The Quality of Art

I mentioned our class in this thread on ZBrushCentral. It could get interesting if this turns into a serious discussion.

http://www.pixolator.com/zbc/showthread.php?p=370914&posted=1#post370914

Capstone Breakthroughs

So I thought I was going to need a programmer, but I may not need one as much as I thought. I thought I was going to need a plug-in written for me to create some of the 3d features I've been envisioning, but I just found an already existing plug-in that seems to have all the features I need. I will still need somebody more knowledgeable to help me figure out some scripting, but I may already have a couple willing and able people for that.

So all I need now is a co-writer and a sound effects/music guy, and I will be good to go. I'm about to e-mail one of my parent's old friends from college who has already done some digital comic work.

I opened up Neobook for the first time today. I know I should have done this a long time ago, but ZBrush is so addictive! Neobook is an amazing program. I can literally drag and drop multimedia files onto a page and choose scripting commands from a pre-fabricated list. When finished, I hit compile, and it embeds the files into the project, compresses, and exports the whole package as a stand-alone .exe file that anybody can enjoy with a simple double-click. It's almost too good to be true. All I need to do is make art, drag-and-drop it onto a page, and do a bit of scripting work to accomplish all these lofty ideas that I've been so excited about.

I literally made the following file in about 30 seconds. http://rapidshare.com/files/37003486/Test.exe.html

Sugar Gliders Update

We made major strides tonight! They're really beginning to warm up to us. When they first woke up, they still crabbed at us and retreated from our hands. Now that I'm about to go to bed, they no longer crab at me or flee my hands. They curiously sniff and then nibble at my fingers. They even allow me to pet them a little bit. Towards the end, I had them coming to me almost by command. If I stood nearby in a convenient place and made some encouraging noises, and maybe held my hand out, I could get them to jump onto me.

They are so very playful and interesting, and incredible climbers. Today, they were climbing on a 7' tall lamp of ours made of smooth plastic. They could only reach about halfway around it and couldn't get any grip with their claws, but still managed to scurry up the thing without too much effort. The way they climb drapes or wires is incredibly human-like. They pull themselves along hand over hand with their front paws just like a soldier climbing a rope. When they're on the ground (which isn't often) they hop and skitter from place to place very much like chipmunks.

Their noises are really fascinating. I mentioned crabbing already. That's the "leave me alone" noise they make when they're upset. It's a really loud noise that sounds very much like one of those old pencil sharpeners where you turned the handle and it broke your pencil every time. Everybody jumps the first time they hear it. They bark like puppies when they're happy. They make a coarse chirping noise when they argue or play rough with eachother. I also heard a noise like air being released from a valve, but I have no idea what that one meant.

And they're so smart too. They want to explore and figure out everything around them. We have a bunch of baby toys in their cage, and they play with them the same ways an infant does. Tonight I watched them chase eachother around in an almost hide and seek fashion. For a little while, I played a game with them where I repeatedly surprised them by poking them from behind, and they seemed to love it.

Overall, I'm in love. I've never had such a fascinating pet, and I've had quite a few pets. They're only 8 weeks old. I wonder how they're going to develop over the next 10-15 years of their lives.

Sugar Gliders!!!!!!!

So a few weeks ago, my wife and I decided that a new pet would be good for us. Neither of us has as much time to spend with Hiro as we need to, and he doesn't get to see other kids much. We thought that a pet could be great for him in these circumstances.

We wanted something that can offer alot of playfulness, energy, and affection, but my wife and I both hate traditional pets. I love cats, but she's allergic. We both love reptiles, but they're not companions and they carry salmonella. Our snake has already made Hiro sick a couple times. Birds, dogs, fish, and rodents were all eliminated with little discussion. My wife did some research and discovered Sugar Gliders.

Sugar Gliders are little chipmunk sized marsupials native to Australia. They have flaps of skin along their sides like flying squirrels so they can glide (up to 300 yards, I hear). Their climbing ability is amazing, and beats out any other animal I've witnessed. They're nocturnal.

They're also born to be pets. In the wild, they only live 2 - 3 years. As pets, they often live 10 - 15 years. They love social interaction and bond well with humans. Glider owners are known to walk around in public with them simply perched on a shoulder or sleeping in a pocket because the owner is like home to them and they won't run away. They're extremely curious and playful. Their waking periods are 10 - 12 hours long, so there's tons of time to interact with them even if you sleep at night. They often learn their names and can be trained to respond to commands. They're even relatively clean. I've been pooped on several times, but it hasn't really bothered me. They poop little pea-sized dry pellets that don't really make much mess at all.

The only negatives I've seen so far with Sugar Glider pets? They're fragile, they're mischievous, and their diet requires alot of special attention. That's it. Otherwise they are perfect pets.

So my wife went looking for Sugar Glider offers online. They're a pretty rare find at a pet store. We managed to find a girl near Chicago who just had 2 baby sisters and was offering them for standard price. Perfect. As of now, they're about 8 weeks old and have only been weened for a week. Yesterday, we all piled into the car and went to pick them up, early in the morning. We spent the day exhausted as all hell preparing everything for when they woke up (carrying them around in a pouch hanging around our necks as we did so). Around 11:30 pm when they finally woke up, that exhausted just melted away.

They were frightened as all hell with the sudden change and seperation from their previous family, but we still had them eating out of our hands within 10 minutes. Within 30 minutes, they were both freely darting and climbing all over our computer room and having a blast exploring. They still need coaxing before they'll come to us, and they're still afraid of Hiro... but I am still amazed at how smoothly it went. I can't wait until they wake up again tonight, not long after I get back from class :)

I expect that they'll be bonded well enough by next week that I could take them to class. In the meantime, I'll have pictures and maybe a youtube video coming soon.

Oh ya. Their names are Ninja and Cherry.

What If...

I wasn't so sure about this exercise when I first started, but I ended up really liking it. I found that my What If's were kinda lame in the beginning and came to me really slowly, but as I continued they kept getting more creative, epic, and easier to conjure.

1. What If... ZBrush had a timeline?
2. What If... I had never discovered the internet?
3. What If... I had been a popular kid in school?
4. What If... You could record your dreams to watch again later?
5. What If... People listened to children?
6. What If... I had never discovered Pink Floyd?
7. What If... Syd Barrett had stayed with the band?
8. What If... Indoctrinating children was illegal?
9. What If... Walmart never happened?
10. What If... The earth was a hollow sphere, and we lived inside of it?
11. What If... I never had to sleep?
12. What If... The human sex drive disappeared?
13. What If... We all looked the same?
14. What If... Einstein never passed on the secret to the atom bomb?
15. What If... The ideals of Feudal Japan caught on in the modern world?
(I think America would have to commit one massive seppuku)
16. What If... Smoking cured cancer, but caused amnesia?
17. What If... We could work 24/7 and stay perfectly healthy?
How many people would live their lives in a cubicle?
18. What If... Superman was real? Would we work him to death?
19. What If... Empathy was a physical sixth sense, and we always felt the pain of those around us?
20. What If... Politicians faced real consequences for lies or recklessness?
21. What If... A zombie outbreak actually happened?
22. What If... We could all switch gender, just for a while?
23. What If... Making art was as easy as downloading thoughts?
Would art school be nothing but Seeing Sideways classes?
24. What If... All the possibilities of nanotechnology were realized, soon?
25. What If... I could ask god one question, but he could only answer with a number?
26. What If... God announced to the world that their is no meaning to life?
Would there be anarchy?
27. What If... I could do anything I wanted, just one time, and nobody could ever know what it was?
Would it be something bad?
28. What If... The human race had an infinite attention span?
29. What If... I could communicate or travel through a picture?
30. What If... We harvested, processed, and manufactured the entire earth?
Could we live on a planet made of junk?
Would it hold together or just disperse and disappear?
31. What If... I invented a new primary color?
32. What If... I could turn blood into gold?
33. What If... Insects waged war on humanity?
34. What If... Daylight was tinted red?
35. What If... I could smell music?
36. What If... By law, everybody had to say something nice at least twice a day?
37. What If... Violence disappeared from modern film?
38. What If... Guns didn't exist?
39. What If... The earth reversed its rotation & orbit today?
40. What If... Disputes were settled with games rather than violence?
41. What If... My third eye suddenly opened?
42. What If... Cannibalism turned mainstream?
43. What If... I was a prophet who found messages in the noses of perfect strangers?
44. What If... The entire world population slept through an entire day?
45. What If... Negative thoughts were an energy source?
46. What If... My child grew up to be a Buddha?
47. What If... The top 10 richest people in the world distributed their wealth to the poorest 10%?
48. What If... Caffiene ceased to exist?
49. What If... Every written record in the world vanished?
50. What If... I thought of something revolutionary for my 50th What If?

Now the Gimmicks

Now that I've told you about my story, here is how I want to tell my story.

I want to make a digital comic book incorporating motion and sound. I want to take advantage of every method to enhance immersion and turn my story into a personal experience.

It will still be sequential art. You will turn pages and recieve the story frame by frame. However, I will encourage the audience to follow their eyes with their mouse cursor because they will be able to trigger events on the page and visuals and audio will evolve as they progress through the story in ways that are slightly beyond the traditional frame-by-frame.

So before I get into specifics, let me explain the reasoning behind this. I don't know where this idea first came from. It just popped into my head when I was talking to a friend about capstones -- "I could try combining animation and comics" -- and I casually mentioned it to him. He told me it was a great idea that I really needed to hang onto, which kind of surprised me, so I thought about it a whole bunch more.

I started thinking about the strengths of comics and film, and found that they are wonderfully opposed. In my opinion, comics have their strength in pacing and dialogue. The reader can dwell on any frame of artwork or any line of text as long as they feel like, and absorb it as much as they need to before moving on. This allows them to fully appreciate a single piece of art which may introduce a setting or character or they can ponder the meaning of a single line of dialogue that would be gone in seconds if recited on film. I have also always personally found that dialogue is more powerful when read off a page and recited in your head, rather than heard from an actor. I think comics find their weakness in action. So many comics are so action oriented, but all we ever get to see is heroes and villains frozen in dynamic poses.

This is where film thrives. We get to see the motion and hear the sounds associated. Motion and sound can really make us feel the woosh of a flying object or the jar of an impact. When something's moving fast, we can really see how fast it moves. This makes a huge difference in the experience of a story.

Unfortunately, film does not allow us to experience a story at our own pace. Stories that deserve several hours are crammed into 2 hours. When an actor delivers a line, we don't have time to think about it. Something else is immediately happening. When we discover a new person or place, we don't get to just stop and stare and absorb the visual. We get a quick pan or zoom and then we're ushered along to something else. Plus, actors are only as good as they actually are, where a character on a page is as convincing as we can imagine them.

I attended Scott McCloud's presentation a while ago, and he gave me another angle. He criticized one existing attempt at a comic incorporating motion/sound. He called it a "self-presenting" comic. The problem with it was, it kept grabbing control away from the audience and then giving it back. It couldn't figure out if it was presenting itself or if the audience was exploring it by their own will.

So I want to take the best of both worlds. I have thought of several do's and don'ts and alot of possibilities and their implications for a story.

First, and most obvious, I will make use of minimal, looping background music. Music can set a mood/atmosphere, tell a story by itself, and generally increase immersion. Music is especially powerful when it's taken away from a story. When you have music, and then suddenly you don't have music, you know something important is happening. I want to take full advantage of this powerful tool of storytelling. Of course, I will give the audience as much control as possible, even over music. As the audience moves their mouse from point A to point B on the page, the music might evolve as the scene progresses. Layers can be added to or taken away from a musical loop as cued by the mouse cursor, it can be sped up/slowed down, or it can even be moved from speaker to speaker for spatial effects. There can even be buttons on the page relating to your typical stereo controls.

Next, I'm going to make use of alot of animated GIFs. This is where most of the motion in the comic will come into play. I'm especially imagining alot of looping GIFs. Imagine a picture looking up at a superhero standing at the top of a building with his cape flapping in the wind, or grass swaying in a field. I understand that this may be distracting and draw your eye to a frame you haven't reached yet, so most likely these looping animations will be triggered by mouse-over and halt when the mouse is removed. This is where following your eyes with the mouse cursor becomes very important.

Even more so with the next example. Imagine being able to trigger events on a page with motions or clicks of your mouse. Imagine that the final frame on a page depicts the protagonist's hand on a doorknob. Instead of turning the page to find out what's behind it, you click on the doorknob and see the door open to reveal what's behind. More immersion. More personal experience for the audience.

I have noticed that I always have a tendency to glance at the bottom of a page before I have actually gotten there. Or I just can't resist reading the very last sentence of a book before I'm even halfway through. I HATE having the ability to do that. It's so difficult to restrain my own eyes from that split second glance which can ruin a surprise. An animated GIF triggered by mouse-over can completely solve this problem.

You're reading a page in a comic book. It's a quiet scene in a restaurant, with two characters engaged in casual conversation. Looks pretty calm all the way down the page. You're following your eyes with the mouse cursor as you read and appreciate the artwork. Looping gifs show your common cafe activity with waitresses walking around and people entering and exiting. You move on to another frame about halfway down the page. Another looping gif much in the same style as those before it. A second or two into this frame, a character walking by in the background pulls out a gun and shoots somebody. Suddenly, everything beyond this point on the page transforms to reveal what's really happening. It catches you completely by surprise. The sound of the gunshot even makes you jump. Totally possible.

I wouldn't call this interactive. The audience has no control over the content of the story (though this could be done, it's not what I want to do). Instead, the audience has control over their experience of the story.

Also imagine how fun it would be to be presented with a 3d sculpture of an important object or character in the story, and be able to interactively rotate it on the digital comic page. Look at one of those superhero comics where they profile a character. They'll sometimes just give you a picture of the guy on a blank white background with a bunch of information about them. Same thing, except you get to move him around and look at him from any angle, zoom in/out, etc.

Finally, here's an idea that I cant claim. A friend offered this to me when I was talking to him about my idea after the Scott McCloud thing. I call it the zFrame. What if you had a static frame on a page, the same as any other. Except you can trigger this frame to become a free-floating camera in a 3d scene. You're reading down the page and you come to this frame. You click on it, and suddenly you can move around inside of it and explore it in full 3d. Imagine the details you could hide in such a scene for an audience to discover? I'm not dead set on any practical storytelling use for this device yet, but I'm sure it's there. I just haven't thought of it yet.

How am I going to make all of this happen? Well first I need help with writing the story, and I have very limited experience in sound production. This is also going to involve alot of scripting and a couple of plug-in applications which will require programming. I need help, and I need it from creative people -- people who can think sideways!

Otherwise, I will be creating all of my images and most of my animation with ZBrush. I would not be attempting this program at all without certain features that just became available in ZBrush 3. First, it's incredibly easy to create high-detail 3d images and render them quickly. Second, ZBrush 3 introduced something called transpose. Transpose allows me to fully pose and deform any 3d character without any rigging or preparation. Third, ZBrush 3 even introduced layers in 3d. You know how layers work in photoshop? It's the same thing as applied to 3d sculpture. This means I can make a base model of any character and quickly modify him and pose him for any scene and create high-quality 3d imagery frame by frame with very little effort.

Also, I discovered an application called Neobook, which describes itself as a tool for creating multimedia artwork, tools, and applications. With Neobook, I can arrange images, videos, and sounds on a digital page along with scripting and plug-ins written in several programming languages. It's a match made in heaven. It even exports your finished work as a stand-alone .exe file, so anybody who wants to read my digital comic will need nothing to do so. They just download and run the .exe file.

So there's my idea. I've put alot of thought into it, but I think I can push it even farther. However, I don't think I can do it without help. I need alot of input and discussion if I'm going to make this idea into everything it can be.

I also want to ask something of everybody who read this post. I am really trusting everybody in this class by openly discussing all of these ideas. I'm aiming to do some things that I think nobody has ever seen before. Please be careful about taking these ideas outside of the class, if you do so at all. People like me get taken advantage of all the time by others with a little ambition and alot more resources.

I am really looking forward to comments!

28 Weeks Later

*** Mild Spoilers!!! ***

Wow. They really saw sideways with this movie. It was fantastic and truly terrifying. I can sit through most media without flinching, but I had my hand clapped over my mouth through much of this movie. Before I get into plot, just let me say that the visuals, music, sound effects, acting, and EVERYTHING were just excellent.

Now here's what I think they did differently in this movie from any other zombie movie I've seen. If you haven't seen it, this gets kinda spoilerish.

People who have seen a few zombie movies (or survival oriented) movies should pick up on this very easily. Stop and think to yourself -- What causes shit to hit the fan every. single. time? Every time the survivors get something good going for themselves, who screws it up? How does it end? Usually one person in the group does something selfish and ends up screwing them all, right? Or an outside group enters the scene with malicious intent.

I cannot think of a single survival story at the moment that doesn't follow this trend. Human greed, selfishness, mistrust, competition, violent nature, etc always turns around on us right? Even 28 Days Later had very much the same idea.

28 Weeks Later seems to offer exactly the opposite message. Now I'm not saying that the entire cast of the movie is a bunch of saints. But every time one of the characters is faced with a decision to be either compassionate or practical, they choose compassionate. Plus, in general, everybody in the movie acts very believably and very intelligently. When forced to be practical, people choose practical. It's the seemingly innocent choices that always screw them.

And throughout the movie, every time somebody does something compassionate, it is punished in increasing numbers of lives.

Through the entire movie people are faced with seemingly harmless decisions. "There's a child survivor and no infected in sight, let's let him in the house. The infection is gone, let's allow children into the reconstruction colony. The infection is gone, I won't shoot these children when they sneak out of the colony. The infection is gone, this survivor couldn't possibly be a carrier. Let's delay the order to kill without discrimination until absolutely necessary. I've been ordered to kill without discrimination, but he's just a child and he's not infected. I should be protecting this kid. I've got a helicopter and these are just kids. They don't act like infected. There can't be any harm in giving them a ride out of the country, right?"

The most striking example is a common theme throughout the movie. This woman and her kids can carry the virus without getting violent. Her blood carries a partial immunity. This could be interpreted as a positive or negative thing. The negative thought is that this is a carrier who can infiltrate society without being identified. If allowed to live a normal life, they could be the source of another outbreak that nobody will be prepared for.

Almost everybody in the movie sees it the positive way. This is just a kid. I can't kill a kid, it's inhuman. They're a hope for humanity. Their blood could lead to a cure. People band together throughout the movie to save these kids and get them to safety. In the end, their compassionate decisions carry the infection over to mainland Europe.

Now that is a horror movie! A million times I've seen the message "People are shit and we're going to get eachother killed." It's kind of a downer, but no big news, right? Now I'm faced with the message "People are soft and we're going to get eachother killed. Sometimes practical safety for the greater good overrides humanity." And then they present a situation where several people should have looked a child in the face and realized that they were dealing with something bigger than the life of a child, bigger than their own feelings of humanity or goodwill, and bigger than their personal judgement.

Looking back on that movie, I realize I would have made all the same decisions and got those kids safely to the continent. Now I have to face the idea that those decisions would have led to global catastrophe. The entire movie had me rooting for those kids. Then it was incredible how the story spat in my face when it showed them flowing over the ocean. What a turnaround when I suddenly find myself thinking "Oh my god you should have killed them." That's real horror, and that's definitely Seeing Sideways.

I hope nobody hates me for spoiling the movie for them :P... if you haven't seen it and you can stomach some intense heart-wrenching terror, then it's a definite must-see.