Following on from what I said in my previous blog all about the "Youtube Incident", I've been busy remaking the first 3 videos in the series in Sony Vegas, and now as of today, they are all up on Youtube :P. Since I've remade all the ones I wanted to remake, I can now upload the rest of the videos on a more regular basis, for example on a weekly basis, and I only want to remake the 8th one as I feel that one was a disaster, so I will replace the sketches in it with newer, better ones.
Here are all 3 videos on Youtube so far anyways:
I will either edit this blog or post a new one when the rest of the videos are uploaded neways.
Sunday 22 February 2009
My New Drawings So Far
Ok with my next set of drawings I've done, my first one is of Phoenix Wright from the games of the same name. The picture I originally used to draw this was a fanart done in the "chibi" style of manga drawing, which I am a big fan of, so hence a picture combing that with Phoenix Wright, was begging to be drawn lol.
My next drawing is of one of the main characters from a manga/anime series called Lucky Star, whose name is Konata. I'm a big fan of her character because of her blue hair (XD), love for games, laidback, carefree attitude etc lol, as I can see similar aspects of my personality with her.
My next drawing is of a screenshot of a scene from an anime called Ranma 1/2. It's one of my favourite scenes due to the way Mr Tendo on the right is drawn, and the sheer randomness of it, hence I wanted to sketch it. This one is considerably more detailed than the previous drawings I've done hence why I also wanted to draw it, I wanted to step up the ante of my drawings by doing more challenging and detailed sketches to test and improve my skills further.
Finally, we have my personal favourite of a drawing, the big one!^^ This drawing took me a good few days to do, ad I am extremely happy with how it's turned out, I still can't believe I pulled it off, even though it was a trace. Anyways, this drawing is of a possibly fanmade wallpaper from the anime/manga series Naruto, and it features the main antagonist Naruto Uzumaki and his own sensei Hatake Kakashi. Kakashi is the very same character I base my nickname on, and is one of my favourite anime characters of all time, hence you can imagine, he's an important factor in understanding who I am. This drawing I chose to do was definitely the most detailed and challenging by far, I think you will see for yourself why in a second ^_^.
Wicked, huh?^^ I definitely love showing this one off neways! :P
My next drawing is of one of the main characters from a manga/anime series called Lucky Star, whose name is Konata. I'm a big fan of her character because of her blue hair (XD), love for games, laidback, carefree attitude etc lol, as I can see similar aspects of my personality with her.
My next drawing is of a screenshot of a scene from an anime called Ranma 1/2. It's one of my favourite scenes due to the way Mr Tendo on the right is drawn, and the sheer randomness of it, hence I wanted to sketch it. This one is considerably more detailed than the previous drawings I've done hence why I also wanted to draw it, I wanted to step up the ante of my drawings by doing more challenging and detailed sketches to test and improve my skills further.
Finally, we have my personal favourite of a drawing, the big one!^^ This drawing took me a good few days to do, ad I am extremely happy with how it's turned out, I still can't believe I pulled it off, even though it was a trace. Anyways, this drawing is of a possibly fanmade wallpaper from the anime/manga series Naruto, and it features the main antagonist Naruto Uzumaki and his own sensei Hatake Kakashi. Kakashi is the very same character I base my nickname on, and is one of my favourite anime characters of all time, hence you can imagine, he's an important factor in understanding who I am. This drawing I chose to do was definitely the most detailed and challenging by far, I think you will see for yourself why in a second ^_^.
Wicked, huh?^^ I definitely love showing this one off neways! :P
Tuesday 17 February 2009
Design Ideas for Identities Box Project
With my interactive box project for the Identities module, I came up with a couple of designs for the appearance and structure of the box based on a Japanese theme. The reason I have only done 2 designs so far is because I've been concentrating on designing the content of the boxes, but I am thinking of coming up with more designs to be on the safe side.
With this first design, I wanted to have a Japanese pagoda building as the core of the box, and to act as the hub of the navigation for it too. I used my graphics tablet and Manga Studion to trace around the outline of the pagoda from an picture I got, and then I filled in the details myself. I found it difficult to trace the inner details, and I also wanted to make the picture as close to being mine as much as possible, so I added in my own markings all over it, using a very random but effective technique that I used in GCSE Art.
I was meant to keep it as just the outline, but seeing as I'm enjoying drawing so much at the moment, I got carried away and drew in extra detail on the pagoda >_<. I wanted to make a 3d model of it neways, most likely from scratch within 3DS Max., although that will be freaking difficult to think of it. Anyways, if you imagine the above drawing in 3D, I wanted the navigation to be centered around the camera itself. Basically as respresented by the arrows there, clicking on different parts of the picture, will rotate the building to show a specific side, and thus one of the included features of the box like my logo for instance. I was thinking of creating movie clips of the building being rotated in 3DS MAx by use of the timeline and moving the camera itself to give the impression of the building rotating. I would then embed the movie clips into the project, which is being built in Macromedia Flash, so when you clicked on one of the areas, the clip would play and the building would appear to rotate as a consequence. Due to time limitations as well as lack of skills, I fear I may not be able to pull this idea off actually to be honest, although I would love to! Out of all the ideas I do have for the box so far, this has to be the most complex one to be honest, but most likely the most visually impressive too potentially. I was thinking of creating a 2D version of it actually, where the box would look something like it does above, albeit the arrows of course, and I'd have small picture symbols in the box somewhere, which would act as buttons and respresent each individual item in the box. Visually, it would probably look a lot like my moodboards, but hopefully a lot better. If you want to gain an impression of what I'm planning to create, please feel free to search for my blog on moodboards, it can't be missed!;) I would probably have an animated ninja character in the middle of the page in front of the pagoda, which I could possibly make it "fly" ninja style towards the chosen symbol, which may be a cool feature. If I really go advanced, I may even be able to pull this off with the 3d character avatar I'm developing for the box, but then again time and skills are problems here too.
With my next design which you can see above, someone suggested an idea to me about having a comic page style interface for the box, which I really liked, being an obsessee with anime and manga of course. Hence, I came up with the idea of having a several manga books lying on a table closed with a bird's eye view of them, and each one would represent a different item in the box. When you click on a book, it should open up and reveal what's inside it, hence the comic page style interface can be used here.
In order to build this, I will need to use 3Ds Max to create the 3D models of the table and books, and I will also need to develop the actual project in Flash in a similar way to the other design idea I mentioned. I will also need to use Manga Studio as it can generate comic panels on a page in seconds, which I can export as .jpeg files and thus possibly map them to the 3d models in 3Ds Max. I would then export the books with the panels added in them, and then import them into Flash after that, where I would add in all the items to each corresponding book. This idea does seem at least a bit easier to make than the first idea, and it could work really well if I manage to build it successfully.
Finally, I do have one final idea which I haven't skectched up yet though. It's pretty similar to the 2D alternative of the 3D pagoda design I mentioned, where I would create a moodboard style interface bassed around a Western Asian theme, and have interactive elements in it, which would take you to different sections of the box. Out of all the ideas, this would definuitely be the easiest to make by a mile, but it also will the be easy way out and the least visually impressive, so I do want to try and avoid using this idea...unless I really have to!
I haven't chosen which idea I'm going to develop yet, as I'm still exploring the software, learning what I can about them, what their limitations are and what I can actually pull of with them especially with the amount of time and the current level of skills I have too.
With this first design, I wanted to have a Japanese pagoda building as the core of the box, and to act as the hub of the navigation for it too. I used my graphics tablet and Manga Studion to trace around the outline of the pagoda from an picture I got, and then I filled in the details myself. I found it difficult to trace the inner details, and I also wanted to make the picture as close to being mine as much as possible, so I added in my own markings all over it, using a very random but effective technique that I used in GCSE Art.
I was meant to keep it as just the outline, but seeing as I'm enjoying drawing so much at the moment, I got carried away and drew in extra detail on the pagoda >_<. I wanted to make a 3d model of it neways, most likely from scratch within 3DS Max., although that will be freaking difficult to think of it. Anyways, if you imagine the above drawing in 3D, I wanted the navigation to be centered around the camera itself. Basically as respresented by the arrows there, clicking on different parts of the picture, will rotate the building to show a specific side, and thus one of the included features of the box like my logo for instance. I was thinking of creating movie clips of the building being rotated in 3DS MAx by use of the timeline and moving the camera itself to give the impression of the building rotating. I would then embed the movie clips into the project, which is being built in Macromedia Flash, so when you clicked on one of the areas, the clip would play and the building would appear to rotate as a consequence. Due to time limitations as well as lack of skills, I fear I may not be able to pull this idea off actually to be honest, although I would love to! Out of all the ideas I do have for the box so far, this has to be the most complex one to be honest, but most likely the most visually impressive too potentially. I was thinking of creating a 2D version of it actually, where the box would look something like it does above, albeit the arrows of course, and I'd have small picture symbols in the box somewhere, which would act as buttons and respresent each individual item in the box. Visually, it would probably look a lot like my moodboards, but hopefully a lot better. If you want to gain an impression of what I'm planning to create, please feel free to search for my blog on moodboards, it can't be missed!;) I would probably have an animated ninja character in the middle of the page in front of the pagoda, which I could possibly make it "fly" ninja style towards the chosen symbol, which may be a cool feature. If I really go advanced, I may even be able to pull this off with the 3d character avatar I'm developing for the box, but then again time and skills are problems here too.
With my next design which you can see above, someone suggested an idea to me about having a comic page style interface for the box, which I really liked, being an obsessee with anime and manga of course. Hence, I came up with the idea of having a several manga books lying on a table closed with a bird's eye view of them, and each one would represent a different item in the box. When you click on a book, it should open up and reveal what's inside it, hence the comic page style interface can be used here.
In order to build this, I will need to use 3Ds Max to create the 3D models of the table and books, and I will also need to develop the actual project in Flash in a similar way to the other design idea I mentioned. I will also need to use Manga Studio as it can generate comic panels on a page in seconds, which I can export as .jpeg files and thus possibly map them to the 3d models in 3Ds Max. I would then export the books with the panels added in them, and then import them into Flash after that, where I would add in all the items to each corresponding book. This idea does seem at least a bit easier to make than the first idea, and it could work really well if I manage to build it successfully.
Finally, I do have one final idea which I haven't skectched up yet though. It's pretty similar to the 2D alternative of the 3D pagoda design I mentioned, where I would create a moodboard style interface bassed around a Western Asian theme, and have interactive elements in it, which would take you to different sections of the box. Out of all the ideas, this would definuitely be the easiest to make by a mile, but it also will the be easy way out and the least visually impressive, so I do want to try and avoid using this idea...unless I really have to!
I haven't chosen which idea I'm going to develop yet, as I'm still exploring the software, learning what I can about them, what their limitations are and what I can actually pull of with them especially with the amount of time and the current level of skills I have too.
Friday 13 February 2009
Back To The Drawing Board
In a recent seminar I had, I gained a strong amount of inspiration for my Identities interactive box project, as well as rediscovering my love for drawing. The reason for me being enthusiasic about drawing all over again is due to using a graphic tablet properly for the first time! I was so impressed after using one in the seminar, that I immediately decided to go out and get one, which I did :P. Thanks to eBay, I got the same graphics tablet that I used for a mere £50, when the usual price is like £80!!. The graphics tablet is called Bamboo (Eastern Asian style name woot!^^), and it's by a famous brand called Wacom.
It's a pretty nice looking tablet and as you can see, it matches the colour scheme perfectly of a pc with black, silver and blue colours, which is what I so happen to have. The blue part comes from the embedded lights anyways. The tablet is really fantastic to use anyways, it picks up the pen so well, and the smoothness of your drawing and the recognition is brilliant in a word. I'm already becoming quite accustomed to it, only receiving it earlier this week! It's super easy to set up too, you literally just plug it it in and it autoinstalls, but if it doesn't, there's always the traditional method. Combining this tablet with some software I bought called Manga Studio, drawing has become a real enjoyment for me, and I try to aim to draw something every day now, I enjoy it that much!
Anyways, on with the real purpose of this blog which is to showcase the drawings I've already done with this tablet anyhoo. Without further ado, here they are in all their glory in chronological order:
This first drawing is of Dr Zoidberg, a character from the cartoon series Futurama. I did some random photo manipulation when I was younger, and for some odd reason, I wanted to make Zoidberg look evil, so I warped the picture to make it look like he had horns, and put flames behind him. I ended up drawing the picture myself later on too for some odd reason anyways, and then I scanned it into my pc to edit in Manga Studio recently. As you can see above, that is the drawing after I went over it with the pen tool in Manga Studio using my graphics tablet anyhoo. I literally made this drawing straight after getting the tablet, so not exactly a bad effort even I do say so myself ;D.
Moving on, this is the very first manga style drawing I did. I recently redrew it in my sketchbook lately, my new sketchbook is A4 in size, so I can finally scan my work in now, the previous one was A3 which made drawing an nightmare too. Anyhoo, this the drawing after I scanned it in and re-inked it in Manga Studio. I forgot to get rid of the construction lines, but I can always do that any time. This character is the first face you draw in one of the manga drawing books I own anyways.
Drawing number 3, and we have the Old Man Sensei (brilliant name :P) character from a game I got recently called Ninjatown (which I may blog about in the future). I love the art style of the game so much, I had to draw my favourite character from it neways, and it's turned out pretty damn well, I know I traced over the original picture, but to have done that with a graphics tablet, which I have next to no experience with, it's really impressive for me! Don't why I drew it in blue by the way, I dont know either to be honest XD.
Moving on, we have my drawing of a "Raving Rabbid" from the Rayman Raving Rabbids game series by UbiSoft, which I am an extreme fan of, and then some. Again, the drawing's turned out so brilliantly neways, I've shown this drawing as well as the previous ones to friends, and they were all really impressed even though they are amazing artists themselves!
My next drawing is of an adorable as hell character called Tama-Chan, from the anime and manga series, Love Hina. Tama-Chan is a flying turtle who ends up turning up in the oddest places, at the weirdest times and doing all sorts of random things, and I really enjoyed drawing her like the other drawings I did before too.
Finally, we get to the drawing that I literally did like half and hour ago! This one is of Sonic the Hedgehog (if you dont know who that is, I may have to hurt you [metaphorically of course]), and he's a character that I've always admired since the golden age of like 5 or 6 years old, to this very day. He's one of the most important aspects of the personality, and hence I had to do him some justice by drawing him lol. The original drawing I did of him which was my 2nd proper drawing and done in full A3 size, was one of the best drawings I've ever done, especially since I copied what I saw, not traced it! It actually looked almost exactly like this to be honest, I did myself proud with that one.
Anyways, those are my drawings with the tablet so far, pelase feel free to give me any sensible feedback or tips on them, and I will continue to do blogs on them as I do more, I may even do weekly blogs on them depending on how things go.
It's a pretty nice looking tablet and as you can see, it matches the colour scheme perfectly of a pc with black, silver and blue colours, which is what I so happen to have. The blue part comes from the embedded lights anyways. The tablet is really fantastic to use anyways, it picks up the pen so well, and the smoothness of your drawing and the recognition is brilliant in a word. I'm already becoming quite accustomed to it, only receiving it earlier this week! It's super easy to set up too, you literally just plug it it in and it autoinstalls, but if it doesn't, there's always the traditional method. Combining this tablet with some software I bought called Manga Studio, drawing has become a real enjoyment for me, and I try to aim to draw something every day now, I enjoy it that much!
Anyways, on with the real purpose of this blog which is to showcase the drawings I've already done with this tablet anyhoo. Without further ado, here they are in all their glory in chronological order:
This first drawing is of Dr Zoidberg, a character from the cartoon series Futurama. I did some random photo manipulation when I was younger, and for some odd reason, I wanted to make Zoidberg look evil, so I warped the picture to make it look like he had horns, and put flames behind him. I ended up drawing the picture myself later on too for some odd reason anyways, and then I scanned it into my pc to edit in Manga Studio recently. As you can see above, that is the drawing after I went over it with the pen tool in Manga Studio using my graphics tablet anyhoo. I literally made this drawing straight after getting the tablet, so not exactly a bad effort even I do say so myself ;D.
Moving on, this is the very first manga style drawing I did. I recently redrew it in my sketchbook lately, my new sketchbook is A4 in size, so I can finally scan my work in now, the previous one was A3 which made drawing an nightmare too. Anyhoo, this the drawing after I scanned it in and re-inked it in Manga Studio. I forgot to get rid of the construction lines, but I can always do that any time. This character is the first face you draw in one of the manga drawing books I own anyways.
Drawing number 3, and we have the Old Man Sensei (brilliant name :P) character from a game I got recently called Ninjatown (which I may blog about in the future). I love the art style of the game so much, I had to draw my favourite character from it neways, and it's turned out pretty damn well, I know I traced over the original picture, but to have done that with a graphics tablet, which I have next to no experience with, it's really impressive for me! Don't why I drew it in blue by the way, I dont know either to be honest XD.
Moving on, we have my drawing of a "Raving Rabbid" from the Rayman Raving Rabbids game series by UbiSoft, which I am an extreme fan of, and then some. Again, the drawing's turned out so brilliantly neways, I've shown this drawing as well as the previous ones to friends, and they were all really impressed even though they are amazing artists themselves!
My next drawing is of an adorable as hell character called Tama-Chan, from the anime and manga series, Love Hina. Tama-Chan is a flying turtle who ends up turning up in the oddest places, at the weirdest times and doing all sorts of random things, and I really enjoyed drawing her like the other drawings I did before too.
Finally, we get to the drawing that I literally did like half and hour ago! This one is of Sonic the Hedgehog (if you dont know who that is, I may have to hurt you [metaphorically of course]), and he's a character that I've always admired since the golden age of like 5 or 6 years old, to this very day. He's one of the most important aspects of the personality, and hence I had to do him some justice by drawing him lol. The original drawing I did of him which was my 2nd proper drawing and done in full A3 size, was one of the best drawings I've ever done, especially since I copied what I saw, not traced it! It actually looked almost exactly like this to be honest, I did myself proud with that one.
Anyways, those are my drawings with the tablet so far, pelase feel free to give me any sensible feedback or tips on them, and I will continue to do blogs on them as I do more, I may even do weekly blogs on them depending on how things go.
Thursday 12 February 2009
Anime Conventions And All That
Recently, I was shown the website to an anime convention being held at DeMontfort University in Leicester by a friend of mine from Youtube. Being very keen on anime and manga of course, I've already signed myself up for it and it will be held during September 4th to the 6th this year. I think this will be a fantastic venture for me anyways, as I will get to meet the guy behind the Yu-gi-oh Abridged series, which is a fan dub of an anime series called Yu-gi-oh, and it's freaking hilarious!^^ Im quite a big fan of him anyways, especially since he does all teh individual voices himself, which is even more shocking when you realise that the voices he does almost sound exactly like the vocie actors from the english dub of the anime!
I will also get to meet a female samurai descended from a long line of samurais in her family, spanning many generations! There are millions of things to do there, I won't list them due to the excessive number of things to do, but you can easily access it via the website.
Anyways, I've been planning to have my Phoenix Wrong videos shown off at a convention recently, and amazingly, my friend suddenly showed me this withotu having any idea of what I wanted to do! I've decided that I want to feature my work there if possible as the Phoenix Wright series is done in the traditional manga style, and does have it's own manga series now too. They only have 2 guests featuring at the convention at the moment, and they want at least 5, so I'm really hoping that they will let me be part of it too, it would be an extremely helpful, amazing and generally spirit lifting devleopment! I'll let you know in the future what happens with this neways, wish me luck!
The link to the website is: www.alcon.org.uk
I will also get to meet a female samurai descended from a long line of samurais in her family, spanning many generations! There are millions of things to do there, I won't list them due to the excessive number of things to do, but you can easily access it via the website.
Anyways, I've been planning to have my Phoenix Wrong videos shown off at a convention recently, and amazingly, my friend suddenly showed me this withotu having any idea of what I wanted to do! I've decided that I want to feature my work there if possible as the Phoenix Wright series is done in the traditional manga style, and does have it's own manga series now too. They only have 2 guests featuring at the convention at the moment, and they want at least 5, so I'm really hoping that they will let me be part of it too, it would be an extremely helpful, amazing and generally spirit lifting devleopment! I'll let you know in the future what happens with this neways, wish me luck!
The link to the website is: www.alcon.org.uk
Wednesday 11 February 2009
My Favourite Music Videos: Nickelback - Savin' Me
I was thinking about the video to this song earlier, and I remembered how much I love it actually. I love the actual concept of the video, basically it starts off with a man walking down a street on his phone, and about to cross a street, when all of a sudden, he gets dragged away with strong force by a nearby man who appears to be homeless. Literally just as he pulled the main guy away, a bus comes speeding fast like it's out of the film Speed or something...After that, the main character walks away but soon discovers something odd, which isn't revealed till later in the video. At the moment, it just shows him with a puzzled expression everytime he sees someone, and he tries to swipe at something above their heads much to their alarm.
After sitting next to a woman at a bench, it's revealed what has been bothering him, he can see timers counting down at a regular pace above everyone's heads, which immediately gives the impression that it probably is how long they have to live in this world. This soon turns out to be the right assumption as the man comes across a scene of an accident, with an elderly woman being lifted into an ambulance on a stretcher. Upon looking at her directly as she enters the ambulance, he notices her timer moving down a lot faster than usual, and it shows the timer ticking down 5 seconds until it reaches 0, where her eyes close and I think you can figure out what happened there.
Alarmed by the sight of the woman dying and being unable to save her, he runs away from the scene, and walks down another street trying to clear his head whilst still being "cursed" with this new ability of his. Just when he has given up on trying to make sense of the ability and what good it could do, he notices another woman approaching her car and suddenly discovers her timer is dropping fast with only like 7 seconds roughly left on it, without thinking twice, he runs towards her and pulls her form the car, only for...well why spoil the ending? It's pretty damn shocking what could have happened to her just then!
The part I loved the most, was how it ended actually because what that guy did right at the end, is what that homeless guy did for him at the start...saved his life! I just thought it was brilliant how they brought back what happened at the start, but made it appear to have a cycle style effect, where the homeless man's destiny up till that point because the destiny of the guy he saved, and thus now this woman will end up having the same destiny...to save someone's life before it's too late!
Obviously, seeing how long other people have to live is not something that would be easy to live with, imagine trying to comfort a loved one who is fatally ill and you know that death will be coming for them soon, but you cannot tell them? To me, this video sends out such strong postive and negative messages alike, and has a kind of feeling to it, most music videos and maybe films and such cannot hope to have! As said just now, having this ability can have such negative impacts on your mentality, but the important thing is, not to think of it as a curse at all, but as a gift from God! Instead of worrying about who is going to die soon and how to avoid showing that you know to them, how about trying to save an innocent life instead which does not deserve to be taken yet?
As life will teach you though, you cannot save everyone, but as I like to think, it doesn't mean you can't try your best to! If I had this ability, I'd definitely try to save as many people as I could, but then again, the damage of failing and seeing someone die in front of you, could be likely to induce permanent trauma! I do love the thought of being able to save lives though, it's something I've always wanted to do, but I've always also felt incapable of doing for many reasons, hence that is one of the reasons why I love this video so much, it enables me to see what it would be like if I could save lives, if I could make a difference! Another reason too, is that I've seen a fair few deaths in my time, I've not always seen the deaths myself, but I've had to deal with deaths of both innocent people and animals, as well as losses of the odd family member too as well.
Anyways, I hope after what I said there, you can gain an understand of why I'm so personally attached to the video, and what it means to me anyways. This song does feature in my list of mysongs that Icannto live without, and now you know why ultimately, thanks to the video. If you don't mind, I would like to hear your opinions on seeing this video neways, and how it made you feel and such. Please no silly comments or anything, I'll only accept sensible ones, and I'll also compare how you feel to how I do and see if we can agree on anything, cheers.
Sunday 8 February 2009
More Awesome Videos I Found
Whilst surfing around on Youtube recently, I found loads more amazing videos that I really want to show off, for this, that and and the like, so here goes anyways.
This video here, is a tribute someone made to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly film using a lightbox and some sand, and it's freaking amazing. It's basically stop motion but with sand being used to form the pictures in the video, just watch and be amazed =].
This video is from a series called "The Fuplers" by a guy called Matt Koval (MattKoval on Youtube), and I find the series pretty impressive and inspiring actually. The series is about a dysfunctional family but the speciality of these videos is that the guy plays all the characters in it, and uses clever juxtaposition to create a smooth flowing, consistent scene. It's the same thing Eddie Murphy is pretty good at, playing several different characters at once, as he has shown in films like Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps and Bowfinger. I love how he manages to create the impression of a typical, dysfunctional family and create such a smooth flowing video all by himself, it shows real creativity, innovation, ingenuinity and so on lol. I wouldn't mind trying something like this to be honest, especially seeing as I have so many wigs that I can use and such.
This next video is just absolutely f***** amazing! It's one of the most impressive videos I've seen in my life so far to date. Basically, Youtube has a feature to put in annotations during a video, and these can be interactive too, including a feature to link views to websites or other videos. What is special with this video is that the guy used the annotations feature to create an interactive video series, spanning over 100 videos! Basically, the videos are a match between action figures of characters from the Street Fighter game series and you can choose what moves to pull off whenever you want, via clicking the corresponding annotation. No matter which order you go in either, the opponents health with always deplete gradually to 0. Nobody has really ever done this before, and I found this to be extremely impressive and amazing! I seriously recommend EVERYONE has a look at this, whether you like or hate the series or w/e.
This video is a tribute to a music video called "Working For The Weekend" by "LoverBoy", and it's also a one shot (I believe it is anyways) starring one guy as several characters again. He plays an entire band in the video, and has the band members interacting with one another as well as pulling off "budget" versions of visual effects like smoke and light shows. Again, I'm quite fond of this video for the same reasons as "The Fuplers" videos neways.
I'm sure we are all familiar with the "Rick Roll" franchise, or at least the actual song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by "Rick Astley". But before you groan, this version is a brand new trend of spoofs invented by someone, which is freaking hilarious! The trend is called "The Literal Version", and it's people redubbing music videos with their own fairly good imitations of the singers, singing what the singers are actually seeing the video. Trust me, it's freaking hilarious! The sheer sarkiness of the humour here is the best part probably, if you know these videos, I'm pretty sure you'll like these =].
These 2 videos above, are a series of films spoofs featuring it's entire cast as ACTUAL MONKEYS!! I'm not sure how they do it to be honest, but basicallythey managed to get the monkeys to actually act albeit in a very goofy, slapstick manner and thus creating some surprisingly good parodies of films! I seriously recommend checking this series out, theres are some brilliant parodies of Star Wars, Titanic, Men in Black, Mission Impossible etc. Monkeys pretendning to be professional actors is awesome! :P
Finally, we get to this guy. This guy's name is Mark Leung, and he's good friends with a certain guy called Simon who happens to be working on a site called Frenzoo. Basically, this guy is extremely nuts, random, hilarious, talented and so on lolol, he's a hell of a lot like a eastern asian, older equivalent of me! That video above is very similar to my style of parodies and such, hence I was really happy and impressed upon seeing it, the spoofs are hilarious, the acting is awesome, and the editing skills are just incredibly epic! I would love to meet this guy, and this video is definitely a good way of showing who I am without using any of my work XD.
This video here, is a tribute someone made to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly film using a lightbox and some sand, and it's freaking amazing. It's basically stop motion but with sand being used to form the pictures in the video, just watch and be amazed =].
This video is from a series called "The Fuplers" by a guy called Matt Koval (MattKoval on Youtube), and I find the series pretty impressive and inspiring actually. The series is about a dysfunctional family but the speciality of these videos is that the guy plays all the characters in it, and uses clever juxtaposition to create a smooth flowing, consistent scene. It's the same thing Eddie Murphy is pretty good at, playing several different characters at once, as he has shown in films like Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps and Bowfinger. I love how he manages to create the impression of a typical, dysfunctional family and create such a smooth flowing video all by himself, it shows real creativity, innovation, ingenuinity and so on lol. I wouldn't mind trying something like this to be honest, especially seeing as I have so many wigs that I can use and such.
This next video is just absolutely f***** amazing! It's one of the most impressive videos I've seen in my life so far to date. Basically, Youtube has a feature to put in annotations during a video, and these can be interactive too, including a feature to link views to websites or other videos. What is special with this video is that the guy used the annotations feature to create an interactive video series, spanning over 100 videos! Basically, the videos are a match between action figures of characters from the Street Fighter game series and you can choose what moves to pull off whenever you want, via clicking the corresponding annotation. No matter which order you go in either, the opponents health with always deplete gradually to 0. Nobody has really ever done this before, and I found this to be extremely impressive and amazing! I seriously recommend EVERYONE has a look at this, whether you like or hate the series or w/e.
This video is a tribute to a music video called "Working For The Weekend" by "LoverBoy", and it's also a one shot (I believe it is anyways) starring one guy as several characters again. He plays an entire band in the video, and has the band members interacting with one another as well as pulling off "budget" versions of visual effects like smoke and light shows. Again, I'm quite fond of this video for the same reasons as "The Fuplers" videos neways.
I'm sure we are all familiar with the "Rick Roll" franchise, or at least the actual song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by "Rick Astley". But before you groan, this version is a brand new trend of spoofs invented by someone, which is freaking hilarious! The trend is called "The Literal Version", and it's people redubbing music videos with their own fairly good imitations of the singers, singing what the singers are actually seeing the video. Trust me, it's freaking hilarious! The sheer sarkiness of the humour here is the best part probably, if you know these videos, I'm pretty sure you'll like these =].
These 2 videos above, are a series of films spoofs featuring it's entire cast as ACTUAL MONKEYS!! I'm not sure how they do it to be honest, but basicallythey managed to get the monkeys to actually act albeit in a very goofy, slapstick manner and thus creating some surprisingly good parodies of films! I seriously recommend checking this series out, theres are some brilliant parodies of Star Wars, Titanic, Men in Black, Mission Impossible etc. Monkeys pretendning to be professional actors is awesome! :P
Finally, we get to this guy. This guy's name is Mark Leung, and he's good friends with a certain guy called Simon who happens to be working on a site called Frenzoo. Basically, this guy is extremely nuts, random, hilarious, talented and so on lolol, he's a hell of a lot like a eastern asian, older equivalent of me! That video above is very similar to my style of parodies and such, hence I was really happy and impressed upon seeing it, the spoofs are hilarious, the acting is awesome, and the editing skills are just incredibly epic! I would love to meet this guy, and this video is definitely a good way of showing who I am without using any of my work XD.
Thursday 5 February 2009
Moodboards? More Like Mad-Boards!
Okay, from last friday's seminar, we were told to design some moodboards to represent who we are as multimedia practitioners. Moodboards are basically like digital collages of yourself, but they don't have to be digital either, they can be made up of traditional stuff like newspaper cuttings, random objects, and sketches. I decided to produce several moodboards, all being digitally based with pictures used from the internet and my collection.
If you have read my previous blogs, seen some of my work, met me or somehow saw the presentation I was supposed to do for tuesday (but couldn't because I fell ill >_<), then you may think I'm probably hard to summarise clearly, I certainly think so to be honest. Condesing complex, more massive things into smaller, simpler things isn't one of my specialties as far as I know, so instead of creating one moodboard, I thought of doing around 4 or 5, each one based on a theme that I feel strongly about. Unfortunately, things did not go quite to plan actually, instead of doing 4 or 5, I ended up making 8 moodboards! I got so into making them and found it so enjoyable, I couldn't resist making more, and thus time and exhaustion are what eventually stopped me from making even more. If you read my blogs, then you probably will have noticed a "moodboard" that I made in the recent past, I called it "My Visual Collection", but after learning about moodboards in that seminar, I realised that it could probably be classed as a moodboard in a way! Here is a reminder of what it looked like anyways, it was a collection of items that I put together that I believed summarise and define who I am:
If you would like to know anymore about the items featured, and how they relate to me and such, feel free to look up the blog I did for this anyways, titled "My Visual Collection". To be on the safe side, stick "Identities" with the search tags too.
Funnily enough, the characters I've chosen for my Anime Moodbox, are ones I feel that I have strong connection with when watching anime, and that I can understand what they're going through and why the feel how they do and such. I believe these characters personalities are all similar to mine, as I have a very varied, complex and random personality to be honest lol.
This time, my creativity started kicking in again like it did on the Frenzoo avatar website (look for my blog on that too :P), and I used this floral brush to try and create a giant flower which you can see above you. The brush I used, was literally one half of that flower, so I enlarged it to fit the page, and then "painted" the right half of the flower with it. Since you cannot flip the brush itself to make it face the other way, I had to improvise and I did that by flipping the actual image horizontally, then painting the second half in the same way as I did with the first half in the corresponding area. Flipping the image back to normal, and that's what you get up there!^^ I also created a white layer the same size of the background, and placed it above this background layer with a reduced opacity to create a sort of "tinted" effect on the background.
I used some new tribal brushes that I downloaded, as I love tribal designs, and I decided on a blue theme this time, as blue is my favourite colour neways, and it also reflects the calm, carefree life I had back in Africa. I used my trick of flipping the image again here anyways, to mirror the brush patterns in the picture.
I'm afraid I cannot show you a screenshot of the background of the next moodboard which is the Games one anyways, as I messed up bigtime on it by forgetting to save a final version of the original gimp file of the moodboard, and seeing as the only version of it I saved was a JPG file, all the layers get merged together into one, so I cannot open that and show you the background like that, sorry. I do have good news though, me being the pre-emptive, clever git I am, I had arranged all the pictures on the background so that most of the background was still visible! All I can say to that is...thank god! Here is what the final version of the Games Moodboard looks like anyways:
If you have read my previous blogs, seen some of my work, met me or somehow saw the presentation I was supposed to do for tuesday (but couldn't because I fell ill >_<), then you may think I'm probably hard to summarise clearly, I certainly think so to be honest. Condesing complex, more massive things into smaller, simpler things isn't one of my specialties as far as I know, so instead of creating one moodboard, I thought of doing around 4 or 5, each one based on a theme that I feel strongly about. Unfortunately, things did not go quite to plan actually, instead of doing 4 or 5, I ended up making 8 moodboards! I got so into making them and found it so enjoyable, I couldn't resist making more, and thus time and exhaustion are what eventually stopped me from making even more. If you read my blogs, then you probably will have noticed a "moodboard" that I made in the recent past, I called it "My Visual Collection", but after learning about moodboards in that seminar, I realised that it could probably be classed as a moodboard in a way! Here is a reminder of what it looked like anyways, it was a collection of items that I put together that I believed summarise and define who I am:
If you would like to know anymore about the items featured, and how they relate to me and such, feel free to look up the blog I did for this anyways, titled "My Visual Collection". To be on the safe side, stick "Identities" with the search tags too.
Anyways if you look below, this is a screenshot of the background for my Anime Moodbox. The trouble is though, like with the later moodboxes, I designed some pretty cool backgrounds, but then they went to waste due to so many images covering them up! >_< 
And if you look below, you can see the first version of my Anime Moodbox anyways. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, there's a white border from one of the pictures causing some visual nuisance in the picture, hence I had to remove it. Also, I didn't completely like the choice of colour for the background, as cool as it looked, it didn't suit the pictures that I used on it after I had edited them in a certain style for this moodbox.
And if you look below, you can see the first version of my Anime Moodbox anyways. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, there's a white border from one of the pictures causing some visual nuisance in the picture, hence I had to remove it. Also, I didn't completely like the choice of colour for the background, as cool as it looked, it didn't suit the pictures that I used on it after I had edited them in a certain style for this moodbox.
Therefore, I decided to try changing the colour of the background too, and I ended up finding a better colour I think for it neways. I also decided to add more colour to the characters for the final version of the moodbox, as due to the coloured glow I put on the pictures, the whole moodbox lost it's black and white graphic style feel to it anyways. Here is the final version of the moodbox anyhoo with a screenshot of it and it's background on it's own.
Funnily enough, the characters I've chosen for my Anime Moodbox, are ones I feel that I have strong connection with when watching anime, and that I can understand what they're going through and why the feel how they do and such. I believe these characters personalities are all similar to mine, as I have a very varied, complex and random personality to be honest lol.
Moving on anyways, the theme I chose for my 2nd moodboard was Eastern Asia, which I doubt I really need to explain anymore why, as I think I've mentioned my life long passion for it enough times now in most of my work at least^^. Here is the screenshot for the background neways:
This time, my creativity started kicking in again like it did on the Frenzoo avatar website (look for my blog on that too :P), and I used this floral brush to try and create a giant flower which you can see above you. The brush I used, was literally one half of that flower, so I enlarged it to fit the page, and then "painted" the right half of the flower with it. Since you cannot flip the brush itself to make it face the other way, I had to improvise and I did that by flipping the actual image horizontally, then painting the second half in the same way as I did with the first half in the corresponding area. Flipping the image back to normal, and that's what you get up there!^^ I also created a white layer the same size of the background, and placed it above this background layer with a reduced opacity to create a sort of "tinted" effect on the background.
I got creatived with the images for this moodboard too actually, I added a "Softglow" effect to that ninja on the left to give him that slighty radiant look he has, which I believe works quite well. With the kung fu master in the red next to the ninja, he originally wasn't in colour actually. It was originally a graphic novel style black and white picture (noir style), but I felt it didn't stand out enough compared to the other pictures and their variety of colours, so I chose to add some red into his life as I believe it does look pretty good and still manages to retain somewhat a graphic effect, not as much as if it were completely black and white though of course.
With the geisha woman holding the umbrella in the bottom right corner, I accidentally managed to delete her silouhette whilst removed the background from the image, but this turned out to be quite useful, as I then noticed that the background appeared where the silouhette was, but in the same shape as it. Hence on a whim, I moved this Yin and Yang picture I was about to use, behind her and voila! It turned out a pretty impressive and eye pelasing result I think! :P
With the geisha woman holding the umbrella in the bottom right corner, I accidentally managed to delete her silouhette whilst removed the background from the image, but this turned out to be quite useful, as I then noticed that the background appeared where the silouhette was, but in the same shape as it. Hence on a whim, I moved this Yin and Yang picture I was about to use, behind her and voila! It turned out a pretty impressive and eye pelasing result I think! :P
Like with the Anime Moodbox though, I wasn't convinced that the background colour was suitable for the job again, hence I decided to experiment again to find a a better colour.
As you can see, I not only recoloured the background in 2 different ways, but I eventually arrived at at the decision that a blue colour was the best choice for the background anyways. I forgot to mention by the way, I placed characters from the Hiragana script in Japanes and they spell out my name, Karan Bhalla. The romanised version of the characters is literally, Ka-ra-n Ba-la, although I don't think it's the exact translation of my name in Japanese but ah well.
And now for the 3rd moodboard anyways, which is based all around Animals. The screenshot of the background is below:
For this background, I decided to use a specific set of floral brushes to create it, with usage of several shades of green to try and add some depth to the picture. I only made a final version of my Animals Moodboard anyways, as to save time and such.
Like with the backgrounds, I went for a green colour scheme to help the images blend together and create more consistency within the picture. It did take a fair bit of fiddling around to get the right shades of green and all that with this moodboard anyhoo, it definitely was the 2nd or the most toughest one to make out of all of them, with this one only posing a mild challenge at the most :P. I am quite happy with the way it's turned out, especially with how well the animals blend in together with one another as well as the background.
For this background, I decided to use a specific set of floral brushes to create it, with usage of several shades of green to try and add some depth to the picture. I only made a final version of my Animals Moodboard anyways, as to save time and such.
Like with the backgrounds, I went for a green colour scheme to help the images blend together and create more consistency within the picture. It did take a fair bit of fiddling around to get the right shades of green and all that with this moodboard anyhoo, it definitely was the 2nd or the most toughest one to make out of all of them, with this one only posing a mild challenge at the most :P. I am quite happy with the way it's turned out, especially with how well the animals blend in together with one another as well as the background.
With moodboard no 4, I went for an African theme anyways, as Africa is where I was born and raised, until my dad's side of the family started causing trouble and them my momma said your packing your bags and we're moving to UK! I got out of the cab and said, " Smell Ya Later!". Took one look at my house and realised I was the Fresh Prince of Lame Parodies...I Mean Nottingham! Sorry, I couldn't resist there, after realising how I worded that first sentence there XD. Here is the screenshot of the background for it anyways...ahem:
I used some new tribal brushes that I downloaded, as I love tribal designs, and I decided on a blue theme this time, as blue is my favourite colour neways, and it also reflects the calm, carefree life I had back in Africa. I used my trick of flipping the image again here anyways, to mirror the brush patterns in the picture.
I didn't want to overcrowd this moodbox too much with pictures, as I did want to show off as much of the tribal designs I did as possible. I chose the same blue theme for the pictures anyways to help make them blend in together as one image and also to blend with the background too. The meerkat with guitar and cowboy hat was a nice find anyways :P.
I'm afraid I cannot show you a screenshot of the background of the next moodboard which is the Games one anyways, as I messed up bigtime on it by forgetting to save a final version of the original gimp file of the moodboard, and seeing as the only version of it I saved was a JPG file, all the layers get merged together into one, so I cannot open that and show you the background like that, sorry. I do have good news though, me being the pre-emptive, clever git I am, I had arranged all the pictures on the background so that most of the background was still visible! All I can say to that is...thank god! Here is what the final version of the Games Moodboard looks like anyways:
For the background, I decided to go for a graphic style after all due to the brushes I used, as I think you can see why I chose it from the picture. These characters are from games that I'm very passionate about and feel quite a connection with like with the anime characters anyways. I decided to keep their colours though because of the wide variety of graphical styles and the unique colour sches on offer here, I just had to show them off lol.
With the 7th moodboard, I decided to focus on an area I haven't mentioned much before, my love for Nature. I'm a massive fan of landscape scenes as you can see below, I formed a moodboard using some of the pictures from my collection of Nature wallpapers. Yes I said some, not even most here XD. To be honest, I think I've created some pretty nice wallpaper here, I've been struggling to find a nature wallpaper that I want to keep as my background on my desktop for a long term basis, as I keep changing it to a different scene every now and then lolol. This moodboard however solves the problem, due to it combining several images into one, it means I get to enjoy the beauty of several nature scenes at once rather than just the one :P. Go me!
After this one, we have the final moodboard which is definitely, the biggest, most random, most demanding and most epic one out of the lot. This one is like a general moodboard about me, it's focus is self identity, and I've shown several anime and games characters as well as some of my avatars, my official logo for my work, and some people who inspire me. This isn't the complete list of people who inspire me anyways, if I did make one of those, I swear I'd collapse from exhaustion or my brain would self destruct from the sheer, unimaginable number of things in a moodboard at once!
I hope that didn;t shock you too much!^^ This is my grand finale moodboard, the mother of all moodboards I've done and so on. This was a beast to make unsurprisingly, but definitely a lot easier than intially expected, as I thought it would take absolutely ages due to it's sizeand complexity.
Oh yeah..I forgot to mention something...This verison is...the SMALL VERSION!!! It may not appear so intimidating since it's been reduced to fit in this blog, but I can tell you this comes in at around 774 KB, and it's dimensions are 800 by 1112 pixels! It's bigger, badder older brother, is the real beast, with a file size just over 2MB and it's dimensions being 1600 by 2224 pixels! I can tell you know, the larger one was the one I originally built too! Yep, I officially can be classed as mad now lol. Anyways, I'm going to call it day now as it's 1:45 am and I'm freaking knackered beyond belief, I've been awake till 2-3pm average everyday so far mostly because of uni work, so yeah, all that lost sleep is really getting to me as well as the hours spent making thse moodboards! -sobs-
I hope you guys appreciate the effort I went through to make these, I know I made them sound easy, but the sheer endurance toll they have on you alone is a real nightmare, I seriously should try and get them done in the daytime especially, lack of sleep is never a good thing! Meh anyways, if you have anymore questions about the moodboards or whatever, feel absolutely free to ask me in person or on her or anywhere else you can contact me, and please make sure it's a sensible question too...See ya anyways!
Monday 2 February 2009
Identities: My 3D Avatar Diary (Twinity) - Day 7
For my 7th day on Twinity, I got invited to a party by Lars, which was being held on the rooftop of a cinema in Berlin city. The party was to celebrate the release of the film "Spirit" (Which I wanna see badly!), and as you might have guessed, it has a fancy dress theme of specials masks, inspired by the release of the film.
Shortly afterwards, quite a lot of people turned up as you can see above and flocked in front of the billboard nearby, which would soon become quite significant...
As you can see above, the party suddenly got into swing and almost everyone started dancing with some music playing of course. The guy in the middle 50 Globals (Nice Twinity based pun there), was the DJ and begun asking people for their music requests. Things didn't go so well from there though, as seeing as I don't know how to "dance", I thought to ask the people there...only to be completely blanked! I wasn't exactly happy about that..so I thought sod them, and decided to explore the area and see what I could find.
I decided to examine the billboard nearby, and discovered something pretty nifty as a result. As you can from the above screenshot, a page from the website "Youtube" has been embedded into the billboard, and seeing as there is a video on it on autoplay, it automatically provided the music for the party! That was a pretty impressive idea there, I never though of using the embedding feature of billboards like that, me likey a lot lol. Unfortunately the song playing was Men In Black, the song is great but this version of it wasn't...It was by some band called "Forever the Sickest Kids" (They sound like a "nice" group), and their cover of the Will Smith classis was a weird hybrid of rap and metal 0_0...It wasn't to my tastes at all, the original version is definitely the best =].
I decided to teleport to Berlin city centre a few minutes before the party to give me time to find the cinema, until a genius idea hit me...Twinity has a feature to teleport to any of your friend's locations, so I immediately decided to teleport to where Lars was as he was where the party was being held.
Upon arrival on the cinema rooftop, I was immediately welcome by Lars as you can see above. I couldn't see him oddly enough though, but I wanted to explore the area anyways. Oh yeah, you can see someone standing behind me wearing one of the mentioned Spirit masks there.
Shortly afterwards, quite a lot of people turned up as you can see above and flocked in front of the billboard nearby, which would soon become quite significant...
As you can see above, the party suddenly got into swing and almost everyone started dancing with some music playing of course. The guy in the middle 50 Globals (Nice Twinity based pun there), was the DJ and begun asking people for their music requests. Things didn't go so well from there though, as seeing as I don't know how to "dance", I thought to ask the people there...only to be completely blanked! I wasn't exactly happy about that..so I thought sod them, and decided to explore the area and see what I could find.
I decided to examine the billboard nearby, and discovered something pretty nifty as a result. As you can from the above screenshot, a page from the website "Youtube" has been embedded into the billboard, and seeing as there is a video on it on autoplay, it automatically provided the music for the party! That was a pretty impressive idea there, I never though of using the embedding feature of billboards like that, me likey a lot lol. Unfortunately the song playing was Men In Black, the song is great but this version of it wasn't...It was by some band called "Forever the Sickest Kids" (They sound like a "nice" group), and their cover of the Will Smith classis was a weird hybrid of rap and metal 0_0...It wasn't to my tastes at all, the original version is definitely the best =].
Also whilst exploring around, I noticed the huge promotional advertising sign for Spirit adorned on the rooftop of a nearby building, which was a pretty cool find, as it suits the surroundings well. By the way, if you like at 50 Globals in this screenshot above, it kinda looks like Superman when he's about to fly off, or failing that, he might have spotted a missile coming towards him XD.
Anyways, I decided to call it a day from this point, due to my shallow and limited experience today, hopefully my next visit will be more eventful. If there's one thing Twinity does right, it's that it does some damn impressive scenery work and such neways.
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