Blarbus

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."

Commie Stomping

I give you another bizarre, yet useful, After Effects assignment.


Commie Stomping from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

What is your favorite color?

Here's a small assignment I did today for Advanced Editing Techniques.  Just a quick exercise in playing around with type animation.


Pythons and Montys from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

Haka in the Springtime

Here's a charming little assignment I did for my Advanced Editing Techniques class.  Just experimenting with the puppet tool in after effects and crude lip syncing.

Explanation of Haka

Muscle Man

This is the base mesh for a character that will eventually become a tipsy, armor-clad knight with a lampshade over his head.  It was modeled with two crude drawings for reference, so a lot of the detailing and geometry had to be modeled freehand as I went along.

I realize these model flyarounds might be a little boring, but they will soon lead to cooler material.  Sometime either this week or next week I hope to be putting chain mail and armor plating on him, and maybe even have him walk around a little, so stay tuned.


Man Rotate from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

The Head!

Great success today.  I finally got around to modeling and texturing a human head in Blender.

Blender Human Head from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

Total time involved was probably about five or six hours.  I realize the ears are messed up, and the skin looks predictably waxy, but this was a huge improvement for me in being methodical with both the construction of the model and the texture detail.

More to come another day.

Motion Graphics

Hey everybody,

Blarbuswise, I've been a bit of a slug lately, but I'm hoping that will change very soon.  This little animation:

Download Marketplace_3.mov (24695.2K) (It's nary a streaming, so you might want to 'Save As')

was an assignment I did for a course I'm taking called "Advanced Editing Techniques," where we basically learn about the fundamentals of Adobe After Effects.  Considering that I'm currently in the doldrums of creativity, this should help encourage me to keep pumping things out.

Expect more...

...soon?

Snowy Classwork

Here's an editing assignment I did for my directing course.  The scene is an excerpt from a movie already made by my professor, Eric Tretbar, called "Snow," and was shot as a class.

This one was a multi-camera shoot, which had its drawbacks as well as its advantages.  It makes editing a lot easier, since all the different angles are being covered at the same time, and it gives you a lot of material to work with.  On the down side, it means that you can't cater the lighting to one particular camera, making the whole thing look more like an evenly lit sitcom.

"Snow" Scene from Alexander Cooney on Vimeo.

Tricky Photography

At first glance, this picture may not seem very special.  Obviously, somebody is standing on a rocky ledge overlooking a pristine lake, right?  Maybe somewhere with a little elevation like Montana, Colorado, or Alaska.

Would you have guessed the north woods of Minnesota?  That is, after all, where this picture was taken.  What you might not have realized at first glance is that this particular picture is a very sneaky picture.  It's tricking you.

In reality, the rocky ledge this person appears to be standing on is actually a sand mountain built by my uncle.

"What, what," you might say, "then surely you must have found a gnome to pose for the picture?"

No, that's my sister.  She's just standing on the dock about thirty yards away.

If you've watched any of the Lord of the Rings films, you've already been duped by this particular trick.  It's a technique called "forced perspective" which is used to make objects appear larger or smaller than their actual size by manipulating the vantage point of the camera to distort the apparent distances between relative objects.

It's the oldest trick in the book, but as someone who has grown up having known little else than digital effects and computer generated imagery,  I find that in-camera optical illusions such as these never fail to fascinate me.