i hate kyler club

Life Drawing And Yoga

2012-01-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

This is more digital life drawing. I should get myself to a real life drawing session, but for now I am picking my skills back up with online life drawing. And for the first time ever, a little bit of animated life drawing. This could be done with a real model, but it is easier with digital reference. In the future, I might move my life drawing into something more akin to life animating.

But lets not get to ahead of ourselves yet.

Kyler

Sheep and Lines

2011-12-28T20:29:00.000-05:00

Link to the full Sheep and Lines Album

Drawing lots of sheep for hothouse.

Kyler

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T01:19:00.001-05:00

The Summit

2011-12-12T11:07:00.002-05:00

A film about the hardest decision there is in mountaineering.

You can learn more about the making-of over at www.kylerkellyanimation.com in the film section.

Kyler

An old photo manipulation.

2011-11-21T23:22:00.001-05:00

I did this when I was thinking up the crescendo step. It was in one of my online photo albums.I always like it.Hmmm....

Kyler

Digital Paint

2011-11-19T20:11:00.001-05:00

After seeing some amazing art that was made on the tablet that I work with, it made me realize what was possible.

After finding some essential color selection tools, which are exceptionally important for this work, and experimenting with ways to make natural feeling brush strokes, I'm on my way to painting digitally.

Here are the first results. I suspect there is going to be a glut still life painting in the future as I rekindle my abilities with this type of color work.

Sure there is nothing like the feeling of mixing real paint, but the advantages of digital will make themselves apparent once I start towards animating.

Kyler

A Field

2011-11-18T23:05:00.001-05:00

I think I figured some digital painting things out today.

Kyler

Ballet Adagio

2011-11-16T14:55:00.001-05:00

Based off of the film Ballet Adagio by Norman McLaren.I'm warming up my drawing skills for a film based on the circus. This is ballet, but I think this is the type of bodies that I will need to be animating and designing.
Making these drawings was a test of my digital drawing techniques. I feel like it is a challenge for the future to learn to draw digitally as well as I was able to draw with physical pen and paper.

It is easy to assume that once you have a digital tablet that it is a one to one skill that transfers to digital work.
From my experience this is not true to a number of reasons.

The first is just that the feeling of drawing on a tablet is different than paper. The glass of the tablet is slick compared to paper. You can't feel the end of your drawing tool vibrate as it move along the surface. This vibration actually tells you a lot about the movement of the pen. Try drag a pencil along glass and than along paper. There is a huge difference. You can actually feel the movement of the pen on the paper.

The next problem is a minor distance lag between the image of the drawing and the physical end of the drawing tool on a tablet. I have found a solution to this by have a very visible cursor icon on the tablet and than paying very close attention to it's actually position. In this way, drawing is much like painting in that you have to track the ever moving bristle of the brush and not just the handle of the brush.

The next problems is software. It is always getting in the way. I am reading a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. The premise of the book is that the right-side of the brain needs to take over for good drawing to occur. This is the non-verbal, non-systematic, non-symbolic part of the brain. It is everything that is opposite of computers. The moment that you need to read something, or choose a folder or open a menu or doing anything to do with language and computer function, you lose the right side of your brain, and you lose much of your ability to draw.

To overcome this, when drawing on the computer, you need to have your software set and well figured out before hand. Learn the shortcuts and buttons that you need and learn them well. If you don't,you will be force back into the left side of your brain and will be unable to tap into the part of your brain that make art.

Getting into the flow of art is difficult on the computer. I'm going to be looking more and more into this topic, and I think it could be a major part of computer development in the future. A company who made computers and software for artists, who understood this concept of getting into the zone could be very successful. Imagine being able to flip a switch and suddenly your computer would be unable to interfere with you right brain. It would turn off all language, all access to technical systems and only give you access to tools that let you create.

And once things were created, you could revert back to the text zone and reorganize everything that you have made.

That might be a great idea.

Kyler

Aww Shucks

2011-11-14T16:57:00.001-05:00

Hand

2011-11-12T16:06:00.001-05:00

The Trouble with Doing Good

2011-10-31T20:13:00.002-04:00

Thinking about the topic of money, I realized there is a terrible hole in the way that our economic system is designed.In our society, it is generally required that one must earn a living. You need to pay for food, rent and other necessities. A source of income is simply something that you must have.

In general, to get money, you provide a good or service to another person and they trade you for money.

Suppose someone were to go out and do something good. Like plant trees in a place where all of the biologists agreed that they were needed.

The trees would undoubted make the land richer.

Other people might be willing to give charity to the tree planter. But that depends on so many factors. What if the surround area had little money, or there were no people nearby?

In such a situation, it would be irrational for any person to become the tree planter. It might still happen. People are good. But it makes no sense economically.

Is there a way to provide the tree planter with money?

Money is ephemeral, it comes from nowhere. The banking void from which money is brought into existence is no-place.

So could the tree planter be paid? From nowhere in particular, with money that is suddenly said to exist?

I suspect that there could be a way for that to work. For good work to be paid for by no one in particular. I am not yet ready to write about how that could work.

Kyler

Digital 3d Sculpture

2011-10-21T17:08:00.000-04:00

Finally, it finally feels like art is possible in 3d on the computer. Sure I've made 3d films on the computer. But the real feeling of making art is hard to achieve digitally. The tools are always getting in the way. Drawing is getting pretty good digitally.

But 3d has always been a really difficult problem to crack. There is so much technical thought that goes into creating the 3d that it is difficult to get into a real flow.

But a new version of the program Z-Brush has really brought 3d into the realm of art. I was able to bring my windows tablet computer into an art gallery today do 3d sketches of the sculptures right there in the gallery.

The process is a lot like working with real clay. In previous versions of 3d sculpting, anything that felt like 3d clay only felt like 3d clay for a few moments. It would quickly distort and turn into polygons again. A new feature of Z-Brush called Dynamesh allows you to overcome this barrier whenever it feels like it is about to impede your progress.

I am still working how to sculpt in the computer, and the type of work flows that I should be using, so the results still are not spot on, but it is just like drawing, in that I will need to do it a lot to get good.

It is really weird compared to life drawing in that it needs to be right from all angles. This was one of the first times that I actually felt like a 3d display would have been immensely useful to me.

Kyler

BitCoins

2011-10-20T16:10:00.000-04:00

I was at a newstand and all it took was a brief flash of the words "Crypto-Currency" out of the corner of my eye to get me to buy a magazine.

The words just melded into an interesting story in my head about what it could mean for money. I've written about money before. It is definitely one of the most interesting aspects of our society. It's like a weird sort of magic. Sure we have batteries that you can charge up and store power in, but with money, you can store it up and than do anything you want with it.

You can look at a gorge and think, I really wish there were a dam and a lake here. And after a few years and a few billion dollars, it could be done.

You can think " I want to be in Japan", and with a few clicks of your mouse, and a few numbers entered into websites, you can be Japan. You could do it without needing to talk with anyone. And you could probably do it today... maybe you would have to wait until tomorrow.

Or if you have enough money, you could buy all the advertisement space in a whole subway system. And put a picture of yourself everywhere with your name. And than everybody in the city might know your name.

Sure you need a bit pile of money to do all the things I've just talked about, but the point is that it can be done.

So money is magical, but currently it's origin is ugly. The short story of where money comes from is that the government ( or treasury (or central bank)) just say that it exists, and numbers change in computers, and money gets printed. There is no elegance or beauty to it.

But here we are faced with something called Bitcoins. And the special thing I find about Bitcoins is that their creation, and the system that they are used in, are all elegantly intertwined in such a way that their value is held up by math and morality.

I won't attempt to explain exactly how bitcoins work. A simple search, or reading the article linked above will provide a better outline than I can write myself.

I'm thinking about the implications of this currency, about how it would spread and what that would be like. Could this be the global currency that everyone will flock to. In what realm of regulation does a currency like this exist it. It has no central creator. Is it something good, or is it something dangerous. Will it hurt people or will it help people. Is it better than what we have know, the same, or worse.

Should we be trying it?

Economics seems like a field where there is never a consensus. It isn't really a science. It works with what people think has value. What people think changes from day to day.

The feeling I get from Bitcoin is that it is such a huge and confusing step in the monetary system that regular people would have an exceedingly difficult time accepting it.

But the other feeling I get is that it is something that won't be destroyed, and that it will last as long as it has a purpose. It feels like an organization was created out of the programming of bitcoin that has no head and can't be destroy. In the same way that all companies have a value attributed to them by the market, Bitcoin too has value invested into it by all the people who thought that it was a good idea, and are able to see the logic and reason that lie in it's code.

Thinking about it now, Bitcoin is just a bit of code that runs on computers all around the world. And all by itself, this code is running the equivalent of a monetary system. It spreads because it is a good idea.

Now suppose that instead of just handling money, suppose that a system such as Bitcoin could handle our democracy.

I've never been relaxed with the idea of a true democracy because I don't think there has ever been one. New things are scary. Sure we have "democracy", but there are so many layers between what people actually vote, and what happens that it isn't scary. We have leaders who try to take care of us. I get the feeling that real democracy is scary.

In a real democracy there is a good chance that you won't know how to spread a message and get your voice heard, so no one will hear you. Majorities can be scary.

But getting back to the Bitcoin as democracy, suppose that suddenly a program popped up that allowed everyone on earth to vote for what they wanted. Lets assume that it would include advanced biometric data recognition to ensure that each person was only given one vote ( in exactly the same way that you can only spend a bitcoin once). And that their votes were anonymous, in the same way that Bitcoins are anonymous.

If this program were to spread, the question of what people actually wanted would be answered. How could a government argue with democracy like that.

I guess, I just wrote a post about the Occupy movement, and suddenly I have an idea for something that actually makes sense to me, something that feels like the next step.

Now my problem is that I feel like the ideas are so big that no one would believe me or care to listen.

Kyler

The Occupation Movement

2011-10-20T15:17:00.003-04:00

It feels like a lot of stuff is happening in the world right now.

Big important stuff, and it is easy to feel in awe and very small compared to the stuff that is going.

There is a movement brewing. The OccupyINSERTPLACENAMEHERE movement is gathering momentum. The american version, that started in New York didn't make sense to me for the first few weeks that it was going on.

Every idea I heard about the movement at the beginning was about different things. First it was about the financial crisis, and than about the environment, and than about politics, or the prison system. And than suddenly the point of the protest shifted. All of those ideas became the result of something else. The financial crisis, the environmental disasters, and the terrible political system in america were all the result of collusion between the biggests corporations in america and the government. Everybody was noticing different problems, and than suddenly the whole puzzle fit together. There was probably one big problem that resulted in all sorts of different little problems.

The method of protest spread. There was a brand. You can occupy any place. Every place has problems. Everywhere you can find a reason to occupy.

America's problem is big and obvious. And it's problems reach all around the world into every other country near and far.

In Canada, I have trouble feeling the same urge to occupy somewhere. Especially in my particular life, at this particular moment, I don't feel burdened by the weight of society. I hear the news, I read the news. But I don't often see, with my own eyes, the problems that are being discussed. And I really don't live the problems that other people have.

I walked by the site of the occupation in Montreal, and I didn't feel any real connection to the issues. I saw one large printed poster, and it seemed like it was a graph of everything about being a human. There is so much noise right now that I can't pick up a signal that resonates with me.

Maybe in a few weeks some chord will be struck just the right way in Canada that will get me to act differently.

Cuba - Havana and Varadero

2011-10-13T11:48:00.001-04:00

While I was in Cuba I could feel the differences caused by the revolution. It's easy to read about a society, about communism, or socialism, or facism and understand how they are different, but it is a different experience entirely to visit a country and feel the differences in so many little ways.

On our first taxi ride, between the Varadero airport and Havana I kept noticing how the electrical poles that ran along the high way were not just different from canadian ones, they kept changing as we moved through the country. Standard wood poles, than twisted wood poles and finally crumbling reinforced concrete.

And some of the insulators were clear glass.

After the revolution there were a lot of problems in Cuba, and seeing all the attempts at solutions made it feel like they were more willing to try things, to at least give them a chance.

Take for example their traffic lights, many of them are equipped with count-downs that let drivers know how long they have till a red light, or how long they have till a green light. It feels like the decision to use such lights would have to be made in a place where change was acceptable, where you are allowed to try something new because it will probably make things better.

I get the feeling that most of the time, in countries that haven't been radically disturbed by revolution, there is simply no allowance for new good ideas. Things are generally good enough, and the possibility that something "might" make things better is not enough of a reason to upset the balance of life.

There are definitely examples of how this type of decision making can make life more confusing. Because of the confusing financial situation of Cuba, cut off from the US and in some ways the rest of the world, they have two types of money: money for the tourist and money for the people. It's a system that makes the country feel segregated. It makes life more complicated and inefficient, they have four separate types of pay phones. They have roughly four different types of taxis and probably five different types of buses.

In any case, people are always adaptable. They find a way to live in the system. There was very little advertising or signage in the country. To fill this void, the streets in tourist areas are filled with jineteros, people trying to get you to come to their families restaurant,and or to buy their cigars, or take their taxis.

Coming to Cuba as a tourist makes you feel like a member of high society in a segregated place. Your allowed into hotels when the general population isn't. Your being constantly asked for your money in any number of ways. And your money feels like it has more power than it did back home.

If you are reading this blog, which would be hard and expensive to do from Cuba, than you probably are part of world that has a higher standard of living than the rest, you have benefits and exclusive rights to things that other people could only dream of.

When you travel, and get right up close to different places, the contrast in society becomes much clearer.

For more pictures of our trip visit this album.

Cuba 2011 - Havana and Varadero

I didn't feel like what I wanted to say about Cuba had much to do with the specifics of our trip. We saw a lot of sights, and had fun on the beach. We saw a show at the Tropicana and explored Havana. We stayed at Casa Particulars, the equivalent of family run bed and breakfasts. They were fantastic.

Kyler

Muscles On the Face

2011-09-14T17:54:00.002-04:00

ZBrush

2011-09-13T20:56:00.002-04:00

I've gotten some hew software, ZBrush. It's like a whole different medium than 3D. I still am thinking about how I can use it.

Kyler

Sculpting Substraction

2011-08-25T18:08:00.002-04:00

This was the result of sculpting in a very peculiar way. All I did was start with a cube and than removed ellipsoid shaped chunks one at a time using Boolean commands. It is a very different way of working and feels quite natural, I need experiment a lot more, but it is a start.

Wealth Cap

2011-08-23T16:39:00.000-04:00

I heard a news story today about the super rich actually suggesting that they would like to pay more taxes to help society. And it got me thinking about the implication of wealth, about how wealthy people can actually get and what the alternatives would be like.

Is it a good thing that people can become infinitely wealth? Is it actually a good thing that there is more than a six order of magnitude difference between the poor and the wealthy?

My instincts about numbers suggests that something is wrong, people aren't created exactly the same, but one person is not a million times better than anyone else. They can't work a million times harder.

When a person becomes super wealthy it is because they find a crack in the system of society, or in the earth, and out gushes money, whether it is from the ground or wallets it doesn't really matter.

I don't think I would want a system where there were no chances of striking it rich, because that is the type of reward that drives people to create great things, the problem is the feedback loop which is caused by money.

Those who have money gain the ability to make more and more of it. With money comes the power to make more money. Suddenly the wealthy will become super wealthy and a huge disparity opens up between the rich and the poor.

With enough money, a single person can be more influential than a million others. A single person can become a ruler, a king or a god with enough money. Is that what we really want?

What type of solution is there to this? Taxes. Curently taxes level off at a specified level of income, and after that it is smooth sailing to make more and more money because it gets easier and easier to come by.

But what if taxes got harsher and harsher, what if taxes increased super linearly, exponentially, so that super-rich meant a much lower number.

Once you are really rich I don't think your goal should be to make any more money. The more you have the less other people will have.

If you are still very concerned with money when you are super rich, it is time to reconsider your purpose, and notice that everyone around you is trying to make their way, and you have the power to make it much more difficult, or much easier.

There is no way to be super rich, no way to be bigger than life, there is always some trick to it. It's an illusion that casts a powerful spell. But there is no such thing as magic.

Kyler

Rocks!

2011-08-12T17:56:00.004-04:00

This video just somehow happened to me last year when I was in the parks all summer.

It's the weird me that doesn't come out in public very often. How very peculiar.

Kyler

Gel Sight - Something for artists

2011-08-10T16:58:00.002-04:00

Gel Sight

I saw this video and realized that there was an incredible powerful application for this technology that can sense the most minute touch input.

Suppose that you had a one foot square piece of this material on the desk in front of you with a camera underneath capturing the touch sensitivity. Next there is a projector above projecting a computer image down onto the top surface of the material. And now you have your fingers and paint brushes and whatever other tools you wish to use to touch the gel sight material with.

The computer can detect the position texture and strength of the slightest touch. It uses this input for a drawing program that creates a beautiful digital image with 3d texture. The projector above is calibrated as to project the image directly back onto the working surface, allowing you to see the result.

This would be an entirely new level of digital art, giving it so much more depth and subtlety.

Well another idea to put on the giant pile of ideas.

Kyler

Most of the Leg

2011-08-10T10:28:00.000-04:00

Polygonal Anatomy - Femur

2011-08-08T11:29:00.004-04:00

I think I am starting a new project. For some reason I actually think I started this project once before, but it never got going.

I'm going to go through human anatomy in 3d. Piece by piece until the whole human figure is complete. I'll start really easily, with just bones. But as I get further, I will rig the bones together so that they move as one. And than model the muscles. And hopefully rig those as well.

I get the feeling that if I can model the human body in 3d, from the inside out, not just a thin outside shell, I will end up with something.

I am doing it simply in 3d, with polygons. Nothing smooth. I will see how much can be said with polygons because they have intention. If I let things get smoothed, everything I put in will get glossed over by an algorithm.

Magicians should only reveal their tricks when the trick itself is beautiful. I'm not really sure what parts of the 3d modelling process are beautiful. I started with a cube and added loops of division. I pushed and pulled the new points that I had created in space to adhere to the surface of the bone I had in mind. I spin the model in the computer, and as it moves I am able to see the 3d shape of it even though it is a two dimensional image on the screen.

The 3d shape begins to feel more and more real as I increase the detail and precision of the model.

Here is the first femur.

Kyler

A New Place on the Web

2011-08-03T21:33:00.001-04:00

I've known for quite a while that I would need to build myself a more official place for myself on the internet. It was only a week and a half ago that suddenly the design took shape in my head.

I wanted to make the design of the website somehow be essential animated. I ended up needing to teach myself about the entire topic of web design to make it work.

Like all art, I ended up learning a lot about myself making this site. I think I really represented how I feel about animation with this site.

I hope you enjoy it kylerkellyanimation.com

Spread it around. The more places it goes, the more places I might.

Kyler

The Very Simple Reason that Facial Motion Capture is Terrible

2011-07-19T12:55:00.001-04:00

I have seen a lot of different research videos and papers on the topic of facial performance capture. They put any number of markers on a face, video the markers with cameras and they create a 3d mesh out of all of this data.

And than usually the results look smooth but ugly. And not really acting that you would want to spend much time watching.

And often, going through this research, you will find images like this.

I've been drawing faces a lot lately, really simple faces. Really expressive faces. And you know what I always make sure to get right, even if everything else isn't great? I always go for the eyes. And than the mouth, and then the eye brows and maybe the nose. And usually after that, the point and emotion of the drawing is pretty obvious.

So I look at these performance capture technologies and the first and most obvious thing that they don't capture is the eye. And it isn't just the rotational position of the eye that is important to capture, it is the white space around the eye.

It's about the amount of the iris and pupil that is visible, the shape that cuts it off and the white space that surrounds it.

If you are to translate a performance capture onto a digital character, it is not the amount of rotation of the eye in the socket that must be transferred, it is the end result of that rotation that makes an image that we as humans with advanced facial recognition abilities can interpret that must be captured and transferred.

Human facial recognition is good, but it has been tricked by drawings for a long time. It is just a matter on focusing on the important parts and letting everything else fall to the side.

Kyler

Wright Brother's Model

2011-07-11T20:21:00.000-04:00

I started building this model a few months ago and finally figured out how to finish it and present it. I have a new-found respect for model builders who take model building to a whole different level of finish and detail.

Happy Father's and Mother's Day

2011-06-20T22:39:00.003-04:00

My parents have come to visit in Montreal. I made them an animated card using my character from last year.

Made on my new tablet computer with TVpaint software. It feels a lot like using a magic animation lightable with magic paper.

Kyler

The Summit Poster

2011-05-19T12:25:00.004-04:00

Drawing but different

2011-05-18T16:08:00.001-04:00

I've been doing a lot of drawing. I'm trying to get a character designed for a game for Mory. It requires a female main characte

Character design is always difficult, and drawing faces is difficult and a giant hurdle that I don't felt I have ever really gotten over is drawing female faces and really understand what makes them female.

So this is just a big pile of female face and face drawing research that I have been doing.

Now there is something special about these drawings. They look like pencil but the aren't.

I just graduated from school and received as a graduation gift an Asus Ep121 tablet computer. It has a wacom pen built into the screen so that I can draw directly on it with pressure sensitivity and very precise line work.

I am really loving it. I don't feel at all hindred by the tablet anymore. I'm still working on getting some really good animation software for it, but I have use a trial of TVpaint and it is going to be great to create 2d animation on.

Kyler

Illusion

2011-03-19T23:02:00.001-04:00

I am very enamoured by illusions.

Whenever I find a new one, I am intensely interested in it.

My most recent find was mime. This video is quite incredible.

Tug of War from Karen Montanaro on Vimeo.

I ended up buying the dvd set because everything he is talking about is utterly related to animation. It arrived today and I already learned a lot from the first hour.

But back to illusions. I've been interested in animation, the illusion of movement, optical illusions, magic eye 3d illusions, magic tricks, card tricks, video games, computer graphics, binaural sound recording, motion tracking, stop motion, photosynths, high realism drawing and painting, virtual reality, and probably a number of other things.

I'm pretty sure that I don't just like fake things, it's that I like knowing how to directly communicate to our perceptual systems. This fantastic mime has stripped away everything but the bare essentials parts of what he is trying to communicate, which is a tug of war.

Every illusion is actually the result of a deep understanding.

Kyler

Inside Job

2011-03-12T22:16:00.000-05:00

I just watched the Inside Job, a film that explains the root causes of the financial meltdown in the last few years.

Out of that comes a discussion of money and wealth. There are all sorts of people getting millions dollar bonus, moving billions of dollars around. And a lot of the time, it feels like people are saying that if a banker got 150 million dollar bonus that money should be going directly to some average working class people. It should just be divided up and given around. In the film, a number like 150 million dollars was compared to 18 000 dollars that elderly were being paid from a pension fund.

And this type of math makes everything feel insane.

But I think there is something weird going on. I don't really think that one banker having 150 million dollars is the same thing as 150 people having a million dollars each, or 1500 people having 100 000 dollars.

The question I am asking is where did the bankers 150 million dollars come from? Did it actually come from hard working people, or was it simply withdrawn from other mysterious investments inside the bank? And what did the banker do with 150 million dollars. I have a feeling it went right back into some sort of investment.

And the thing with investments is that you can't really take all of you money out of them. Suppose all of the bankers with 150 million dollars suddenly wanted to spend all of that money. They would need to sell all of there investments, the market would be flooded and the end value of what they actually had would be dramatically reduced.

So in fact while all sorts of bank statements and computers might say that there are millions and billions of dollars moving around in the bank accounts of a minor top percentage of the world, I have a feeling that that money is tied up, and simply could not be let forth into the world. And money that can't be used doesn't really have much value.

The bankers did do something wrong with how they were practicing economics, but I don't believe that the numbers that they are telling us have anything to do with the actual amount of value which they stole from the world, though they did a really good job of mucking up how everything and everyone else in the world thinks about value.

I guess value is the real mystery. I will have to think more about what is money and what is value and what they mean.

Lies

2010-12-30T23:11:00.000-05:00

I don't like going to stores very much anymore.

I don't like looking at many commercial things anymore.

Every sign, picture, word, message, jingle, phrase, logo, tag-line and catch phrase is lying to me.

You said your food was fresh.
You said your restaurant was world famous.
You said this was a triple A grade egg.
You said I was saving money.
You said this was a great deal.
You said this was a guarantee.
You said I was helping the environment.
You said I wasn't cutting down trees.

But it's all lies, all the time.

Just tell the truth and I will buy your products. But don't try to tell me your telling the truth, because that would probably be a lie.

Good luck economy

Black Swan

2010-12-30T23:07:00.000-05:00

Always remember that film isn't the real world.

It feels real. It has consequences. Continuity must be... except of course it doesn't have to be.

This film isn't reality. It is a type of fantasy. It is part science fiction. It is the filmic representation of a platonic form. It demonstrates with powerful film language what it takes to create the perfect performance. It doesn't surrender in an attempt to be real.

Don't try to understand what actually happened in a film, because it didn't happen.

Understand what the film meant.

Building a mountain

2010-11-30T17:11:00.001-05:00

I guess I haven't written much about the project I am working on for school.

My film is about a mountain and two mountaineers.

The past few weeks I have been building this mountain. I had a rough outline of what the mountain needed to be from my storyboards. What should be roughly where. I had enormous books, with gigantic pictures of Mount Everest and Mount Blanc borrowed out of the library for weeks. I had thought a lot about this mountain.

I sculpted a tiny version of the mountain and adjacent mountains in plasticine. I painted watercolours of the mountain.

And the last week I have been finally creating the mountain in 3d. For along time it felt really small in the computer, just like the model that I had sitting on my desk. But today, I started in on the details. I started adding parts where the characters would actually be up close and personal.

Finally I added little stand-ins for the characters, just to get the idea of the scale of things.

I put my virtual camera right next to these tiny little figures, and suddenly the massive scale of the thing I had created took shape.

It's a primal feeling that I get when I work in 3d, where I am no longer looking at a virtual set, but I feel like I am there.

I put myself at the top of the mountain, and I felt unease, vertigo, high above the glacier I had just created.

Right there, that feeling, is why I like 3d, why I like computers, why I use his medium and not any others.

Kyler

End of Fall Life Drawing

2010-11-23T19:20:00.002-05:00

And that is all the life drawing for this semester.

Glow Strings

2010-11-12T21:09:00.000-05:00

Many things probably

2010-11-12T11:46:00.000-05:00

How am I doing?

I haven't been posting much here recently. Now why is that?

I think the simplest answer is that my life has been changing, and I haven't felt comfortable posting all of the information about how it has been changing. Thus I have fell into the trap of simple not posting, thus not needing to confront the issue of what to post online and what not too.

Many months have past since I made a post about Jackie on this blog. It wasn't really a big grand post, it didn't do a very good job of keeping the blog rolling. Relationships have never really been part of the scope of what I talk about on this blog. There are actually unpublished blog posts about relationships sitting in the background of the blog, waiting patiently, one day to made public... well perhaps.

But the summer's long story made shorter, Jackie and I fell in love during the summer. It is only finally starting to feel like real life again. Though the whole world was tipped on its side and everything is different but still fantastic.

We live in Montreal, snug in the same apartment I was living in last year. There is so much more life in the apartment now. The walls are covered with maps and drawings. There are arts and crafts everywhere. We go to music concerts and cook dinner together. I go to school, she goes to work. We struggle with ordinary life problems. It feels like we hold each other up.

Suddenly I feel like I've jumped a few years forward in life. I'm right on the edge of really having to be an "adult".

There was this feeling when I was little that my parents could just deal with anything. No matter what, they knew how to deal with it. There was this feeling that an adult could plan a trip, while a child could only really go along for the ride. I don't know any other way to describe it. And suddenly I can feel that same level of responsibility rising in myself.

I don't think of it has a burden of responsibility, there is a certain amount of strength in it. Finally getting to be in charge of all of the decisions.

How am I doing?
Really well. Though I can tell that time is just going to start sweeping by.
I need to make life more interesting to slow it down.

Kyler

Drawing with Rhythm

2010-10-31T12:27:00.002-04:00

I've been to two life drawing sessions after that first post of drawings. The second session of the year is always painful. Everything feels forced, and the drawings just don't seem to come out right.

But than in the third session. The teaching assistant who gently leads the classes brought in some hand outs which explained drawing with rhythm. Having straight lines sit opposite of curved lines, and having these sets of a straight and a curved line alternate around the body.

It makes the curvature seem to snake around the body, from one side to the other. This is often called rhythm.

I pretty much completely forgot about proportion, or anatomy once I started drawing this way, but it gave my drawings a big boost of vitality that they had been lacking.

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Kyler

Life Drawing Restart

2010-10-17T13:31:00.001-04:00

It has been quite a while since I have been able to attend life drawing sessions. This year I have the time.

Kyler

Graphics

2010-10-08T01:03:00.000-04:00

I had a discussion today with my roommate about graphics in video games.

I thought that it was the limited simple graphics of Minecraft, which made it such an appealing game. He thought that I was missing the point. The reason Minecraft was good was because the underlying world simulation was more interesting than most modern games, which was what lead it to being a more interesting game. He felt that any graphic improvements to Minecraft, as long as it retained the same underlying complexity would only serve to improve the game.

For some reason this didn't feel like a compelling hypothesis to me. I felt there was something inherently better about the simple graphics. I made an argument that like in painting, there are many times when simplifying the image results in a stronger image. I felt that you could make graphics higher quality in terms of craft, such as higher resolution, better frame rates, smoother edges, but that making the virtual worlds more "realistic" and detailed would not improve the experience.

He countered with another idea. Everybody who has been playing games for anytime has experienced the fact that in nearly all games that have realistic graphics, in which there is a lot of detail in the world, there is almost no interaction with the world. You can move things, you can't touch things, you can't affecting things. Most of the effort of programming went into making everything look good, instead of giving it life. Thus as a gamer, we have come to link good graphics with limited interaction.

It was than that I realized something, something that I learned in art history.
There are different periods of art history. There was Realism, a time when the most compelling art attempt to reproduce nature, but this lead Impressionism, when artists attempted to capture the Impression of nature. But than artist move to another period and completely forgot about nature and where more interested in the medium and the politics and there was Modernism. Times change based on the art of the time.

And right now, times are changing for video games. A few years ago graphics where one of the most compelling aspects of games, but right now there is a return to limited graphics which support more compelling underpinning structures.

If I had to guess, there will be a resurgence of games that do not rely on the cutting edge of graphics. When there are art historians writing about video game history, they will look back at this and probably be able to name it.

Kyler

Minecraft

2010-09-24T11:10:00.000-04:00

I've long had a deep interest in video games, however in the last few years, there have really been few games that felt compelling or interesting.

Until yesterday.

I downloaded a game called Minecraft, it isn't really free, but I haven't had to pay for it yet because it is still in development and I have been playing it offline. I'm fairly sure it is being made by one guy, and it is really the talk of the internet town right now.

Most games give the player a very thin shell of a world to run around in, and fight bad guys. Walls are impenetrable. Objects are unbreakable. Things look right, but they don't react correctly.

In this game, the graphics have been simplified to the point to which they only represent the data which makes up the game. The fundamental data of this game is a three dimensional array of cubes. This array is probably about a thousand cubes, by a thousand cubes, by 200 cubes deep. And each one of those cubes is made of a different material: Rock, ore, sand, water, lava, trees or other such materials.

The game begins by randomizing this array. Hills, mountains and oceans create the surface. Trees, grass and flowers grow on the surface. But the game does not stop at the surface. It randomly generates a world all the way down deep into the earth. Deposits of ore, crystal and lava are placed underground. Rudimentary fluid simulations eat out underground caves.

The player is than dropped into this world. It is a dangerous place, with enemies who will attack, thus the players most viable options is to dig themselves a mine from which to get materials and to hide in.

Creating the mines is an amazingly creative process. It can be done in any way which you chose. You can create a well organized mine slowly slopping down into the earth. Lighting it along the way with torches and placing steps to make it easy to navigate. Or you can dig straight down, hope to hit valuable resources, and than dig yourself out.

I played the game yesterday, and without any intention of having one, I had an adventure. I dug my mine deep into the earth, and suddenly and came upon an underground cave. It was extensive. It was true exploration as I had no idea what lay around the next bend in the darkness. I would hastily place torches as my fear of the dark had been renewed. I actually felt at times like I was hundreds of feet underground.

Soon I had built an underground base, where I could manufacture goods out of the mined ore. When I returned to the surface, I discovered there was also a farming aspect of the game. To rejuvenate health, one must eat, thus I planted some wheat. But wild animals were continually stepping on and eating my wheat. I decided to build a wall to keep them out.

Within a few minutes of beginning this wall for my farm, I realized that I was no longer building a wall, I was designing a castle. It had a torch lined parapet, and stairs leading up to the wall.

It wasn't long before I was beginning to make a lava filled moat.

The graphics in this game are simple, yet the data behind it is complex.

I started the game with empty hands and now have a castle.

Kyler

Shobac Cottages in Nova Scotia

2010-08-30T22:48:00.000-04:00

I am currently on a family trip in Nova Scotia. We are in the middle of an architectural dreamscape.

Being at a cottage with my family is a very special experience.

Kyler

Watercolour Drawings

2010-08-21T21:50:00.001-04:00

This summer I have been doing a lot of watercolour drawings. They are an essential part of one of the videos that I made. Here are a selection of the best. The whole group can be seen by clicking through to my photo gallery.

Very spontaneous.

Kyler

A Twenty Thousand Kilometer Summer

2010-08-20T11:50:00.003-04:00

It has been a vast summer. With my Parks Canada videography job, I have crisscrossed the country in which I live. I have met hundreds of people. Packed my bags countless times.

I will recount my experiences of my trip to Torngat National Park, but I still don't know exactly what to say.

On a basic level, it felt a lot like one of those wonderful childhood camps that many people go too. Campfire songs. Exploration. Humor. Camaraderie. Living in tents.

I'm still not sure what it meant on a grander scale, or if it needs to mean more than that.

Kyler

Old Days Again

2010-07-26T23:30:00.000-04:00

In the old days, to make a photograph, photographers had to be very skilled. They had to do everything manually. Figure out exposure and the development process just right to make a picture. But photographic technology developed. Slowly, everything that was once hard became easier, and easier until today, every single step is automatic, down to detecting whether or not the person is smiling.

I suspect that if i had been born about 80 years ago, I would have been engrossed in photography. But today I can't really be, almost everything has been figured out.

However, I have gotten myself into a field which has the same characteristics of that photographic era. Computer animation is a very similar, very technical skill that only a small percentage of the population has figured out. It's part art, part technology, and delves with image creation.

The question I wonder is if and when and how 3d animation will be made easier, and if it will ever get to the point where anyone who wants can use it as a powerful tool. I suspect that being on the forefront of bring this type of high technology to the masses would be a good place to be.

Kyler