Thanks Giving

Well Happy Belated Thanksgiving.

My family came to Montreal to celebrate. It was great to be able to have them at the apartment. They have this great ability to just make a place better than it was before. Things get fixed, cleaned and added as though by magic when they showed up.










While my apartment may be a little bit bare, it really is feeling like home.

Kyler

Art Science Business Religion

Art is my business.

Science is my religion.

Somethings are more authoritative

when you don't try to back them up.

Kyler

Drawing and Animating

I just realized that I made a fairly severe error and have made the same error before. I was trying to animate something which I couldn't draw.

Sure maybe I could draw it once or twice, and get it pretty much right, but that is by no means good enough to animate. You should be able to draw something from everything angle from almost memory before you start animating.

All I have been able to do because of this is make myself frustrated with my skill. I was thinking I wasn't good enough, when in actual fact I had simply chosen the wrong things to draw. I need to start designing my characters within the realm of my drawing ability that allows me to draw for animation.

I can't draw for sketch, use those sketches as a starting point to animation. Those sketches need to be converted and simplified into something that I completely understand, in which there are no unknowns in my mind, which I can draw for animation.

Next time I will have to take this advice to heart. I still don't know how badly the stuff I was working on turned out, so maybe I don't need to be so hard on myself. But I need to fundamentally shift my attitude towards drawing and animation because they are controlling me, instead of me controlling them.

Alright.

Kyler

Spectrogram Analysis

One of the most important steps in animation is called sound breakdown. It is the process by which an animator will listen to sound and figure out it's timing. It an animator is going to animate a voice of a character, they need to determine the timing of the pronunciation. If they are given music, they need to be figure out the timing of the notes.


In the old days, before digital was all the rage. The audio would be on a magnetic tape and they would play that backwards and forward very slowly to time everything out. It took along time, but was a good process. With the advent of digital technology, there has actually bit a turn for the worse for most audio breakdown. Most programs to play audio aren't very accurate and don't sound great when you try to slow something down a lot and scrub through it.


You may think that the waveform of a file would be useful in figuring out the timing. Wave forms are fairly useful when some basic sounds are happening, but soon they become useless when there are too many sounds.

What I have been looking into for the last year is a different way of representing sound: spectrograms.


A spectrogram is fairly simple to understand. On the horizontal axis time is represented from left to right. The vertical axis represents the frequency of the sound. The color represents the intensity of he sound.

This is an example of a spectrogram of piano and violin music. If you can see a spectrogram in action it becomes fairly easy to distinguish notes, chords, and other sorts of sounds. You can see rhythms, scales and all sorts of other parts of the music.


While it may not be immediately apparent, there is a vast amount of extra information visible in the spectrogram which is simply hidden in the waveform.


I have two suggestion for software if you would like to try out spectrogram analysis.

The first is only for windows, and I find mostly useful when you are starting out with spectrograms because it allows for real time analysis of sound. This means that if you have a microphone on your computer, you can make noises and seem them appear on the screen. I have spent hours making noises at my computer to see what they look like.

The program is Spectrogram 16.

It is only available for Windows. There are other versions of this program, Spectrogram 5.0, and others, but for some odd reason I can't get them to work well.

If can get the program working do the following.

Press- File/Scan Input

A whole bunch of options will appear, leave them at the default. Press OK.

Now if everything is working you can start making noises and seeing the results.

I would suggest trying whistling, talking, singing, instruments and whatever other things you can think up.

The second piece of software I suggest is much more robust, is compatible with Mac and Windows and is more useful for animation audio breakdown.

Sonic Visualizer

With this software you can import prerecorded sound files and really analyze them well.

To work with this program:

File-New Session

Then press File- Import Audio.

Now to see a spectrogram:

Press Layer - Add Melodic Range Spectrogram - All channels Mixed.

Now it should generate a nice spectrogram of your audio


I will stop now with this talk about spectrograms. There are lots of settings that can be adjusted which can drastically change the appearance of a spectrogram. I will have to write an even more in depth explanation of that in the future. In general it is good to play with the settings and look at the results. If it looks more useful it probably is.

 While I have been able to really get a full grasp on this more advanced topic of spectrogram analysis, it is possible to read spectrograms, meaning if you could determine what a person said simply by looking at the spectrogram.  This ability is extremely applicable to sound break down.  For more information  see Spectrogram Reading.

If you do start using spectrogram for audio analysis, I do want to end with one word of caution: Never stop listening to what you are doing.  If you allow yourself to fall into the trap of only looking at the sounds, you could miss something very important in the sound.  Spectrogram analysis is only a tool that helps the precision and accuracy of sound break down, it is not a replacement for listening.

Kyler

Free Will and Action

I think I might have stumbled upon a peculiar lapse in how my mind functions. It seems that when I have to start or stop something that I am doing, if there is no other influencing factor, my actions lag roughly fifteen minutes behind my thoughts.

The simplest example is playing the video game Geometry Wars. It is a game that is generally played over and over again, because each round lasts only about 3 minutes. The real difficulty is deciding when to stop, and then actually stopping. If you have nothing of urgent need to be done, there is simply no built in stopping point to the game, you simply have to make yourself stop. You have to decide that your done, and then actually turn the game off.

That may sound simple, but I suspect that it is not because there are less similar situations than one might suspect. Take for instance TV shows. You don’t have to consciously decide that you are over. The show ends. It tells you where to leave. Suppose you are playing a sport. Either there is a set time limit, like in soccer, or you will tire yourself out, natural endings.

To clarify, what I noticed was that there was roughly a ten to fifteen minute delay between my conscious decisions of action with no inherit force determining anything for me other than my mind. If this is true, it is of major importance. It means that I haven’t been making many “free will” decisions without a roughly fifteen minute lapse between mental decision and physical action.

So the real trick now is to notice when this is happening and tightening that timing up. As I have discussed before, I suspect this type of learning can happen incrementally over time. So as long as I do slightly better at this all of the time, I will get better at it.

Kyler

Pitch Sketchs

I'm going to try something new with my sketches. Instead of simply letting them float. I am going to annotate them with some comments. It will make me consider them more than if I simply post them as I am required to really take some time in Photoshop doing this.

These drawings are from my character animation course. The assignment is to animate a baseball pitch. These are the drawings from warming up.

















What did you think about this new format?

Kyler

Rediscovery of Sculpture

Well, it has happen again. I have rediscovered that I can sculpt. I discovered this once before in the post Fundamentally a Sculptor. But for some reason the lesson never seems to stick. I think it is because I have never really challenged myself to stick with it very long. But now I am going to get some plasticine, some armature wire and really start sculpting stuff in the same way that I would sketch things. Maybe I will even be able to animate some of them. That would be pretty cool.

What really got me to figure out how to sculpt with plasticine was when I figured out that I can't sculpt by primarily pushing the material around with my fingers. I needed to cut the material away. I have been using an Ulfa knife for the time being, until I get a few more tools.

This first image is almost the first thing I made after discovering to use a knife to carve. All of my anatomy and drawing abilities immediately became apparent. I knew exactly what I needed to do. I felt limited by my dexterity and my tools.



This little SUV was made because I have modeled it before in a 3d program, so it just seemed like a natural thing to try to make.

This was when my break through really happened. I just decided to attempt to make a female figure from my knowledge of anatomy. I didn't have wire for an armature, or enough plasticine, thus I couldn't complete it. What astonished me was the speed and ease with which I made it. It couldn't have been more than ten minutes, likely it was less, I don't know.






Anyways, I am going to keep this up, get more materials and tools as it will prove infinitely useful for my puppet animation class, my 3d animation class, and as a great skill to have.

Kyler