Monday:
Class: Practical & Digital
New group of students this week. Things have been moved around a bit. Lecture on VFX stuff. Assignment for next week: Write a paper about a specific visual effect in a movie and how I think they did it. For this assignment, I’ve chosen a scene from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where Jim Carrey gets out of his car and runs toward the other end of the street only to find himself back at his car. He looks back and the street has been turned around, so he runs back only to find himself at his car again.
Class: Animation 1.
Missed this class because of doctors appointment. Assignment for next week is to work on the logo animation from previous class as much as possible.
Tuesday:
Class: Story Process 1. Talked about why Delgo was so lame, both story-wise and animation-wise. Lecture on character animation. Looked at the 11 Second Club.
Class: Lighting & Texturing.
HDR compositing, making 3D objects match the lighting of a photo, and appear to exist inside the photo. Projecting photographs onto objects as textures. Assignment: Take pictures of buildings to project onto 3D models.
Class: Storytelling Strategies.
Everyone brought in an object that had personal significance and told the story behind the object, which rolled into a discussion about the role that objects play in stories.
Wednesday:
Class: Modeling 1.
Played with blinn and lambert shaders in Maya.
Class: Oral Communication for Media Arts.
Everyone gave speeches, which were filmed and commented on. We got into groups and began brainstorming for our group pitch.
Class: VFX & Compositing.
Played around in Photoshop and XSI, adding CG objects into photos.
Thursday:
Class: History of Computer Graphics.
Watched a scene from Star Trek 2, created in 1982 by the CG people at ILM who later became Pixar.
Also watched some SIGGRAPH demonstrations from 2000. Important person to remember: Paul Debevec.
Class: Storytelling Strategies.
Broke into groups and created 3 story ideas, each one based on a predetermined object (dress, pen, old book). Each story had to have 3 acts: beginning, middle, end. We then shared our ideas and discussed how the ideas could be developed further.
Friday:
No class.
