Trailing trailer

Oops! forgot to put this on my blog:
 

Animation Abandoned

Yes, finally I can say that I am done with my latest animation. Of course a digital animation / video is never really finished, just abandoned at a certain point. Today I started sending "Scatter Brain Matter" to festivals.

It already had a pre-première in the City at the November edition of BYOA, where i got some good feedback that made me fix something with music that I had tried to fix with sound effects. Overall the film seemed well received. With the amount of content being generated nowadays festivals are a bit of a lottery, let's hope it gets selected!

We are Glass

Not really, but this thing seems to be made of glass. I updated an older experiment to test the new MacPro in my office at Monmouth University. Did pretty well rendering this with caustics and all.
 

 
Oh, you wonder what happened to "Scatter Brain Matter"? Well, the start of the semester got in the way. Need to find two days of time to finish it, but I do have picture lock!

Final Test (?)

Today I did a test for what should be the final effect for my animation "Scatter Brain Matter" (working-title-in-flux): a flood of running creatures:
 

The End is Nigh! I am rendering the one but last shot, and animating the final one. Getting really close to being done. I would have been even further along rendering if the power had not gone out at our house (twice) last night, killing the overnight render shortly after midnight. Luckily the surges did not kill my computer!

Once done with animation there is of course more compositing to be done, colors to be corrected, the edit needs to be finalized, sound and music added and mixed, titles and credits superimposed and whatnot. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

RGB.Machine

For my animation I need something to glow inside of a"crystal ball" so I created something based on the machine from Contact and had it leave particles behind in glorious RGB. I rendered it a couple of times with different settings, here is the result:
 

GeneraTurn

With the semester almost over I am about to go into hyperdrive to finish my animation before I start my new job this Fall. Here is a prop I need for the final scene. I could have left it out but that would have compromised the mind-matter bifurcation scattering subtext.
 

I showed the latest edit test for Scatter Brain Matter to my advanced animation students at Montclair State the other day, and one of them labeled it as very "Meta". So stay tuned!

Bring Your Own Brain

I showed a Work in Progress video at the latest BYOA and was happy with the response and got some good suggestions. Important things got in the way, but I am working again on the final scene of "Scatter Brain Matter". Here is another test:
 

Almost at the last scene...

I am approaching the last scene of my animation whose working title has been in flux but seems to want to settle on "Scatter Brain Matter". It is going to be a tough one but I have to add a strong finish!

Here is an image that emerged as I was working of the Trumbull inspired sequence that will form the transition into the final sequence:

I may also have been slightly influenced by Dinosaur Train...

Is it just me or does it show a lion with a smiley face on top?

If you happen to be in Sochi...

My animation "Seeing Red" was invited into the Echos of Eco video art screening, part of the Seventh Winter International Arts Festival which takes place February 6 - 20 in Sochi, Russia. The webpage for the competition is still rather empty, but this really seems to be happening! So if you happen to be in Sochi, and quite a few people might be the coming month, drop by to see "Seeing Red".