Bruteforce Works

Stories any which way.

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WIP for Ithaca, my coming piece. This will be the official video for Bruno Miranda's classical music piece "When the Wind Whispers". The music is great, sadly I can't share it until the forma debut, probably end of February.

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And here a bird's eye view of the same piece, which has 19 scenes.

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Proud to have finished this piece in time, now I need to get ready for my grown up Xmas! This ended up being heavy lifting, but feels strangely rewarding.

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Ah much better now! The Girl and the Night is starting to take shape and I fixed the snowman's accidental dance. I'm loving this piece, it really means a lot to me.

The music will give you an idea of what's about to come.

Nothing too good.

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Continuing with my Xmas piece, here I have still to fix a little hop I managed to get in the snowman, not sure why.

I tell Pom the plot for this piece, which is rather sad. She asks "Woman, who is your audience?" One of the great things about not having an audience is that one goes through life enjoying all kinds of unprofitable pursuits because the possibility of commercial success is so remote one totally forget about it.

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And also, let me share a little texture study for a Xmas piece I'm trying to get done. i want to get an ink wash feel, which is not the easiest thing to do when you are working with layers, but I think Eb-Synth did a good job carrying the blotchy feel through the 120 frames.

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While I'm here, let me share a little bit of the collab with Vito JEIDELETE, which has this bear guy and a little squirrel as main characters. Vito created the plot and the animals.

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Just a quick reminder to all my visual novel loving friends, that the demo is available here... It will take you about 15 minutes to play it, so it's not a major exercise in endurance!

Not Guilty by Not Guilty

Not Guilty is a visual novel about a boy band under the media spotlight.

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Been super busy with the release of the Not Guilty demo (next week) but after that I'll have a bit more time to get the house ready for Xmas, chase some personal projects and to finish a most postponed animation Vito JEIDELETE and I are concocting. Hopefully we'll have by the end of thee year, but that doesn't depend on me.

On the family front, we had a close encounter with Covid, with Pom and huaso getting it during NFT London, but David (my husband) and I escaped to the Highlands, returned after the kids were negative and so far we haven't got it. Okosan, on the other hand, is coughing a lot.

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I was making such great progress in Blender Grease Pencil that I decided to start a proper project instead of just creating random disposable scenes for every tool I wanted to try. Then Pom announced that when we release the Non Guilty Demo we need to have a lot of other peripheral products ready, so my newly acquired passion for Grease Pencil had to be put in the back burner.

But my idea is to make an animated still life which involves some Chinese vases and jars, flowers, some fruits and maybe a humming bird, for sure some butterflies, all done 100% in Grease Pencil.

What I'm showing here is the vase I made in 3D blender then imported into 2D animation Bender, and the surface colouring, which I think is awesome. I also discovered how to light the scene, to make it more mysterious, the GP objects react just like ay other mesh. With luck it will look like a living version of a Flemish still life. But maybe with some scribbles because one of the cutest ways to use surface painting is to do some line drawing f a mesh and then animate it, looks like a 3D scribble in motion.

Anyway, after November the demo and side dishes will be out and I will take the rest of the year to prepare for Xmas and work on my own things.

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The whole day working trying to control the cameras, as you can see, to no effect. 

But some things which happen with lines  and fills  creates absolutely weird shapes and then some negative spaces which are really interesting, creating a very organic collage feel which moves.

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Another Grease Pencil experiment, very pleased with Blender’s video render, save me a lot of worK1

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New developments in the Grease Pencil front!! I discovered I had to install the Grease Pencil tools in Blender (which meant upgrading to 3.2) and then I managed to get the canvas to rotate, which is super necessary and also all the nice texture brushes I’m testing here. I haven’t discovered how to make a decent camera animation, but this looks really good  when it’s animated and rotating a bit the camera, then you really get a feeling of depth.

But today I’m going back to the visual novel (and its blog) otherwise Pom will fire me.

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Here goes another story. Few days ago I was writing a thread in Twitter about process and my friend Yatima asked me if I had tried grease pencil from Blender. And to be true, once I opened it, after Zero-Alpha asked me the same question, but after not managing to do anything i gave up in couple of hours.  

But this time I did a google search and I landed in this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNPeTVWPymo&ab_channel=GAKU

After seeing this, as you can imagine, I couldn’t eat, sleep or do anything productive, because I was too excited. Friday and Saturday I was getting nowhere, but this morning, as I was walking the dogs, I though about a possible pipeline that would allows me to use moving references. I did one with a mesh, it worked ok but it was a bit clunky, then I though since you can project images or videos on the camera, I could roto directly in grease pencil because it’s much more conformable to work on than on a video in PS.

Not only is more conformable than PS, but it has  a really good onion skin, you can use the sculpt tool to model, it does an attempt and interpolating a sequence,  all of which matter, but what really matters in that demo reel. There is a wonderful feeling of a 3D watercolour which I haven’t seen anywhere else. 

I still have a long way to go, but I know this much. I will conquer this mountain or I’ll die in the attempt!

Have a great Sunday.

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Given that Tumblr allows to tell stories, let me tell you one: I’m not an animator. I’m not trained to be one and I don’t think I have the technical skills of one. And yet, I discovered in college that I have a fascination with moving things, whether motion graphics or animations. 

I should have known, really, because as a child I loved all the gimmicks that allowed you to animate. Do you remember drawing little people on the corner of every page of a book? I did that! And curling a page with a pencil and then letting the page toll and unroll to alternate between two frames? I did that too. And  one of my favourite objects was a pencil sharpener that showed two images according to how you held it. My mom gave it to me after a trip to the US, among a mountain of other things, yet this is the only one I remember. 

I just love all the magic tricks that exploit retinal perception into creating imaginary movement. And the stories that can be created that way. I can’t believe that one can tell a visual story so cheaply, just with a bit of work.

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Being this my first day in Tumbler, I’m taking the chance to post everything I ever made, but don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll get back to normal soon.

For some reason, this blog feels like FB to me, a place to put anything I want without worrying at all about how it’s perceived. Twitter feels, not sure why, more like business.

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I love this piece which is part of a new collection about the life in big cities. The collection is based (loosely!) on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Projects’ via  Michel Houellebecq ‘Unreconclied’, but of course as soon as one is  developing an animation, the good intentions are left behind and things follow their own commands and end wherever.