Tag: SpaceBase: Infinity

How long has it been?

Must have been ages since our last post… seeing as how Nat has gone full sci-fi Lawnmower Man on us:

He’s actually pretty pumped about it; all those splines and lines means he’s articulate! As in he’s got a big mouf:

OK, its not that big, but maybe a little too big for his head. Fortunately adjusting the size should be no problem! And after spending a day learning motion tracking software, The overlaying process of the mouf on the face ain’t so bad. Animating moufs still is… anyone know how to automate animated mouf generation based on audio input? Cause that would be pretty cool, allowing me to play more Awesomenauts with Mike and lament on the sad selection of other great online co-op games.

The outdoor King scene has been on pause since we last got together, but we should be finished in another day of filming. The venue is likely changing for it, as I’ll be packing all of the equipment up and moving it from Vienna House to Mikey’s, which really needs a cool studio name. Like “Maggie’s Magorium”, or perhaps something even cooler!

Until then, I’ll be churning out the splines and keyframes!

-Steve

ps- moufs!

One might say that the aim of any artistic work is to provoke emotion.  What better to provoke someone to feel a way about something than to make a dog sad?  We have made the dog sad.  Behold!

Eventually, this scene will be stitched together with an interior shot, a static image of stars, and a meteor shower through the witchcraft that is modern home video editing.  Please reference the post below for a mockup of the shot.

Until next time,
-Mike

Was this the horrible, unspeakable accident that sparked the genesis of the Melty Man?  Does it fully explain the back story of how Mr. Man attained his moniker?  Might it create a wealth of story-lines ripe for exploration throughout the first season of SpaceBase: Infinity?

Either those things, or we dropped the adjustable arm lamp entirely too deep into the set and blew out the image.  Great opportunity for ridiculous text effects, though.

Today, we fully assembled the next set, experimented with lighting (including some nice LEDs leaking through the window), and made King’s new sitting position.

In addition, we realized that if we leave clay out, the clay gets dry.  Hmm… that sounds familiar for some reason.  Looks like we’ll be remaking the character’s bodies again.  Hooray!

When everything is composited, the shot should look something like this (only, a little better):

Finally, a question to ponder… better rap “supergroup”: 213 or Westside Connection?

-Mike

After a long hiatus, the SpaceBase:Infinity crew is back and hard at work… finally. The jerks.

And next on the list for scenes is one of the more unique sets we will be working with on this project. After much deliberation, we decided to go with a cross section of the SpaceBase interior, with the exterior showing at the same time (you can see a little of the base’s inner workings at the top of the above image). While a little technical and tricky, this should prove to be an interesting shot, which will make up for our lack of exposition and dialogue in the scene!

After crafting the majority of the Base’s set for this scene, we took a break to make some musics, and it was good. The crew of SB:I toiled away as we played our hearts out. Then we took another picture:

Until next time, when you will see more!

-Steve

Let us begin this blog post with a block quote of an earlier blog post.  Imagine a world where it is early March, the weather is still threatening snow, and Steve and I are tirelessly clicking the enter button on his wireless number pad.  A bold decision is made:

“We’re also planning to do some creative reusing of a few of the angles we’ve shot so far.  In a few weeks, we should know whether or not we have ingeniously saved hours of work or confused the shot sequence so severely that only hours of additional work can sort out the wreckage.  Exciting!”
-Mike

Fast forward to present day.  We made a mess for ourselves.

What have we learned?  Make notes.  If you plan on reusing footage, make it apparent where the cuts should be.  Write down frame numbers, descriptions, draw a picture.  Do something to remind yourself later instead of, you know, not doing anything and assuming it’ll all work out fine.

Here are some things I’m hearing Steve say as he edits the scene and I write this post:

• “This doesn’t make any sense.”
• “We filmed the dog out of sequence; that threw me off for a little bit.”
• “Yeah, it’s too… maybe a little further.”
• “What’s this shot?”
• “Winona reaction face.  But there’s a lot of talking there!”
• “I’m assuming that comes after what we just did. [sigh]”
• “I really don’t know what we did here.  I’m gonna move on.”

Next time things will probably be perfect.  I’m pretty sure.

-Mike

Even though the full episode of SB:I will only be in 3d if you consider Einsteinian theory, we do have some conventionally 3d treats for you today.  If you have your computer connected to a fancy TV or a Nintendo 3DS laying in a charging cradle somewhere, click the link below each of the following pictures to bask in the full muti-dimensionality of SpaceBase: Infinity.  If you’re stuck on a 3d incapable iPad or some other such unfortunate device, try not to get a headache from these gifs!

Download Winona here.

Download King here.

Download the sandwich here.

If you are motivated to purchase a screen that can show you these inspiring 3d photographs, follow this link.  Or this one.  Or even this one might work, maybe.

As for real progress, fear not, we didn’t spend all of our time fiddling with stereo photo maker.  We should be able to complete shooting scene 3 the next time we meet.  We’ve captured over 1000 frames so far, for those keeping track.

-Mike

After nearly a year of filming test shots and with one scene already in the can, we figured it was time to learn how to use a camera.

From what we can figure out, besides focal distance and zoom, there are three settings that affect the look of a shot: aperture, ISO, and shutter speed.  Shutter speed was intuitive.  The longer the shutter stays open, the more light is allowed to pass through to the lens.  This results in a brighter and clearer picture, but also encourages the ghastly appearance of the phantom hand.  Slowing the shutter speed past five or six seconds will diminish the depth of field effect coveted by semi-pro photographers and super-amateur stop motion animators (such as ourselves).

Aperture determines the amount that the shutter opens.  An aperture setting of 5.6 opens the shutter twice as wide as a setting of 8, which is twice as wide as 11, and so on.  The amount the shutter opens determines how much light hits the lens.

According to photo.net, ISO is apparently a swarm of bees gobbling up the light passing through the shutter.  Steve likened changing the ISO to adjusting the number of photo-receptors available to take in light.  An ISO setting of 100 has half as many receptors as a setting of 200.  Increasing the ISO creates a brighter picture with a smaller aperture and faster shutter speed, but at the expense of adding graininess and noise.

And with that, we’re over 300 frames into our next scene.  It’s nice to once again measure our progress in frames.  Looks like the entire scene will end up having between 1700 and 1800 of them.

-Mike