Blarbus

All Things That Are Underneath The Sun And The Sky Dome

This is a fake trailer I put together of an actual short film that Max Silver made during this last term at Carleton.  Why make a fake trailer?  Well, you might notice that every shot in the video is an effects shot.  Basically, I just picked out all of the effects and animations that I had made for Max's film, slapped them together and turned it in as my final project for Advanced Editing Techniques.  Since the requirement was that it be in the form of a movie trailer, I added a few basic titles and a ridiculous voice over.

Don't worry, it's not supposed to make any sense at all (although that doesn't mean that those of you are theoretically inclined can't analyze it and reach unintentional conclusions).

Animated crows and Suns from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

The big personal achievement here is the scene with the talking crows.  It's the first bit of extended character animation that I've ever done in either medium, and it's certainly the first in which I've had to lip synch the characters to pre-recorded dialogue.  Lots of time went into that shot.  It took about a solid day's work to model each crow, another to rig it, and yet another animate it.  With two crows, that came to a total of six days in the ole' Scoville media lab for forty seconds worth of footage (I will add, however, that were I to have done this with traditional cel animation, it would have easily taken double that time).

Needless to say, it proved to be a tremendous learning experience, and I'm now confident that I can produce effects and animations that contain articulated, sympathetic characters who can talk and interact with each other in a meaningful way.  Monsters, aliens, animated short films-- they're all possible now.

Spring Break and Such

A few test images I took over break with my brand spankin' new Nikon D60:

I'm still trying to get a hang of all the different controls and image formats, but it's already very apparent that this wonderful little camera is capable of producing some fantastic images.  I'll be bringing it along on my grand tour to New York, Prague, and Rome, so expect to see a fair share of graffiti, skyscrapers, rustic sunsets and intriguing locals popping up on blarbus throughout the coming months.

And another little doodle just for fun:

There's Always a Bigger Fish

My esteemed programming partner Adam Denny and I crafted this piece of software for our final project in Introduction to Computer Science.  More specifically, it was written in python, and it utilized a few very basic graphics modules our professor had created in order to be able to interface with OpenGL.

As you may or may not be able to tell from the video, the fish have been programmed to generate themselves randomly and detect collisions with the borders of the aquarium as well as with each other.  In the event of fish-on-fish action, the larger fish makes a feast out of the smaller fish, grows bigger, and slows down.  This vicious cycle continues until there is only one.  This last fish is often referred to in fish circles as "the one to rule them all," and as such tends to get all the fish ladies.

We had originally planned it so that an even bigger, ultimate fish comes in out of nowhere to eat each and every thing inside the program with one epic gulp, but in the end, this monster fish had to be thrown out the window in order to satisfy time constraints.

Expect to see more of this kind of thing in future posts.

Procrastination

I really should be writing final papers... 

But drawing a sailing ship also seemed like a good idea.

Crow Folk

Winter term is wrapping up here at Carleton, which means that final papers, projects and tests are all looming over the horizon of the coming weeks.  Ordinarily this would be a time when the blarbus takes on a bit of an abandoned hue, but this time around I'm lucky enough to actually have coursework that is relevant to movies and animation and such. 

Here's a small taste of the final project I'm working on for Advanced Editing Techniques:

This is a small taste of what the final project is shaping up to look like.  In the words of Donald Trump: "It's gonna be uuge."