Hi there! Ruby Star has been in a holding pattern for several weeks as a new opportunity to do some animation work for some old friends came our way… should have posted news of that earlier but I got swept up in the new activity. We just finished the aforementioned project a couple weeks ago, actually, and it seems another one has come along but I’m aspiring to continue work on Reverie in tandem. It’s nice to learn some new skills along the way that I can apply to this personal project of mine… some new discoveries that are making things faster have come up - major bonus.

The last project that I mentioned is a video for a band called Ludo for their song, Save Our City, off their Broken Bride EP. It’s a great song and really well produced, kind of Queen-ish? And it’s loooong – so we had to think of a strategy that help us get through it quickly. To do it, we devised a fast animation technique in which we rotoscope puppets, blending in the characters with painted backgrounds and watery effects to achieve a dark, inky, loose, animation – as if it were drawn with markers or something.

We were able to preserve some of the raw video from the puppets and blend it in with the animation which has cut down on animation time. It’ll be out there in the world before you know it so I’ll be sure to make announcement!!

Can you feel the excitement?

Hi All,

While the majority of our robots are made of recycled parts found at the recycle center as well as the coop, sometimes they are just not robot-y enough for us. Whenever this happens, we rush to one of our favorite places on earth, the TOY SHOP (aka. Home Depot)!!

One of the most challenging and exciting parts of our project is seeing how far we can stretch the dollar. The best way to do this is to either use recycled parts, or using interesting looking parts we might find at the depot.

Thanks to all the cool people that came to the booth at the Sustainable Living Festival this past weekend, hopefully we will keep in touch. Anyway, here is  a taste of an upcoming short doc we are working on. Enjoy, and look for a documentary on here in the next week or so. Keep rockin!

Tryin it on for size

Robot foot maybe?

uuuummmmm, see ya next week!

-Jefferson

Hey Everyone,

This is Jefferson, and this is my first postage on the bloggage (with many more to come!). Just wanted to post a couple of picts of the filming on set of the no longer freezing warehouse in Albany. I picked a couple of nice shots from a database of many, to give you a taste of the actors that will show up in the first movie. You can see some of our state of the art filming techniques, as well as the lighting that we have been using up to this point.

Were excited to be working from the new editing studio (more to come on that), and working with all the live action shots we have recorded. We will also be posting some short documentaries of the production process, from our secret missions to the toy store (home depot), building robots in the warehouse, and most importantly the filming. We hope to make these updates a much more regular thing, so stay tune in. For now, here ya go!

***just the highlights, the rest can be seen at the Flickr site***

The actors look on

Alyssa pretends to be Ben.

This is a sketch of a logging robot infected with emotion software that proliferates among smart machines like a computer virus. He becomes conscious, which is illegal for machines of Earth, and tags along with humans who are meeting with smugglers to take them to Mars. Jeff built our model for him by picking up cheap toy construction vehicles.

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Thanks!!! -Ben

Here’s another distress test I did earlier on. Like last week’s, it’s a frame that I crunched up a bit and sprayed with water to see what would happen. I’ve been revisiting these tests in an effort to introduce some “liveliness” (as my father-in-law put it) into the scenes I’m animating now for Reverie. Things are going well and I think it looks pretty profesh, but there was something fresh, I think, about the early experiments I was doing that I’d like to make part of the “feel” of the Reverie project.

Here’s a link to an early test that’s up on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad6AYO2xqo8

I can’t wait to share some clips of what I’m working on right now - I wanted to post it this week but it’ll probably have to wait ’till next Wednesday. Animation isn’t the speediest enterprise I’ve undertaken, that’s for sure!

Catch ya later,
-Ben

During certain animated sequences, especially when heavier music is in the background, it’s fun to mess with frames of animation on the downbeats. By marking frames a number 1 - 10, 5 being on the downbeat, and 6 through 10 trailing after the downbeat, I’ve been experimenting with blasting the frames with a spray bottle of water, distressing the image the most on frame 5, least on 1 and 10. This way the images can periodically break apart with the drums, adding agitation and tension to whatever dramatic scene is taking place. It’s pretty cool! Here’s a frame of the character Simon having been smeared and allowed to dry.

Foremost of importance, joining me in on this trans-media adventure is now Jeff Chu, who is both documenting the production and assisting in pretty much every other aspect of things.

This past couple weeks has been particularly exciting as we completed construction and filming of a difficult model/costume - a gigantic spider robot we call, Spiderbot.

Prior to that, my pals Ludo rolled through town and dropped by for a cameo at the studio. My old band, Jupiter Sunrise, and Ludo played a bunch of shows together a couple years ago so I hadn’t seen those fellas in a long time. The portion we shot with Ludo features them dancing amidst a troupe of partying robots. These robots, having newly acquired software that emulates human emotions, are all freaking out so Ludo stop by to check things out. It’s shaping up to be a pretty rambunctious scene.

It’s been a really productive couple months and things are really picking up steam!!!

-Ben

This is an early sketch of what we nicknamed the “Spiderbot.” These big machines patrol areas where aspiring colonists, fleeing the climate woes of Earth, meet up with smugglers to ferry them from Earth to Mars.

Below the sketches are video stills of a rotoscoping test we did recently - converting our model into an animated sequence. Rotoscoping is the term for tracing the movement of a film or video image to create a cartoon. Our model was a costume of found objects and some Home Depot supplies inspired by the sketches above. We traced the image on the computer with 2-D cartoon software. The blobs of color and shadow are filtered down from the original video and embellished a bit with the 2-D tools and video effects software.

We’ll try to get some actual moving images of recent tests and edits up online as soon as we’re confident that what we’re creating is very close to how the final output of how our animation will look. I think Jeff and I can safely say that Wednesdays are looking pretty solid as the days we use for our updates - and when some of the comics and graphic art are available, Wed’s will be our weekly release days, for those as well.

Also, welcome to anyone who saw our booth display at South by Southwest This is a pretty new blog - hope you can follow along as subscribers… it’s going to get only more fun from here! Till next week…