Last one! I've pulled out all the stops for this one!

This is my last project of the semester! Since I'm not planning to take any more art classes, this might be the last thing ever to appear on this blog. However, if I ever make anything remotely computer-artsy again I will post it here.

I have been building up to this video for a while. I had the cup idea over "Spring" (Easter) Break, the made the Pong video to see if it would work. Then I made a better one, Snake. Tetris was the 1st one that used different lengths for different pictures, and the sound was much more advanced. I was going to make a video of the cups coming in and out of the fence like a wave was going through them, but I could tell as soon as I looked at the pictures on the computer screen that it wouldn't work, so I never made it into a video. Then I made that short, simple video of the bouncing cups to test out more realistic (non-videogame) motion. The throwing video tested if it was practical to have people as part of the animation interacting with the cups. Now, everything that worked (except writing music, which I only did for the Tetris video) has gone into this video. I also made Windows sounds into a simple kind of music (at the very beginning of the video), emulated the motion of a liquid (blood), utilized a prop (that gun/blaster is actually a tripod), had one of the actors record his voice and put that into the video, and made a better finishing screen in Photoshop. The sounds effects for this video (other than the recording) came from 3 sources: system sounds from Windows XP, system sounds from Windows 95, and sounds from the Pinball game that is pre-installed in most Windows XP machines.

So without further ado, I present the video Why Your Mother Told You Not to Stick Up Your Middle Finger. It's somewhat dark humour, but it's a cool video. Due to the fact that there's a link to this blog from Mr. Sands's Art Blog, to avoid any controversy and to allow this to be shown to any audience (in other words, to make it "school-appropriate"), I have censored this video by putting a black square over the middle finger when it appears. I do have a non-censored version; it's on Vimeo. The black box is the only difference. Nothing else was changed in the slightest. The uncensored version doesn't have the word itself in it.

In case you don't get the "Game Over" screen at the end, it's just an allusion to the Snake and Tetris videos. It adds to the dark humour.

I would like to recognize the 5 people (including me) who have been involved in making this video and explain exactly what each of them did:

I, Daniel Ghan, came up with the concept of the animation. In making the videos, I moved the cups; I controlled how each video went and what each frame looked like. However, I don't claim to have come up with all the ideas that went into the videos. I also put the pictures together on the computer, wrote the music for Tetris, and found the sound effects for all the videos.

Ed Cain took all the pictures. He has been my partner from the start and worked nearly as much as I have. We brainstormed new ideas together.

Mark Nashland is the actor who appears on the right side of the last 2 videos (he's the one who gets shot). We recorded his voice for the last one.

Dillon Hayes is the other actor.

Mr. Sands is the art teacher. He provided the cups, which were left over from previous years' Art 1 classes that made designs in the fence with them. I was in one of those Art 1 classes, and remembering that project undoubtedly helped me come up with the idea of using them to make a stop-motion animation. The 4 people named above are all in his Computer Art class, which gave us the motivation, cameras, tripods, hardware, software, and time to make these videos.

Throw Test

Whoops, I forgot to post this...
This is similar to the last one, but obviously we've finally added the human element into this. It turned out pretty decent, although occasionally there'll be a bit of a jump.

Motion Test

Bounce Test from Daniel Ghan on Vimeo.

The main purpose of this video was to test how well we could emulate realistic motion using the cup animation. I thought it was okay.

We were going to make one to test if moving columns of cups further into/out of the fence could create a 3-D wave effect, but it failed utterly. We looked at the pictures and couldn't see the effect at all, so we didn't even bother making a video out of it.

Cup Tetris!

Cup Tetris from Daniel Ghan on Vimeo.

At last, the long-awaited Tetris video is here! We filmed it over 3 days (which is why it jumps a couple times). I wrote the music myself (well, arranged it; the tune is the famous Tetris music everyone knows) just for this video using some old software from an old computer. The software allowed me to adjust the tempo, so when we sped the game up on the 3rd day because we were getting tired of taking pictures and just needed to make the player lose, I did a few calculations and set it so the change in the music's timbre and tempo coincided with the speed-up of the game. The sound effects are system sounds from Windows 95. This video was done entirely with Windows Movie-Maker, Midisoft Recording Session (to write the music), and Windows Sound Recorder (to record the music as a last resort to convert it from .mid to .wav).

Cup Snake

Untitled from Daniel Ghan on Vimeo.

As promised, another stop-motion animation! This one was actually probably easier to make than Pong, so we were able to make it longer. The sounds, like last time, came from C:\Windows\Media.
Ed and I will probably make another of these soon. Hopefully we'll be able to get more people and more time and be able to make something besides simple videogames. In the meantime, vote for my medal!

Vote for me!

Here's a link to vote for my medal design!
http://www.medaldesigncompetition.com/Contents/En/DesignDetails.aspx?d=75
If you don't feel like signing up to vote, please click the link anyway. More views will put my design closer to the top of the page, which will increase my chances of winning.

Illustrator Tutorial

Mr. Sands had us do a very basic tutorial for Adobe Illustrator. This comes from a screenshot I took of my work on the program.