So you can see the image from the catalogue in color here: AKIMBO
My how times flies. I recently received my catalogue copy of the video themed commission I was part of, "Icon, Villain, Antihero". It looks pretty snazzy. I love the glossy text finish on matte cover.
And the nifty 'ntsc' like style of odd and even fields of what appears to be an image of Tim Curry from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
My film ' Construct a Nation of Couture and Peace!" was part of the first series titled ICON. My film discussed the idea of film/media icons and how it pertains to American/Japanese relations during the postwar occupation. I appropriated footage and images from various sources, Tetsuwan Atom, Astro Boy, Gene Kelly films, World War II photographs, and propaganda films and combined it in After Effects, and 3d. The other artists part of my series was Aram Siu Wai Collier (a hilarious film edited together of Lou Diamond Phillips from his various roles) , Maria Legault (a music video with a fabricated celebrity, Marie-Minou) , Kathleen Smith (an homage to Werner Herzog's work with her walk to the Toronto Zoo) , and Jenn E Norton (A kaleidoscopic visual representation of the creation of a star).
Here's what writer MARUSYA BOCIURKIW summarized about my film:
Things get even more dreamlike, perhaps even a little nightmarish, in Jeffrey Tran's 'Construct a Nation of Couture and Peace!' The title evokes Communist slogans and implies a sinister tone to fashion's dictates. ... These images represent the collision of Japanese and American culture in postwar Japan, but they also speak to the globalized and hybridized nature of popular culture itself..."
....and so on and so forth. They get it! Woo hoo! Then again, it wasn't cryptic ... It's crazy that it's been 3 seasons ago now that I made this,
and to have my first commissioned work with Trinity Square Video was a great experience and opportunity for me. Congrads to Trinity Square Video and all the artists involved on the completion of this series.
I actually had written this in the previous post to further explain my thoughts on 3d glitches and mistakes but decided to give it it's own post:
Anyway here's a photo of me with Will Wright, the Creator of massively successful and innovative games such as Sim City, The Sims, and Spore.
I had a chance to hear his talk at Siggraph 09, and my word was in inspiring.
I wanted to talk about the current status of computer graphics and its amazing future. I'm not talking about Avatar, and oo ahh 3d! (Which is pretty impressive) But i'm still waiting for the standard screen w/o glasses part.
I'm talking about the state of which we're at where art is reverting back and exploring new aesthetics that isn't just about hyper-realism.
With new eye capture tech, The uncanny valley is appearing less and less noticeable.
With 3d graphics pretty much achieving the realism it was striving for, I notice that the industry is actually pulling back, in film and video games. And you are slowly seeing it like in Borderlands on xbox 360 cell shading.. or course Jet set Radio did that first, but was always a niche market game at best) Or even with Horton Hears a Who and the more recent Cloudy with a chance of meatballs.
But what I don't see as frequent is the minimalist, abract and raw animation, playblasted, and edgy, and rough work as accepted in the mainstream.. but it will eventually.. Have a look at low res pixel animation, it's exploding everywhere now.
low res graphic games are booming in the industry through xbox live downloads.
That's why David O'Reilly (I refer to him often b/c he's the first I've seen to receive accolades for his short film work in playblast, low res aestetics.
And no, all the glitches just crappy compressed work or a mistake.. i'm sure it began as a glitch, but then by refining the technique, was able to harness it.
In history a lot of great things in science have been discovered by chance, like x rays, penicillin.. and viagra. And when I mean discovered, I mean in a sense of using it in a practical sense.
You ever work on your computer and the window freezes? And then you begin grabbing the window and dragging it around and around and making this cascading effect which is entrancing? I wouldn't be surprised if someone creates a performance piece out of that. (Kinda reminds me of sand art animation .. future post!!!)
As an artist, be it paint, pencil, chalk, or clay, the medium and how you use it is motivated by what you're trying to achieve in your art.
In art history, art began as cave drawings, then humans discovered perspective, pencils, paints, chiaroscuro, muscle anatomy, and arguably reached abilities to replicate realism. Then those crummy expressionists had to get involved.
Art began to push back and try to explore paint and ways of expression that wasn't so stringent to academia, and what came was an explosion (pardon me) of art possibilities.
Now in 3d graphics, those with the principle that it's all about hi res, with GI, displacement, normal maps, cloth, hair dynamics , that's fine. Now people are looking to push back and explore various ranges and trying to mix aspects of 3d together to create new techniques.... people are mixing 8 bit graphic paradigms with more realistic paradigms, or even them some.
It's funny how it seems that 3d graphics is related to limitless possibilties, but in a broader sense, we have gotten stuck in this 'realism' idea (among its umbrella of iterations), and it's the derivations that thrive from this.
Every art style has a confined (almost mechanical) set of rules (and exceptions)
to create a work of art.
But that can be discussed in another post!
When I was at Siggraph '09 last year, I attended Will Wright's talk about the evolution of computer graphics and gaming. He presented a slide show on the same parallel that I just said here (coincidence!) But I'm sure the thought isn't new, it just isn't in the forefront yet.
But the indies will eventually become the norm, (which i'm kinda afraid of it becoming over saturated and being seen in your next car commercial)
So if there ever was a stagnation in 3d art, it's opened up once again, and until 3d/3d holographic entertainment emerges, we'll be busy creating new and interesting aesthetics within this construct.
You know sometimes mistakes bring great surprises. There's one thing about motion graphics that I just am disappointed to not see in the field yet (well not entirely true: see the genius that is :David O'Reilly)
I was cleaning the mesh of a blendshape that was attached to a original bind pose, and since the the cleaned mesh had less vertices than the original it was connected to... this happened!
it kinda looks like what Two-Face from batman would look like in a modernized updated version in the future... wouldn't that be neat? as if Batman Beyond had a two face, where the new Harvey Dent was trying to stop a hacker of sorts (instead of the mob in a Chemical Plant) and was in some sort of tech firm, and half his body gets electronically digitized!
No just a quick sketch i saw online of Thomas Edison the perfecter of the light bulb! (not creator, someone else did, i don`t know who) and practicing my crosshatching. You definitely have to work in steps, and plan out highlights to shadows, because each layer of cross hatch you add should be uniform and consistent across your image, as well as quality of line, and length. it`s fascinating the amount of thought goes into a certain style. You need to maintain a consistent set of rules to stick to, otherwise the drawing will look flawed...
it`s almost computer like, in fact it pretty much is. There`s tons of computer techniques (like you see in photoshop) that can mimic artist techniques. Thought I don`t think we`re there just yet in perfecting it. To me from the animated films I`ve seen (SUPER Street Fighter IV) for example uses `pencil`line filters, that still seem too perfect to be considered organic.
I really dig the watercolor simulations that have been applied lately though. In the video game Okami it`s another example of this...
Hopefully in our short film that we`re making this year we can try something that can loosen up some of this computerized automated look. Maybe We`ll be able to improve on the computer 'organic' technique.
Busy working on a project for Bryan Belanger-Diaz, a 3d western of sorts, (with a twist)! It's always like that ain't it? I fixed the 3d model a bit and made his face a lil broader, his previous design seemed a bit gangly and more of a goon than a protagonist. But yeah, the drawing is much more toonish than the project, but i decided to give it a try and draw a concept of them in this style.
Karate enthusiast, VFX extraordinare, Enter the Jennings: Shaun Jennings. He is just as masterful in the Martial Arts as he is in the Computer Arts.
We're finally in the stages of discussing our ideas with Shaun and how we can realize them technically in our film. He's extremely detail oriented and joined in our project as a volunteer. He presented some great thoughts on work flow, technical approaches to what we have in mind... Louis is here contemplating over some concept work with Shaun. He's very excited as well!
We've been doing some tests recently and hopefully we can lock down on 3d realization so we can start applying it to our first models next month!
