OUDF501: COP Level 5 Essay Proposal Form

Course Title: DIGITAL FILM, GAMES AND ANIMATION ______________________________________________________

Name: WISDOM MAKUBILE
______________________________________________________

Provisional Essay Title or Topic: Panopticism In Religion ______________________________________________________

Main issues addressed by your essay and the thrust of your argument: 

• The constant omnipotence of god resembles Panopticism in which there's an invisible force above that encourages you to abide to the rules for the sake of avoiding punishment. 
• How religion is used to control people 
• How religion is used to make profit 
• How religion is used to create rules and take away rights from others, for example, homosexuals not being allowed to marry because it's wrong under the eyes of god. 

What visual material will you look at? 

Documentaries
History Channel
You Tube

What theoretical perspective / methodology will you use? – e.g., Identity, Sustainability, Panopticism, Marxism, gender analysis, the gaze, semiotic analysis, feminism, discourse analysis, genre theory, psychoanalysis, Critical Theory (post-Marxism, Frankfurt School Tradition), consumption:

Panopticism 

Which specific theorists / writers will you refer to? 
Jeremy Bentham
Michael Foucault 
Philip Schofield
David Watkin


______________________________________________________

Books / Articles / Resources Already Located (Using Harvard)
1. Brunon-Ernst, A. (2012) Beyond Foucault: New perspective on Bentham's panopticon. Surrey: Ashgate
2. Foucault, M. (1975) Disciplin and Punish: The Birth of a Prison. London: Penguin
3. Watkin, D (1986) A History of Western Architecture. London: Laurence King Publishing
4. Schofield, P (2009) Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum International Publishing Group
5. Foucault, M. (1970) Foucault: The Order of Things. Oxon: Tavistock
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7
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OUDF504: Blend-Shapes

On one of the tutorials by Mat, we leant how to use blend shapes. This isn't something that I necessarily wanted to use on this project but I know it will come in handy in the near future. blend shapes are important when making organic shapes and wanting to create deformation in more than one area in that structure. 

OUDF504: Key-light Tutorial

On one of the tutorial, we learnt how to key an actor out of a green screen. This is fairly simple to do and it didn't take too long to get my head round it.

figure 1

To get a clean key out of the image above, the first thing I did was use the Screen Colour ink dropper in the Key-light effect, I then selected the green screen colour so the green screen would disappear and turn black. There are other options I still need to do to separate the actor from the back ground. 

I used the screen pre-blur option and changed the value to 3 to smooth things out on the edges. Raising the clip black and lowering the clip white on the screen matter option to 58 and 75 equalised the levels and the image looked like (figure 2) at this stage.

figure 2

I further cleaned up by using screen shrink/grow attribute and changed it to -0.8 and it worked perfectly. I then Adjusted the replace method to hard colour for lighter blending with the green spill. For final refinements, I learnt how to use the simple choker, I increased the value to about 0.75. The last step was keying out the actor, this is called a garbage matte. 

This removed all the back ground leaving only the area that I selected over. My footage was now ready to be composited to any background I wanted.

OUDF504: Motionographer

Motionographer is a lot like Stashmedia tv but instead it is the blog version. Motionographer (pronounced like “oceanographer”) seeks to be a source of inspiration for film-makers,  animators and designers by sharing outstanding work from studios, freelancers and students, feature stories that give readers a closer look at influential studios and individuals, commentary that sparks discussion or introspection about the creative process, miscellaneous items that motionographer contributors find interesting.

Motionographer isn't just about motion graphics. Inspiration can come from anywhere, and the Motionographer contributors hope to provide you with interesting material regardless of the medium in which it was created. It is an all-volunteer organization run by professional artists, designers and directors in our spare time. They don’t make any money from the web-site. 

While I was reading through they're blog, I found an animated video that it very sound driven and interesting  This showed me how sound is very important in any media. This is an animation created by Glass Amsterdam works production company in collaboration with the G-star campaign. The spot mimics macro photography, creating a hyper-real journey that brims with tactile details, despite being entirely CG.

OUDF504: HR Giger

During my research for the VFX module, I decided to dig more into depth on HR Giger's body of work. After watching the latest blockbuster 'Prometheus', I was really intrigued by the visual effects incorporated into the film. The concept art work that Giger did in the 80's was still good enough and relevant that they were used in Prometheus. It's a unique and more realist take to what aliens are. Ridley Scott and HR Giger have known and worked together since the 70's. The visual effects in the film remained true to Giger's style and do not adhere to mainstream preconception or Hollywood's usual depiction of extraterrestrial life. 

I read HR Giger's book and it is titled 'HR Giger ARh+' the book has a lot of illustrations drawn by Giger himself and almost all of the images seem to depict a lot of humanoid bio organism sexual art that portrays Satanism and sexual desire. On most illustrations this is subliminal but on some it is very evident. A lot of his art was used in the latest blockbuster Prometheus.





Below are some of the screen shots of the book that I was reading to further understand his work.

OUDF504: Alien

Point and Description of Alien.

• Android with amour like clothing.
• High resolution detail 
• Beat up and broken down (no arms etc)
• Laid on the bed lifeless 
• Futuristic
• Sharp and edge based look
• In need of medical attention

Creating this alien wasn't as complex, I kept it simple and all I had to model was the head, the torso and the pelvis. I did not need to create any legs as this was not going to be on the shot anyway, this was a good way of saving time for other things in my project. For the arms I decided to to model cables sticking out, I used CV curves tool to achieve this. This is to give an illusion that the alien has no arms and is in need of medical attention.

Prior to creating my alien character, I did a lot of research on armoured aliens and androids, I also drew out a couple of sketches.

I used Mental Ray's materials to texture my alien and the final render was done using Mental Ray. Below are a series of renders experimenting with shaders and lighting.

OUDF504: Render Layers

On one of the studio sessions I learnt l or 2 things about render layers. Being used to rendering on a single layer I've never really had any control over the final look of my render. I learnt that if you render in layers you gain control over the shadows, reflections, and occlusion when the final render is transferred to After effects.

  

There are a few stages to go through to achieve this. We begin by rendering the colour pass for the texture of the specified geometry, in this instance it is the cube and the lamp (figure 1).

figure 1

With all the relevant assets selected we create a new layer for the shadow pass, the cube and the mat on the surface are the only assets that need to stay selected not the lamp. the lamp's shadow is already created in the real world object therefore it is not needed in the shadow pass. (figure 2)

figure 2

The place mat is a reflective surface therefore creating a reflection pass is essential, this is done by firstly selecting the cube, the lights and the place mat > creating a new render layer > name it reflection pass > create blinn > turn reflectivity to 1.000 > assign to object > Render. The reflection will show but the cube will also show it's colour pass, we only need the reflection. To fix this all that is needed is to go to the attributes of the cube and turn off primary visibility. Our final render should look like (figure 3)

figure 3

finally to create an occlusion  all we need to do is again select the cube, the place mat and this time the table > we then need to create a new render layer and call it 'occlusionPass' > this already has a pre-set and under its attribute editor we choose occlusion. The outcome should look like (figure 4) 

OUDF504: Compositing Tim into Environment

Compositing Tim into the environment again proved to be another easy task, I was figuring out a lot for myself as I was going along & this led me to experiment a lot. The key features I used on this project were the Key-light 1.2 preset to mask out Tim from the green screen and make him blend to the environment. Comping Tim into the spaceship wasn't enough to make him blend with his surroundings, so I had to look at the key features of the room to achieve the look I was going for. I noticed there was a lot of light and glow intensity coming in from the window and the wall lights, therefore my first mission was to try and match this. I first decided to use 'Levels' effect to deepen the blacks and brighten the whites on Tim's clothing and skin, I then decided to use the colour correction feature to match the colours, I realised making him black and white was the best solution. Adding a glow intensity matched him with the lighting of the room.

Below is an illustration of the outcome

The footage still felt a bit plain to me so I decided to add extra features to make it more interesting.

ECG Heart Monitor: Since this was a hospital concept, I decided add a ECG machine to monitor the heart rate of the patient. I simply downloaded a video off You tube and imported it into AE, I turned the mode into 'Sceen' to try and get the hologram effect.

Earth Trap-code Video Effect: This is another hologram effect of a rotating earth I decided to to import into the footage. This is a file I downloaded from the Internet, the file has a 'Creative Commons Licence' therefore meaning anyone can use it as long as you credit the author. To make this hologram more effective and realistic, I added a glow on it > Duplicated the layer > Rotated it 180 degrees > Moved it down so it can match the floor level > Reduced to opacity to 50% > added a fast blur effect.

Particle Effect: I decided to add particles to to the entire room to give it more life as there was very minimal movement. I used the CC particle world effect and this worked very well.

My next objective is to import the Alien into the scene.

Below is the final Composite of how it looks like.

OUDF504: BeamFX

Creating the Beam effect on After Effects was an easy task to do, my Idea is to have Tim zapped with a laser like beam effect and vaporise into smoke. Of course this doesn't mean that he is dead, its a way for the Aliens to abduct him into the Ship. The choice of colour I chose for the laser beam is a deep red, as it is a standard colour for most lasers, the same colour went for the smoke. 

The image below (figure 1) illustrates this: 

figure 1

The smoke was not hard to create either as I got an already made preset, all I had to do was drop it into the layers as an alpha channel and set the mode to overlay. The image below (figure 2) illustrates the final outcome of the smoke effect.

What I had to be wary about was the backplate footage in which Andy and Dan are running (figure 3). On the shot they run through Tim, so in this case I had to make sure that he was beamed before they were at the position in which he was stood. 

Overall this task took me no longer than an hour to do, now all I have to do is render the footage as a .mov file and import it on Final Cut Pro to edit with the rest of the film.

OUDF504: Stashmedia.tv

Stashmedia.tv is an online magazine for animators, it has the worlds largest archive of animations on they're website in which you have to subscribe for a small fee to view all the content. It is designed to provide inspiration and insight to other people's work, only the best and the latest animations are uploaded monthly. 
They allow animators to submit any projects such as

• Television and cinema commercials 
• Broadcast graphics and film titles
• Branded content and virals
• Music videos
• Short films
• Spec spots and pitches

 It is a great way to know about obscure animation/VFX houses etc and if participating, its a great way to earn recognition. 

Through out the VFX module, I spent too much time doing research on industry practitioners, Stashmedia helped me cut down a significant amount of time on research as they compiled all that is relevant to me on their archives. I have watched a number of videos to get some insight on how industry professionals work, there is also hours of behind the scenes footage which is submitted, therefore making it easier to learn the work flow behind a projects. 

Below is a short animated film called I Pet goat II from Heliofant, in which I discovered on stash media

OUDF504: L'Odyssée de Cartier

L'Odyssée de Cartier is a short film created under Digital District VFX company, Its a french made film and directed by Bruno Aveillan. The first time I watched the Cartier short film, I instantly adored how cinematic it looked. I also thought the assets used where all computer generated but after watching the behind the scenes I was very surprised. Among all the assets used in this short film that I was sure were CGI , were the cheetah, the elephant, the diamond encrusted snakes and lizards, the plane, the horses and the sets. 

figure 1

Figure 1 above for example is a real-life cheetah leashed by it's trainer, on the final video the leash has been composited out. Before I had knowledge on weather this cheetah was real or not, I though they had used the same technology that the VFX house 'Rhythm & Hue' used on Life of Pie. 

figure 2

Figure 2 is a chinese dragon in which it was computer generated but the rocks falling around it are real as they were filmed on location

figure 3

Figure 3 is the actual elephant they filmed on location then composited into film in post production. Im my view I think it would have been cost effective to model a digital version of the elephant, in that way they would have had more control of what they wanted it to do. 

figure 4

Figure 4 is another shot that I thought might have cost them a considerable amount of money to shoot, the director actually shot this scene on location against a green screen measuring at least 200m, this scene could have been shot at a studio without the need of the horses, the long backdrop and also the camera rig to have to capture moving footage. this would have been cost effective.

Below is a behind the scenes footage which shows the  making of the short film.

Below is the final video of the short film.

OUDF504: Keying & Camera Tracking

After finishing my interior environment, it was time to start compositing the footage into the scene. This proved difficult as all my shots had motion therefore I had to include camera tracking in which I had no experience in. On one of the shots the camera slowly tracks forward and on the other shot the was the crane panning up. 
Keying the footage was very simple as there is a tutorial posted up on the VLE to guide us. The tutorial taught me using features as Screen Pre-blur, Screen Matte, Raising and lowering the clip attributes, Screen shrink/glow and more. I also used the simple matte chocker effect for even better results, I will apply this method into my future work flow. My footage had enough green screen on the background and minimal creases therefore I was able to key clean footage overall. 

Below are images showing how my keyed footage looks. I used Keylight 1.2

Below, the dots you see on the subject are to help with the with the camera tracking. During filming I also applied masking tape on the green screen to help me with post production tracking which is this stage. I added either text or a solid to help me with perspective when the footage is exported to maya. I'm yet to experiment with null objects as I was told are also very good with camera tracking.

After all the 3D camera tracking is done, the next objective is to export the footage into maya, import my 3D interior environment into the scene, line up to and scale to size. Batch render and import the image sequence back into After effects. This is something that I have not done before so therefore I will ask for help and also watch tutorial videos to help me with this.

OUDF504: Lighting & Shading

The lighting and rendering of the interior of my spaceship proved to be a bit of a challenge as it took me way longer than I expected. The problems I was facing through-out this process was the way the lighting was illuminating the interior, it wasn't working the way I wanted. 

After finding out the hard way that Maya does not render more than 8 lights at the same time, I discovered I was using 12. I was mostly using point lights for the walls & manipulating these by using the mental ray light nodes such as the mib light photometric.

I download IES photometric data files from light companies, these helped me achieve real world lighting patterns, intensity and wattage. Below is an example of how IES files can help in 3D digital software.

Other lights I decided to use were the area lights that I used for the windows, the look I'm going for is a white glow which mimics the decor on the tron legacy. The lighting on the floor (figure 3) is what I'm going for my windows. I then decided not to use area lighting as I already had more than enough lights in the scene. Instead I decided to use a shader which allows you to increase the glow intensity, it works just as well.

figure 3

If the scaling of your CG environment does not match a real world scale (of a room for example) the IES files will not give you the desired effect. I scaled my environment to 300cm that is equal to 9 feet 10⁷⁄₆₄ inches, the height of a regular room. 

As for rendering I decided to used mental ray. If used correctly, mental cray can let you can archive photo real renders from the shaders it offers. In terms of lighting, I experimented using global illumination, final gathering and irradiance particles.
In terms of materials I used dgs material for chrome textures, dielectric material for glass textures and mia material x for simple matte Lambert like materials.

dielectric material for glass textures 

dgs material for chrome textures

mia material x for the wooden floor