WHY ARM THEM?!

Someone recently sent me this. According to this Chinanews article, a robot which appears to be based on the Honda Asimo is seen performing Tai Chi Quan sword forms. If you have been following any of my robot posts, one has to ask, why arm them?!

"A humanoid robot named "Huitong" possesses functions including sense of sight, audio dialogue, sense of force and sense of balance. This humanoid robot with independent intellectual property realizes complicated human actions, such as Taijiquan (or shadowboxing) and saberplay, for the first time in the world. Photo shows the "Huitong" humanoid robot was performing Taijiquan."

That's what it says. Are we asking for it or what?! I can picture it already, a legion of little kung fu programmed robots deciding they think this world would be better off without us. Versions of this news can also be found on sites like Gorobotics.net where they seem incredibly excited by the news. Robots wielding swords are cool until somebody loses an eye.

It seems like all this robot news is practically begging me to do a movie!

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HDV FUTURE

I was at Best Buy yesterday and I saw this! The newest and cheapest in the line of recent HDV cameras on the market, the Sony HDR-HC1. This thing is tiny. Let me tell you that Japanese hand holding it on that image is tiny. The whole thing excepting the lens area fit into my hand.

So what makes this camera so great when there are so many others? Well, the price for one, but also its size and its digital still ability. This is a camera I would carry with me often. If you think about it, you wouldn't pick up your huge shoulder mounted Sony FX1 or Panasonic HV1 for a trip to the zoo. With this HDR-HC1, however, you can be off on a trip and shooting 1920x1440 still images as good as many still cameras, but also shooting 1080i full motion video!

Now, of course, we all know that I want to make movies. Well, I think this image from the HC1 shows that it will do just fine for that. Now it doesn't have any special 24P mode, though I think it may have Sony's cineframe capture ability like the FX1, but that is small thing considering why I will be buying it.

This is the all around camera. This is the replacement for what I have currently, the TRV9. This will fulfill all those purposes and take me into the realm of HDV. Since I now own Vegas Video as well, it will be the last chip in the replacement of my DV production pipeline.

Think about it. Cheap green screens are available all over the place online. A good camera, some FX wizardry. Can you see where this is going?

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PSP Reference

A project like a show for the PSP has a certain sense of novelty to it. For this reason it can be somewhat time sensitive.

Displaced

I seem to be getting displaced from my apartment more and more these days by plumbers. I am posting from my PSP for no real reason. Acually, I'm sitting at my desk and could use my desktop, here at work, to post this, though it's rendering test frames right now. This, however, is more fun! So what's really going on?

Well, I watched a lot of good shows over the weekend and did a lot of reading.

Really Now...

Bet you can't guess where I am. Ok, I am at Chandra Thai yet again.

More Connected

I was in downtown Burbank today and found another connection for my PSP. It seems WIFI is becoming more popular overall. Now I am at Chandra Thai, posting on my PSP, because I can...

Many Paths

It must always be remembered that there are many methods by which to achieve the final image. I am after the one which gives me the quality I want the quickest. I am also after the one which allows me the most freedom, after the fact, to edit and change the work overall.

I used to draw storyboards on paper, in the same fashion as the Japanese directors. I don't do this anymore. It is quicker to draw with a WACOM tablet into the computer. This was only one realization. You see, it is still quicker, in the long run, to draw it into the actual Mirage project that will eventually become the final scene.

The above image took less than thirty minutes to draw. I now have something to put on the edit timeline as part of a show. It's a storyboard, but it is also part of a final scene. As the project rolls along I can always freely decide what I want to add, change or update. This is but one such path to achieve that final project.

I watched the first thirteen episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and I think this is a gem that I hope will start something of a movement in American television animation. It was the third highest rated animated show shortly after its appearance, and it continues to draw crowds. I hope other studios take notice.

This show has great writing above all else. There are elements that Japanese animation, being from a different culture, just doesn't have, and anime dubs wished they sounded as good as this show sounds. Voice acting can make or break a show, and this one has talent on a feature film level. I hope this shows more studios how its done!

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Final Fantasy: Redemption

As I expected, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children was absolutely amazing. This was the real Final Fantasy movie, what they should have made from the start. Keep in mind that I am one of the few, the proud, who like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, but I recognize its faults and know well why it didn't succeed.

Advent Children, however, will succeed if the number of times it's been downloaded, in the few days its been out, is any indication. The visual quality, the humor, the character designs, the true Uematsu music, everything is done right this time. There are some great inside jokes for those who know the games, but the film stands alone for those who don't. This gets an A+ in my book.

That's not all to be sure. I also got to check out the pilot for Avatar: The Last Airbender, the anime series currently airing on Nickelodeon on Friday nights. When it's done right, the combination of the elements of Japanese animation that work with the best aspects of American production, made for American TV, gets you a most incredible result.

There are things in this show you simply won't see in Japanese anime, even in their fun kids shows like Naruto, which just started on Cartoon Network, One Piece or Shaman King, which are both also airing out here. I guess it's just a matter of culture. I especially notice this in the comedy, which is done so well in Avatar. On the whole, I haven't seen so much inspiring material in ages!

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ADVENT TIME

I totally forgot to tell you that my Advent Pieces box arrived on Thursday afternoon. I actually didn't open it then for fear of staying up too late and missing the loop session at Loop Group yesterday. Well today I will dig in!

What's an "Advent Pieces" box you ask? Well it is centered around the DVD release of the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, but there is so much more. Here is what's in it.

Bonus features include a " Cloud + Fenrir" figure set, a script book (replica), a cap, a T-shirt, a key chain (serial-numbered), an extras DVD, and a PlayStation 2 game "Final Fantasy VII INTERNATIONAL" (compatible only with PlayStation 2 console sold in Japan). The disc(s) is picture-labeled.

Check out this picture of the items. Ever since the demise of my famous Qvis hat, I have needed a new cap too! Maybe this time around I'll actually finish the Final Fantasy VII game!

In other news, someone recently made me aware of the anime series Avatar: The Last Airbender, made by and airing on Nickelodeon, right here in Burbank. I had not so much as heard of this show before now. I haven't seen even a trailer yet, but the still art on the web is just amazing. I will write more about it as I discover more.

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LU PING

Just back from Loop Group where we did what is known as ADR on one of our upcoming films. That was fun. Aside from the work I did at Westwood Studios in Las Vegas, I had never really been in a real studio to record dialogue. This time it wasn't just me alone.

Some may be aware that I did the voices for the main soldiers in the popular Command & Conquer games from Westwood Studios. (some websites seem to attribute these games to EA, but I won't get into that.) Well this time it was a large group doing what is known as "walla", which is general crowd sounds. Of course we also got to do a lot of screaming and chaotic crowd deaths. ;)

I also forgot to write yesterday that Corin Nemec of Stargate SG1 was in the building. He walked around to see what kind of cool things we were each doing and seemed to actually take an interest in the process of what happens after the initial shooting.

In other news, Animation Magazine has a story about the upcoming Danny Phantom special this month. I don't know much about the property, but I thought from the image that it had a very interesting visual style. I am left to wonder, though, are we seeing a trend in the animation done in this country. I know most animation is being shipped off overseas these days, but it seems that the few shows that stay here, like some on Cartoon Network and those on Nick, are starting to look very similar and very square. Maybe that's just my observation.

One last thing. It has been brought to my attention that my post on the "super tree" in Vue 5 made very little sense. Having gone back and read it myself, I see that this is true. This weekend I will do it again, eplaining it in greater detail.

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Here Again

So I find myself at Chandra Thai again contemplating the meaning of life. Well, maybe just the meaning of anime. The purpose is to tell a story, right. Somewhere inside all the things I wrote about the last six month lies the answer to being able to create with nothing getting in the way of telling that story.

The Secret of the Close Up Tree

You saw that I wrote before claiming it is not meet to attempt to do the immediate scenery in Vue 5 Infinite. This does not mean it can't be done though. It just takes a bit of thought and tweaking. I will now explain the secret to making a close up tree.

The first thing you need to be prepared to do is BYOT. That means bring your own textures. The procedural stuff in Vue is great when creating the scenes over there, as I said, but if you plan to be right next to it, get ready to make high resolution textures that will hold up. I made the above image from two pictures found in William Vaughn's Newtek texture library. You can still get it from their site if you haven't already.

Next step is to perform a bit of trickery. You know how I wrote that the trees were not detailed enough for close up scenes right? Well, imagine if the tree, rather than being use as a whole tree, were used as just a single branch on a large tree.

Here's what I did. I took a tree into the editor. I scaled it really large, about 4X, and worked the settings so it had almost no branches and certainly no leaves. Now I place it in the world and bring in other normal size trees to go with it. They are small by comparison. As such, these normal size trees can now become the branches for my new huge super tree! The detail level has just quadrupled!

Before I go I just want you to make sure to watch this movie right here. Do you see how quick that was made? It really is that easy. Think of how quickly I will be creating outdoor backgrounds for my show. Maybe this is a taste of what Lucas was talking about as far as what visual FX should become.

As an update, a couple of my close up trees with a quick eco system in the background and you have a forest scene!

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VUE TO APPEAL

So I think I got a pretty good handle on Vue 5 Infinite. There really isn't that much to it. It's very easy to use, has a straightforward interface, and the buttons pretty much do exactly what you expect them to do. Some of the bigger 3D packages could learn a few things from this design.

Now, of course, Vue can do this because it is very specialized. It's not a 3D tool to let you do anything per se, but a tool for creating great environments. Because of this though, some of the tools are extremely quick to grasp and you could day a lot of the work is done for you, but not in a way that you wouldn't want.

Here are some things I found out though. Vue 5 Infinite, as an environment creation tool, is still geared towards the creation of very picturesque scenes and vistas. It is not made for creating the world in which you will directly interact or be surrounded by. It's for making the beautiful world over there. There's certainly nothing wrong with this, it's just worth noting because now you can see, at least from the standpoint of what I will be doing, exactly how and where it can be used.

Still, View imports normal UV mapped 3D objects from other programs, so the possibility exists that as you create a scene, the closeup objects can be your original creations made to be right next to the camera. This makes it very versatile. I suppose I shouldn't talk too much after just one day with it. I am certain there's still more to learn!

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Out and About

Here at Chandra Thai and I found a network. Also, has Blogger finally recognized the PSP? The startup screen seemed to fit my PSP perfectly. On another note, on the PSP home site, viewable only on the PSP, all countries have gone active! I knew it launched in Europe this week, but Australia and New Zealand have gone live too! With all those sales, do I need to get my PSP stuff going or what?!

Owning Up

Ya know, over and over I hear people say that shooting a "real" movie on digital saves you nothing. Do you know why? That's because these people rent their digital equipment from the same place where they rented the expensive film gear. Then after they shoot they go to someone else's edit bay and pay outrageous rates greater than or equal to having film processed and edited. Why do they do this? Because that's the way movies have traditionally been done. So they try to fit the square peg of digital into the round hole of traditional movie-making.

Tradition dictates that you rent your equipment. Tradition dictates that you must have a certain type of crew containing certain members and a certain hierarchy. Well, tradition is nothing more than learned behavior. It can be unlearned.

If you rent a digital camera package at $1200 per day, how many days before you could have owned a $60,000 high definition camera package that you could make movies with for years? Actually there are great solutions cheaper than that now, and cheaper still coming.

Do you want to save money? Do this: Set up a pipeline where you own your camera package. Set it up such that what you shoot, even if its 1080P is transferred directly to your computer for editing. Do your own VFX. You can learn Lightwave 3D or Cinema 4D or whatever, but do your own VFX. People have done it, so there is no excuse. At worst, close friends on the crew who are "sharing" in the movie can do them. Do your own green screen work and your own compositing. This is all possible.

Finally, if you want to make money, I mean actually sell your movie, whatever deep, philosophical, emotional, important project you were making, forget that and put a monster in your movie.

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DISCIPLINE

"Discipline is a mode of thought. ItÂ?s easy when you are doing it and difficult when you are not. But with patience, the right attitude, and keeping your mind on the goal, discipline becomes second nature. You don't have to force yourself. It just comes naturally. That is the way it should be.

Says author Tom McGregor. Is it possible that in all this time of inactivity, that is to say not truly making a show, that I have lost discipline and focus? I mean, I am constantly doing preparatory work, but it has yet to result in a single minute of finished animationgracingg the screen. Well, there's only one way to test that theory.

I may not have finished every last little bit of preparatory work that I wanted to finish, but I have lined up far more than I ever had in any previous project, so it is time to start making it.Learningg Vue 5? I will learn by making the show. The new music stuff? I can learn while scoring the show? Thereusablee assets? They will still be created while making the actual scenes for the show. I can't lose, eventually it all still gets done!

In other news, I found a hosting service that may be perfect for my PSP pages. They offer something like 1000GB (yes gigabytes) of bandwidth per month for a very low price. I was originally worried about needed to learn how to run a bit torrent tracker to deal out the chapters of my PSP original show. With this new service, that won't even be close to necessary. I can just put it up for download.

The Cheap Ninja

Who is this guy? What is he doing? What can he possibly expect to accomplish? Well, more than likely, not much for he is only a cannon fodder ninja sent to attack our heroes in the long awaited, Production I.G., original, in-house anime series Otogizoushi.

Well, long awaited by me anyway. Based on their independent video Kaidohmaru, this series takes the story to much great depth and features much more detailed artwork. Ever since it appeared on their site, more than a year ago, I've been downloading the images from their galleries and learning from them. That's not the point though. Having seen this image in an actual episode, an idea came to me.

AT work I was making some crowd folks for one of our movies so they needed to be ultra low res, as in game res characters. After I finished the first one, I thought, could a technique like this, that is creating a low res character with a single texture like one for Unreal Tournament, be used in my anime? SO I did a test. I made what basically amounts to game character like I used to do at Westwood Studios in Las Vegas. but instead of doing a single texture to look real, I drew a texture to look like an anime character. The result speaks for itself.

For battle scenes and when you need those cannon fodder ninja characters, using some video game techniques can add to the speed and really keep production flowing!

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Hitting The Reset Button

So we set off across the endless desert. We were on a mission. It was not going to be easy though. Already we could see to the rear a massive sand storm coming at us. When I inquired as to how we could get out of this, my partner pointed to what looked like some kind of massive natural structure up ahead. So we went there.

The structure was unlike anything I had ever seen. The stones of it were suspended as though someone took a snapshot of the place crumbling. There was no ground to speak of in this place. The only way to traverse it was to jump from stone to stone. I guess because it was thus frozen in time, that's why the sand storm could not enter.

We jumped the stone path to make it to the other side, just in time to see the sand storm pass. At the end was a small book store, mostly containing books on things that would really interest me, ancient civilizations, religions and cultures and the like. I knew it would be a bad idea to buy large photo journals with which to trek across the desert so I gave up on getting any books this time.

At our next stop we had to take some kind of test to pass through. I had no idea what the test involved so my partner took it. I never quite knew what was happening, but somehow he either fooled or flattered the woman testing us into letting us pass. She didn't seem happy about it, I know that. Either way, she let us go.

Ahead of us were two cities. On all the buildings of one was a silhouette image of a woman. I am guessing the same as just tested us. On all the buildings of the other were similar images, but the woman was always with a dog. I knew that was the city we needed to go to. As we walked though the city, my partner commented how it was so much like Tokyo. I guess it was in a way, but that's when I started to notice something weird. It seemed like all the women there were guys dressed as women. Maybe I picked the wrong city.

We had to figure out what was going on here. I found this sign on the wall and wanted to stop and read it. It was a final plea of someone who knew they were losing themselves in that city. They were becoming something they didn't want to. My partner urged me to keep going so I couldn't finish reading it. I decided to tear it off the wall and take it with me. I noticed that the sign was written in red on a large, white, plastic bag. There was something in it. Based on the red stains at the bottom and the feel of liquid in the bag, I conjectured that the writer may have left some organs behind.

We were doomed and I knew it. Something was going to happen if we didn't get out of that city. We came across some old guy but he wouldn't exactly explain to us clearly what was going on. We were going to lose ourselves in that place if we didn't do something. The old guy said that wasn't the case as long as you know who you are and who you want to be. So I thought about it and for a moment I couldn't remember my name! I was finished. Then it came to me, "I'm Terrence Walker!" I said pointing to myself. And who did I want to be? I thought about saying "daikenjya" but I didn't really know what that word meant. So I said, "I'm gonna be the pirate king!"

Right about that time I woke up. Pirate King?! Well, I recently read a wired news article about anime taking over on TV here in America. One of the things it mentioned was how the networks were looking for the next Dragonball. Two shows currently trying to fill those shoes are Shaman King and the epic pirate adventure One Piece. The article goes on to mention how everyone has high hopes for Naruto, coming very soon to Cartoon Network. This got me thinking, "What would be the ultimate show created for American TV that would fill all roles they desire?" More on that idea as things develop.

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