Some thought it wouldn't happen.  Had I left the world of mutant monkey heads?  Had I forgotten that Yoda was still an unfinished project, and that five years ago I had promised his return in Japanese? Fortunately, it occurred to me to do something!  So, for the 5th anniversary of my previous Yoda post and my 100th post on this blog, I'm glad to present my latest variant on Yoda! I'd been thinking about this project on and off; in 2016 I'd replaced the cylindrical lightsaber with one from a different project (similar to my replacing a spherical hand with my sound project's claw), googled a tutorial to get a glowing lightsaber effect, modified the hut's door a bit and added some image textures from a fan texture pack in a version I dubbed mark 4.5, but not having the artist's permission to share it, I decided it was best to to try again.  A little while later, I decided to go for a bit more of an overhaul featuring a much more accurate hut--apparent...

    So a few months ago, my sister Leena made a custom version of the widely used song meme "We Are Number One" and asked that I do the visuals based on some premade animations.  It was only half a year later that I remembered to do a blog post on it!  Without further ado, here's my contribution to BIONICLE fandom:     Most of the work here was simply video editing in Premiere, but there were a few points where I ended up adding original elements and visual effects--for instance, I made Ekimu's saxophone in Adobe Illustrator while paying attention to the surrounding art style.     The main changes I made were actually all based around masking and animating those masked elements in After Effects, using the same technique I used for the hand in my "Fire Hand" short.  I used a bit of motion tracking for some of the masks, but a lot of the motion was manual (e.g. masking Leena's signature yellow Miru Nuva over Sportacus' ...

So, as many in the tech world know, Apple recently switched to a new photo format for their iDevices with iOS 11 forward.  While the new format is vastly superior to JPG, it was all but entirely incompatible with Windows programs. However, thanks to a college class in JavaScript, I managed to download and jury-rig the official HEIF format website into a file reader!  It seems Chrome/Edge are incompatible as of this writing, so thus far only Firefox seems to work.  Here's a link to the program: https://mega.nz/#!9xwWgCSA !6G3mvAjN_zB7iYzhVEkuGsulNjPFCsoZubSfpUTHQw4   This is far from a perfect viewer, so I plan to keep working on and rewriting the program as necessary (#1 on the agenda would be compatibility with more browsers).  In the meantime, though, have fun with the program!   UPDATE 1/3/2018: I've run a direct copy of the website on other browsers, and apparently Chrome (and presumably the other browsers) somehow can't load the special images b...

    Not quite related to CGI or special effects, but as I've been exploring the filmmaking process between creating ABYDOS and doing pre-production for the sequel, I think it'd be good to share what I've learned from it, both in terms of crimes against filmmaking mistakes I've made and things I've happened to learn along the way.  Best to keep in mind that I'm far from a professional, so these suggestions are more from my experience as a no-budget science-fiction pseudo-horror indie-film writer than a professional screenwriter/director, but if you're in such a position as well, perhaps some of these may prove useful to you.  Without further ado, here we go: Keep the script open to your cast     This suggestion is probably obvious to many, but it was one of the things I'd seriously messed up on while filming ABYDOS.  I'd kept the script fairly closed and would only reveal brief portions of the script at a time, thinking the relative lack ...

And, despite being on a blog based entirely around computer animation and special effects, the video doesn't have anything to do with either of them!  So yeah, this mostly talks about story/concept/different things that happened during filming.  Anyway, a new semester has started and I'm really hoping my modern philosophy-ridden Art Theory class comes with brain bleach!  In the meantime, though, I hope you enjoy the Making Of! 

    Ta-da!  I ripped some models from a game and made an animation with them to convince myself that ripping them was useful! (Also, I made my first video done completely in Blender since 2015!)      Again, neither Samus nor her gunship's models/rigging were made by me; both were ripped from the first Metroid Prime using the fantastic HECL.  For some reason I actually like the model from Metroid Prime 1 better than the one from Prime 2/3 (I think it may be the relatively minimalistic use of lights combined with less feminine-looking armor).  I was around halfway through this tribute to the underrated franchise when Prime 4/Samus Returns were announced, so I guess I'll call it a celebration of the franchise's return instead.  Also, for what it's worth, I'm calling it an "animation test" because there's not enough to the video to do the word "fanimation" justice ',:^|.      As the title implies, this is a jump fo...

    Continuing my splash work for TV-Nihon, I decided to do one in Blender instead of using Photoshop.     I feel like this represents the start of a turn into more advanced 3D modeling for me.  I hadn't done much with Blender in quite a while--mostly animating the Walking Death in ABYDOS and making fan work with 3D models from games--but here, I feel like I stepped into a newer era of 3D modeling by constructing more complete background scenes with image textures and objects created from the ground up.      Made near the end of 2016, this still uses Blender's internal rendering engine, which is basically obsolete, so the picture's lighting isn't nearly photorealistic, but it does use image textures to a far greater degree than it'd been done in much of my earlier work, which helps add more realism and distract from other things like the number of commas I put into this sentence.