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
Many things probably
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 There are actually unpublished blog posts about relationships sitting in the background of the blog, waiting patiently, one day to made public...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
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
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.
<
Kyler
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.
<
Kyler
Life Drawing Restart
It has been quite a while since I have been able to attend life drawing sessions. This year I have the time.
Kyler
Kyler
Graphics
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
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
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