Demo reel / Portfolio

Hi all,

My apologies for the generic blogger web site. I am in the process of getting my own personal web space, and I am temporarily using this site for my contact info and demo reel.

My résumé located here (pdf)

My demo reel is located
here (mov, 40 MB)

Jonathan King
3D Animator and Visual Effects Artist
jonathancking@gmail.com
607-768-0890



Some images of my past work (links are broken, see my more current demo reel instead)

spider crowd animation


digital camera animation


Here are some images from my renders and animations. Click on the image for the full size.

Journal 5/2/2006

After a long arduous journey, the goal is at hand. Between the rough cut and the fine cut, I spent, essentially two days working. Two, FULL days of working, that is. About 40 hours in total. The first "day" was spent finishing up the special effects. I was working on all of the scenes sporadically, but, in order, I essentially did the following.

The opening scene was a little too blurred for my taste, so I screen grabbed MS Word and pasted it in AFX as an image, and added a grain effect to jive with the rest of the footage. I also spent time working with photo filters and brightness to make it look less like a graphic and more like live footage. The text animation I basically took from my animatic.

For the first abstract scene, I had to animate strokes across the monsters to simulate the writer thinking about the various ideas for monsters. I used AFX's vector paint after a torturous, wasted hour trying to figure out how to do it in Corel painter. The strokes don't look as stylish as Painter's, but I'm happy with them. It took me about thirty tries to actually get the scribble stroke just right. About ten tries for the circle on the third monster. Of course, after that tenth try I realized half the circle was out of action safe and had to do it over again.

The third scene took the most time out of all the scenes (obviously). First, there is the text animation that appears on the screen. In order to keep my camera move (the zoom into the screen), I had to pre-compose my background layers twice, once as a 3D environment, and once as a 2D background. Only then did the text appear correctly in 3D. The camera move had to be quite precise because I was basically using two cameras to show the same movement (once on the background footage and once for the 3D text layers). There were also problems with the mask, and I had to do extensive tweaking in order to get the mask to line up with the screen. Additionally, the mask stays the same size regardless of Z-depth, meaning I had to manually enlarge the mask to make the text stay on the screen only for the duration of the transition. you can see some mask errors if you go through that transition frame by frame.

I had a great idea to transition to the feathery green mask--in the rough cut I just had it appear on the frame that it was supposed to. In the fine cut I actually have the mask existing for the whole scene (including the zoom transition), only it's blown way up (edge pixels quite high). I then shrink it as my face comes into view. There was a more subtle transition problem in that I went from a really bright screen to a really dark background (zoomed in on the laptop's screen to the black backdrop of the next abstract scene). To fix this, I simply added another white layer and turned down its opacity to fade from bright to dark.

This abstract scene was where I had the most fun. All the movements were done in AFX using basic transform keys. The blood I put on a separate composition called splatter. Of course, masks had to be done frame by frame to match the monster's toothy smiles. The little girl I actually redrew in Photoshop to make her demonic. I'm quite happy with the way she turned out. I also photoshopped the monster that the demon girl attacks: it's eyes slant in the opposite direction to convey its fear. I considered putting a sweat drop animation on it, but that seemed too anime-like, and I wasn't going for that kind of look. To fade out the mask I just turned down the edges of the mask. Since I had two masks, one on the footage and another one the turquoise adjustment layer, I decided to make use of them and fade down on the footage slightly before the turquoise, leaving a dreamy, almost other-worldly closing effect.

For the last scene, I put on a nice purple overlay to ease the transition into the final animation. It's hard to see from the web version, but I also tracked red eyes to my footage while it's purple. I then fade into an Imageready gif sequence. I created ten frames of shadowy-beast animation and tweened them. Unfortunately, the opacities of the frames changed on the tween frames, creating a slight flicker in the animation. It is very visible if you go through frame by frame, not so much if you're just watching it. Now I know how cartoonists feel drawing things out frame by frame.

The second "day" was spent having fun doing the sound design. I actually really liked working with the sound. I have an old game (Windows 98) called Klik n Play, which allows you to create rudimentary 2D games by controlling movement, sprite collision, and object creation. And while I had a lot of fun creating nice games, Klik n Play also comes with a hundred or so audio clips to use in the games. I stole a bunch of them for my sound editting. The typing sound I found on the web, but I really had to edit the hell out of the clips to make it sound less repetitious. The monster screams are mostly from Klik n Play, some from findsounds.com.

The scribble sound is definitely from Klik n Play, and was nice because it was a series of short scribbles followed by a longer scribble. I cut it up for both the scribble animation, the question mark, and the circle. The blood n guts effects are all from Klik n Play. I was laughing quite hard after doing all the sound--it really makes the piece stand out. It's a lot funnier than I intended, but funny in a good way.

The scary finale is from a track on the Hannibal movie soundtrack. On the Vide Cour Meum song, there are about five seconds after the piece finishes. And suddenly, this lough sound comes in. Quite terrifying, the first time I heard it, as it was so unexpected. But it was perfect for the ending to my piece, and even matched up well with the jumping movement of the shadow beast.

The music is a waltz by chopin. Quite serendipitously, there is a nice, slight fade-out at about twenty seconds into the song, which I simply faded out to silence. It matched quite well with my piece. I also like the way the piano glides into the transition with the turquoise mask. I could tweak with sound the whole day. I could probably spend another week just editing the sound on the piece.

So ... all that's left is to burn the DVD. And it's due in about 1.5 hours, so I guess I should be getting on that. Thanks, faithful readers, for staying with me to the end, and best of luck on all your endeavors. I hope my sharing has been worthwhile.

-jk

Fine (Final?) Cut

Whew! It's been a long journey, but here is my dpp project, in a form that I'm actually happy with. More tweaks may come, or they may not.

Journal 4/28/2006

Hmmm, looks like I have some journaling to catch up on! Let's see, my last journal dealt with the animatic. Since then, I have had to do my shot reel and a rough cut.

The filming, actually, has been the hardest part of this process. I did not have access to good lighting, which was unfortunate, and my takes definitely suffered for it. I ended up filming twice, after seeing how bad the footage was the first time around.

There were a couple things I wish I had known before I started filming. First, one should stripe the tape before attempting to film a whole bunch of takes so that the time code doesn't keep resetting. I tried to log my clips in Final Cut, and it was absolutely impossible because my timecode kept resetting every few minutes or so. The skills of my cameramen were also apparent--how shall I say, less than stellar. Unfortunately, in both cases, I had to rewind the tape to check the footage nearly every shot, which probably led to the timecode resetting. The footage was also pretty jerky.

The second thing I wish I had known before filming was that we should judge the brightness and color of our clips on the NTSC screens rather than the computer monitors. In retrospect, I think that some of the footage that I thought was too dark might have been okay on the NTSC monitors. I had the idea, halfway through the filming, to film in very low light to simulate night time, as if the writer was working through the night and finishing at dawn. I used, of all things, a wide-screen tv and my laptop's monitor to provide some low light. Unfortunately, the footage turned out quite grainy.

A third thing, which is more of a wish, is that my laptop has no firewire connection, so I couldn't see the footage without rewinding the tape. It would have made things so much faster. Essentially, I spent two entire days trying to do the filming for this project, and another day or so trying to adjust the brightness and contrast in post.

On the upside, I now have valuable lessons in filming with the dv camera. I'm still a little hazy on how to do shots simulating night time, I guess the idea is to keep the lights high and tight, with low ambient light, and then colorize everything in post. Also, serendipitously, I've managed to use the grain on most of the scenes to my advantage in the effects work.

Which brings me to the roughcut. Much more fun than the filming. The first thing I did was take my monster images and animate them with photoshop. Essentially, I had them all open their mouths. I ended up using GIMP to do the final touch ups because GIMP's blur and smudge tools are a lot better than photoshop's, in my opinion. The result was relatively realistic--I asked around and most people could not tell which was the original image and which were photoshopped.

Secondly, I knew all the monsters would need to have their background's keyed out, so I colored their backgrounds bright solids: purple, orange-red, and neon green. The keying was quite easy to do in After Effects. A little bit more difficult was the "animations" themselves. I lay the three "frames" of animation on top of each other and keyed their opacity properties until I got a relatively smooth animation. The difficulty was in getting one frame to appear and getting one to disappear while making sure the monster itself didn't look like it was becoming transparent.

The After Effects class was quite useful for figuring out how to create nice filters for my shots. I settled for a color burn filter to get a nightmarish, grainy look for the first effects scene, which actually looks great even with the accentuated graininess. For the second effects shot, I used photo filter and tint. Additionally, I doubled up the footage for that scene, putting filters on one layer and leaving them out on the bottom layer. By changing their opacities and modes, I got the footage to look mostly greenish (a tribute to American remake of The Ring), but with slightly orange highlights. It created a weird, trippy look, and greatly covered up the fact that the footage was terrible. It almost looks like I meant to have all that grain.

Finally, for the first rough cut, I put an animated mask on the green footage. This was a major detail in my original idea, and can be seen to an extent in my original styleframe. The mask turned out great because the edges have the same orange highlights that the lighter areas of the footage do.

I think the film is turning out pretty well, for my first foray into digital animation production. Tasks still left to do: animate crosses, check marks, and scribbles. Animate monsters attacking in the second scene. Create a text effect for the zooming in on the screen. Replace the opening scene with an After Effects text animation. Stabilize the footage. Track reddish eyes to my face at the last scene. Do the animation for the last scene.

Rough cut

A rough cut

More shot reels

I just recently learned that we should be calibrating our footage for display on TV screens rather than the wild-gamma-varying computer monitors. Which is great because the following two shot reels actually don't look bad at all on TV. The first one, with filters. The second one, without. Actually, without the filters looks better, yes?

New Styleframes!

Here are my style frames redone with a touch of flair (aka Corel Painter IX):





My current favorite is the first one at the top.

Reel

My first (well, actually second) attempt at filming.

Journal 4/1/2006

Time really flew while I was doing the animatic; it was a lot of fun. I did the typing effect and the opacity masks for the monsters in After Effects, rendered them out as quicktime movies, and brought them into Final Cut for editing. Unfortunately, the quicktime movies from After Effects had to be rendered in Final Cut, so I must have rendered them with the wrong settings in After Effects. Also, I had a couple problems with crossfades. For some reasons, the crossfades didn't work when I put them between an image file (psd) and a video file (mov). It only worked correctly between two mov files, or two psd files. When I put it between a psd and a mov file, the crossfade would only last a single frame, and Final Cut refused to let me change the duration of the crossfade. Plus, I had to rerender all the keyed effects (crossfades, scales, center points), so that slowed me down a bit. Even still, it was fun to start work on the project.

In terms of the direction of my project, my major discovery was that everything is moving way too fast to be considered a project about writer's block. But interestingly, the timing fits very well as a project about the writing process. The initial stumbling block is still there (depending too much on cliches), but is quickly eliminated with a little thought and a little planning. By the end, the writer has a nice completed first draft of a short story, and there's just enough time left over for the monstrous finale.

Before I start working on the imagery, I want to do another style frame, because I think that is the last obstacle I have before I can start filming and working on animating the monsters. And since the style frame is going to be mostly abstract, part of the image may actually make it into the final piece. I'll see how it goes.

Animatic

Awesome animatic