings I modeled for "Apeopolis" in The Wannabe Pirates.
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Presenting!
Stalled Trek: Prelude to Ax'd-We-Are
This is a parody of the Star Trek fan film, Prelude to Axanar, which was hit by a copyright infringement lawsuit by CBS/Paramount. You can watch the original at http://www.axanarproductions.com
More later...
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Only 33 days from concept to finished film ...and a whole lot of hours inbetween.
As I mentioned, start to finish on the Mac version of A:M, so anyone who claims you can't use A:M on a Mac clearly hasn't tried. :-)
It's killing me to have to keep it a secret. Tomorrow can't get here fast enough.
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At 4am, I finished the new Stalled Trek!
It will be launched tomorrow at 11am (CST) on YouTube. I'll post the link here. This one is different from the first in several ways:
1) It is not based on an episode of the original Star Trek
2) I took on a co-writer, Jonathan Lane, the blogger who featured Amutt Time on his Fan Film blog last month. That's how this came about. He sent me an email, thanking me for the interview and I sent him back half-jokingly an idea for another Stalled Trek. He loved the idea and I told him that if he'd co-write it, I'd do it. He agreed.
3) I only did two voices this time. I turned to friends to help out with the voice work. That was great fun. Most of them simply recorded their lines into their iPhones. We live in a marvelous time.
4) It's only 6:57 long including the titles. Even that is kind of long for YouTube. That's less than half the time of Amutt Time, which is really too long for YouTube.
5) This one is in HD and looks more advanced than the first one.
Jonathan wants to launch the film from his weekly blog, so that's why I have had to wait until a Friday to put it out.
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The most preposterous case I remember was the Time Square advertising case with the first Spider-Man movie. The film-makers had replaced the advertising on the buildings. This angered the owners of the spaces because part of the value of them is that they will pop up in movies. It seems ludicrous to me to think that just because you own a billboard in the physical space, that you also own it in the virtual space.
I think the owners eventually won out, but I'd have to go looking.
For my latest animated puppet parody, I've made use of the music of Kevin MacLeod, who releases lots of music under Creative Commons. He refuses to join ASCAP because he doesn't want them suing schools who might perform his music in band class. His belief is that it's his music and he should be able to decide what people can do with it.
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Another issue is quickrender not working. At least with the camera set for multipass, it gets stuck on "pass 17/16" and I have to force quit. A little inconvenient that I have to render out a frame to file to see what something looks like. :-)
I've noticed this in the choreography window, and frankly have been too chicken to try it anywhere else for fear of having to force quit.
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I'm confused. My memory is that if you click on the on/off in the User properties, you can then right-click and choose constant. That will make the choice you set appear when you open the model. Is that what you're asking, Rodney?
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That's what it is, it's just not an enhancement to the Quicktime X player. I'm guessing they figure now that if you're a pro, you'd just shell out for Final Cut Pro and Compressor.
I find myself using Photoshop a lot. I open up an image sequence as a video and can do any color work in an environment I'm familiar in. Not as robust as After Effects, but also not as alien to me.
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The easy way is to model a transparent dome over the cornea and adjust it's specularity. Works like a charm for me.
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Hey I use Mac too and I can tell you that .jpgs do not work. They might import. They might allow you to decal, rotoscope, etc. But you will crash in rendering unless you convert them to .tga or .png. Also, you will discover that rotoscopes barely work in any format and layers do not present themselves unless rendered. There are known graphics issues with mac and I believe somewhere I read that A:M prefers .tga. I am building some models now and my rotoscope images are entirely unreliable regardless of .jpg or .tga which sucks. If you have any other Mac questions, please let me know. I just may have wrestled with it, maybe not. I think overall, A:M works best on PC but the mac version ain't shabby. I use it constantly and love it .
-Adam
Thanks, Adam. Always good to have another Mac user on the forums.
I generally use PNG files for everything and haven't had a problem using them as rotoscopes or layers. One thing to consider with layers is that unless you change the default settings, they are affected by the lightng of the cho. There is an option to have them "flat shaded" and I use that often. I usually use layers for the sky.
This time out, I'm only using the Mac version, so it will have that distinction over the other two films.
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At some point, quite a few years ago, Apple split Quicktime and abandoned Windows. I'm a little surprised to find that somebody else didn't step in with a replacement.
I've viewed the OS X Quicktime mostly as just a player app and I've noticed in the last couple of OS versions, the player has limited what files it plays natively. Now it converts it to a playable format and when you go to close it, it prompts you to save it in the new format. These non-playable formats are usually old .mov files.
Since I've been working with video again, I re-purchased Quicktime Pro on my computer and had to install Quicktime 7 and look for the app in the Utilities folder. It still works like it always did, but it doesn't replace the main Quicktime player. It's like a legacy app.
As it happens, I haven't really made much use of Pro. I can do so much video stuff with the Adobe apps, there's little need. I almost never export video from A:M, choosing instead to render to frames.
Since virtually every app now natively plays movies (browsers, mail, etc. Heck, even the Finder plays them), I would guess Apple could question the need for a stand alone app.
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Oh well, due to circumstances outside of my control, the release is being pushed back a week. I would definitely have been having to cut corners by the end, so this is probably a good thing.
Sorry for the tease.
It's coming, I promise. :-)
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I, for one, am glad I don't feel the pressure of tagging this one's success or failure on how many DVDs I (don't) sell. :-)
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I've completed the first assemblage of the new Stalled Trek I'm doing!
There's still stuff missing and not all of it is animated, but I'm hoping to rectify that by Friday. The assemblage is being used to score the movie, which I'm so happy to have this time out. The composer is volunteering his service, which is tremendous. I'm also not going to make a DVD this time, so no Kickstarter funding was necessary. Just me spending lots of my time. :-)
I'd love to tease this, but I think anything I showed would give it away. I'll upload a ton of stuff here once it's done, though.
So, consider this a place-holder.
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I'm not sure if this is a bug, or just a change of mind. But I've noticed that holding down the shift-key while starting a new spline no longer connects it to the control point you click on. It places it in the same place, but it's not joined. This used to work. I've had to go back to the old way of doing it where I click away from the control point, then hold the shift key to add it to the control point and once I've finished the spline, I have to go back and delete the extra bit of spline.
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Alas, the JPG.iio file is present and accounted for.
No worries, Kev. I didn't think that. I was just pointing out that thing I've noticed. :-)
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I don't use a MAC, so I haven't experienced those issues yet.
Are you working on another Stalled Trek?
I always can tell a PC user because they put Mac in all caps like it stands for something. :-)
As a matter of fact...
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I'm over my head in a rushed animation project, so I don't have time to file reports, but wanted to put these down as I encounter them so that I don't forget... and some may not be issues or are already known. When I'm done and have recovered, I'll file them.
1) JPEGs don't seem to work. Can't get a JPEG file to import into the PWS. I was noticing that an old material I used wasn't doing anything and I realized that it used a jpeg support file and A:M was importing it as a blank image. Changing it to a PNG file allowed it to load normally. I usually prefer not to use JPEGs, but weird that it's not letting me import them.
2) Shaded Renders getting stuck on "CPU SSAO". I think that's what it says. The workaround seems to be to turn off all of the render options before selecting Shaded. Turning them off after selecting it, must not do the trick. I had a shaded render hold for several minutes on the first frame (I ended up having to Force Quit.) When I did the workaround, all 87 frames rendered in a single second. I couldn't believe it. They were just instantly there.
I think that's all I've encountered so far. I'll add them here as I go.
I'm using v18-P SSE4 for OS X.
New Stalled Trek
in The Wannabe Way
Posted
Thanks, Rodney!
There's no doubt it's been viewed so many times because Alec Peters has shared it to his audience. I know the numbers aren't big in the real world (I just saw a "my cat is so cute" video that had 18K views in 15 hours), but for me, 8K+ views in five days is a lot of views.
I've entered it in two film festivals (both convention-based). One is GeekFest, which just so happened to be taking entries for a "special edition" that included the Dallas Comic Con and the Dragon Con festival. Curiously, I saw that a puppet movie had won top prize in the animated category. I didn't think of puppetry as being animation, but I guess it sort of is. I mean, there's go-motion animation, which is essentially puppeting a character.
I should know on May 5th if it was accepted to GeekFest and I think the notification date for the Dragon Con is in June or July. I'm not really thinking it will take any awards (wouldn't be disappointed if it did, of course), but if it's accepted and they show it in Dallas, I could see it with an audience ...which could either be a very rewarding experience or a nightmare. :-)