#glue them onto things. make shaker cards.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

another Unnecessary Purchase sorted and jarred!

[purplesurveys]

772

What was the last thing you threw at someone? A piece of meat for my dog to run for. Well, walk and sniff around for. He’s an old guy and doesn’t run anymore unless we’re taking him out for a walk. Do you follow recipes? I always certainly have to, since I don’t have any one dish memorized. I’ll start off with a collection of recipes for sure, but I’m hopeful that I’ll be at least a decent cook over the next few years. Where's the last place you had an itch? The area behind my knee.

Do you look people in the eye when you talk to them? It’s always important to have eye contact to show you’re paying attention so yeah. But I know it can get uncomfortable for most people at some point – and me – so I’ll give my eyes a break and look at their forehead, their nose, the space between their eyes, etc. When you look into someone's eyes, can you see their pain? Uh no, I don’t look that intensely lmao. And even then, I’ve learned over the years that most people are very good in hiding or playing off their true emotions that even if I try to find something off, I’ll likely turn up with nothing.

When was the last time you sneezed? Midnight today. How do you act under pressure? It will depend on how much there is to do and how much time there is left. I don’t have one permanent behavior for every time I feel pressured, which is pretty often. Who did you last say "I love you" to? My dog. Do you ever call people just to hear the sound of their voice? Yes, back when everything was normal I’d sometimes call my girlfriend just to drop by and say hi, and also because our schools are a little far apart and I’ll miss her in the middle of the day. School usually stresses her out so I do that as a pick-me-up for her. When was the last time you used a glue stick? January maybe? Our profs always ask us to submit index cards with our contact details and a 1x1 photo at the start of the semester, so there’s a good chance I asked to borrow glue from someone to paste my photo onto the card. What was the last startling noise you heard? Some dipshit on my Twitter feed decided it was good fun to share a jumpscare disguised as an innocent, cute video at 3 AM. I was mad about it then and I’m still mad as hell about it now lol. Do you ever look back at your yearbooks? I did this a lot as a kid. Idk why, I found it interesting to get to know the people in my school and read their write-ups I guess. I stopped looking back on them precisely because I did it too much when I was younger. Do you ever want to be prom queen/king? No. I did not give a shit about prom at all. I really would’ve happily skipped out on it but my school is a complete killjoy and made both attendance and bringing a date mandatory for everyone. No stags, can you believe it? It’s like when Captain Holt from Brooklyn Nine Nine said “Have a good time, I specifically requested it” lol Are you tired? Tired of this quarantine, yes. But I took a nap not too long ago so I’m not feeling to sleepy in that sense. Have you ever ran from the police? I haven’t done anything for them to have to do run after me, so no. Are you afraid of clowns? Not really. I was never exposed to them much so I always just saw them as people in heavy makeup that do balloon animals and other funny tricks. Have you ever written on someone's face in your yearbook? HAHA yes. When my sister and I were kids we bickered a lot, and in one of our fights I thought it’d be funny to doodle on her kinder portrait. She didn’t think so and she started wailing - just in time, I heard my mom coming home and I had to think fast so my sister a) stopped crying and b) wouldn’t tell on me. So I did the stupidest thing and also doodled on my own prep portrait to make her feel better. She calmed down and my mom never found out. When was the last time you made dinner? I *helped* my dad make dinner a few months ago. I haven’t completed a meal myself. Do you have any special plans coming up? They’re gonna be mellowing down the lockdown rules in my province by the 15th and I’m really hoping to see Gabie soon. Realistically I doubt it would happen as I don’t think both our parents would agree to it, but it’s still nice to keep hoping. Did you just lose the game? Yep, but I really only found out about this game from Reddit a few months ago and I didn’t grow up having to play it, so I’m never all too pissed off or like emotionally invested in general whenever I lose it haha. What is a class at school you are interested in taking? There are global studies electives that I was unaware of until someone told me to take them after I enrolled for my last sem in collefge. There are courses on Turkish culture, global gastronomy, and they also had past courses on ‘Diversity on Perspectives on Peace and Conflict,’ ‘Cultures of Disasters,’ and ‘Cultures and their Global Entanglements.’ They all sound right up my alley and am disappointed no one told me sooner. Do you hold on to your dreams? Some of them, the ones I know I have a chance of attaining. Obviously I’ve had to let some go, like wanting to go to the moon or becoming a firefighter. Do you follow rules or break them? Follow. I don’t like getting into trouble. Is there someone you are dying to see? A lot of people. Who do you want to be buried next to? I’ve given this zero thoughts. Are you double-jointed? Nope. Did your dream last night involve blood? It didn’t. I’m not even sure what my dreams were anymore. Who was the last person to yell at you? My mom, probably. How do you feel about the new president? I wouldn’t call him new, he’s in the latter half of his term now. I hate him and I hope he dies soon. Do good things come to those who wait? Sure, it can happen. What is the last song you played on iTunes? I haven’t used that in a while. The last one I listened to on Spotify was Sudden Desire by Hayley Williams. Petals For Armor is still on loop, surprise. What is the last thing you looked up on youtube? I was showing my sister the hilarious Vine of Beyoncé where she thanks a talk show host who tells her “You are Beyoncé,” as if it was a compliment looooool, so I looked up “you are beyonce thank you.” When is the last time you went to the grocery store? March 9th. What is your favorite fish? Tuna or eel for raw fish, tilapia for cooked. What kind of calendar do you have? A digital one. Have you ever been two hours late for school? Oh hell no. I’ve been late before, but if it’s as dramatic as being an hour late I usually just cut class to save myself the embarassment of having to do the walk of shame entering the class. What is your favorite stuffed animal that you own? I don’t have any stuffed animals. Who did you hang out with yesterday? My family, as has been the case since March. Has anyone stolen your heart yet? Yes. Have you ever won a gold medal? No. I’ve won first place before, but they didn’t issue out gold medals. Do you have any trophies? Also no. Do you work out? I don’t. When you introduce yourself, do you give hand shakes? Sometimes, but tbh I just picked it up from Gabie who’s a big hand-shaker. I preferably wouldn’t cause it seems so formal to me. Is there a limit to how many best friends you have? Yeah, like I wouldn’t want to have a lot; I like keeping my immediate circle small. I’m more than content with my two best friends. When's the last time you went to a dance? 2016. What grade are you in? Soooooooooo unbelievably close to graduating college. Are you in a band? I’m not and haven’t been. Have you ever been in a talent show? No thanks. Have you ever won a contest? Competitions, yes. Contests, no. How do you feel about germs? I’m quite particular about them. I don’t like sharing clothes with people; I pick which friends get to eat off of my spoon or sip from my straw; I’m super iffy about touching someone else’s keyboard; I really don’t like having to touch other people’s hair and with that is also the fact that I never borrow or lend hair ties. Holy shit so I’m more germaphobic than I thought and all I had to do was list these things down......................... Do you like screamo music? Not really. What does your wallet look like? Pink and a lot thinner now that I haven’t been given an allowance since they stopped school. Do you have any hickeys on you? No. At this point, I really wish I did lmao Would you rather have money or love? Money. I love love, but I won’t deny that I also love being able to afford the lifestyle I want to live haha. Do you have any family pictures hanging on the wall? Not on the wall, but we have several frames lined up on the first few steps of our stairs. Which do you prefer: bath or shower? Bath after a long hard day. Shower most days. Do you have a lamp in your room? I used to, but I removed it after realizing the light just keeps me from falling asleep faster.

Do you have windows vista? No. Do you have the strength to say goodbye forever? I’ll deal with it if I had no choice, but I’ve never handled goodbyes well.

[sylleboi]

𝕮𝖆𝖙𝖈𝖍 𝖚𝖕 | 04/11/19

We began with a brief reminder of why we are doing this assignment in particular and where we all are individually, as well as going over where we should be at this point.

So far we have had just a few hand ins during term 1; Pick & Mix and now also movers & shakers. For Movers & Shakers, we need to hand in the following, with the deadline being Thursday the 14th November - 4 pm:

All work from Pick & Mix, completed; both folder & blog.

Movers & Shakers completed; both folder & blog but also a usb that contains all the files for this brief; this would be things such as gifs or videos of each animation as well as a showreel (mp4 file) + current working sketchbook.

For this brief and briefs to come, there are no exceptions to not be finished with everything before the deadline given. Deadlines are there to replicate workplaces in real life so you can work more professionally. 

We also went over the checklists for this brief which includes one for the production file and the blog; making sure that everybody were caught up with understanding everything on these two lists:

For the blogs, it’s important to keep in mind to follow the formation of;

Introduction

Body

Conclusion/Evaluation

It’s also important that we, at this point, know what all the terminology includes and that we have a clear understanding of what all of the terms and keywords mean. Some of the more important process related terms are additive and subtractive animation; these will come up soon so it’s a good idea to have a good understanding as to what these are for future projects, tasks and challenges.

Use the questions that have been given to help articulate the blogs. It’s accessible and there to help review and evaluate all the work we do as we go along through the briefs.

For this whole term, visual language has been the root for everything, main focus. we are right now looking at tone and texture.

Can we quickly define them?

Tone: Contrasts between different colours and shades, it’s the different between light and dark. The relations of these shades that describe tone.

Texture: Texture is tactility. Raised surface.

✄┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈

Quick task:

Spend five minutes in groups to discuss;

Ways to describe a texture:

Rough, smooth, jagged, silky, soft, hard, spongy, wet, raised texture, sharp, shiny, matt, gritty, solid, liquid, grainy, spiky, fluffy, scaly, pointy, lumpy, chunky, dry, brittle. 

Ways to describe a tone:

Light tone, dark tone, medium tones, warm tones, cold tones, dull tones, bight tones, contrast, colour, solid, harsh, soft, concentrated, rendering, juxtaposition, positive & negative space, richness and deepness, shade, viscosity of colour, opacity/translucence/sharpness, opaque, hue, saturation, vibrancy, desaturation, shadows; chiaroscuro.

Materials and mediums you could use in this project?

Wax crayons, watercolour, ink, acrylic paint, graphite, chalk, pencil, graphite stick, foam, paper, pastels, gouache, tissue paper, foil, fabric, plastics, plasticine, cardboard, sandpaper, glitter, sequence, lino printing, oil paint, card, ORE, coloured pencils, markers, pen, string, tape.

We also went over these with the class, adding as many ideas for each point as possible.

Today’s focus and task:

Use your own footage to create a working rotoscope sequence.

I am going to use the video of a swan.

Pick a describing term/terms for both texture and tone.

Texture: Rough yet soft

Tone: Contrast, hue, juxtaposition.

Pick a medium/material/media aiming to reflect the selected texture and tone.

I am going to use ink (brush pen) on paper and let loose.

So, the first thing I did was go onto Photoshop on a mac in the studio to then import the video of the swan into the program. The final number of frames were 46 after removing ever other frame from the initial video. I then printed each of these frames out on A4 paper. After this was done, I could start the drawing process. At this point, I didn’t really know exactly what I wanted to do for this task, but I decided to start the way we started this brief (Muybridge movers); with tracing paper and some ink. I began doing some simple and rather bold lineart with a brush pen. This was time consuming, but it turned out rather successful in the sense that it reads quite clearly what is happening and what the subject is.

At this point I had finished all the frames, making sure to number all of them to keep track. Since I still, at this point, didn’t know exactly where to go with this just yet, I decided to continue by roughly colouring each frame in with the same brush pen. 

As I went through, I thought about when we did subtractive animation a few weeks ago, (”Mealt”) and so by taking inspiration from that lesson, I applied what I had learnt then about this process to this animation as well.

So now with every frame outlined and coloured in, what now then? I have now finished with the tone aspect of the task, now it’s time to incorporate texture into it, and I had the perfect idea. The ink lines are quite rough or somewhat harsh, and I wanted to create juxtaposition, so what better way of doing that by using texture opposite to anything rough or harsh? The answer is bubble wrap. It’s great texture and it is soft compared to many other mediums.

So, I took my bubble wrap and began cutting out random shapes of it to then use these to glue onto each frame with a glue stick. This was a tedious process, but fun since it’s nothing like I’ve ever done before.

As I was working, I suddenly realised the potential of this sequence. There is an incredible amount of pollution happening in the world at the moment, and today there are literal islands made out of plastic, floating about in our oceans. Every day, wildlife is affected negatively to this by either getting hurt or dying from it in one way or another.

When I had finished gluing the bubble wrap onto a selection of the frames, it was time to start photographing every frame:

This was my setup. I used the back of my production file to create a solid black background for the pictures. I took all the pictures using my phone; I have learnt from the “Mealt” workshop that this is quite an effective way of doing it instead of scanning in 40+ different frames.

Above are some screenshots of my camera after photographing all the frames. Now it was time for editing them to my own personal liking, which I did on my laptop using “Preview’s editing tools. They are a bit primitive, but for the purpose of this exercise, that will do just fine.

After editing, the final number of frames came to 39, even though the initial was 46. I cut it down a little since I felt some of the frames were unnecessary; something I should have thought about earlier on when choosing which frames to use in the video. I decided to do my animation the same way I did when I did my Mealt animation; so, to do this, I replicated the process from then. That means that the next step would be to import all of the now edited frames into Krita (the program I’m going to use for this). This part is quite tedious but definitely still important to get right to avoid chattering when playing it back in the end. I’m simply just lining up each frame in order to the best of my ability. It was at this part of the process that I decided to invert all the hues of the frames. I did this to replicate how the swan originally is white; also, symbolising how pure the animal is in contrast to the pollution (black background)- and how it takes over.

Here are all of the frames put in order:

Here are the same frames, but with all the hues reversed:

After then exporting all the frames lined up to match each other better, it was time to animate it together. For this (and all my gifs) I use Giphy.com.

Like the Mealt workshop; I copied and reversed a selection of the frames to successfully make the animation loop; also, making it appear as if it’s “breathing” or growing.

Here is the finished rotoscope of the swan:

And here is the original snippet of the video:

With the use of the bubble wrap, it tells the story (which in fact is no story at all, but reality) of how the more plastic we throw out into the ocean, the lesser the population or the animals living in this environment there are. If this keeps going, all life will eventually be gone; (shown by how the bird eventually fades away into nothing) - but if action is taken globally, we can reverse this and start anew; letting wildlife thrive without plastic choking them up.

It is no coincidence that I made the subtractive element happen during the last 10-15 frames as it is meant to replicate how quickly it (plastic and pollution) can kill nature.

[overseer2020]

A City of Citizens

  I started up my blog again because I thought I had everything I wanted in the precise places, but like most creative endeavors, this one refuses to lie still. I’m currently engaged in my own sort of Development process. It’s a little haphazard, but considering the modular nature of Magic: the Gathering, I want to experience some of the chaos inherent in seeing cards I might not think of being together sharing space (this is one of the reasons I’m so excited to get these new prototypes printed). After pulling just a few virtual Sealed Deck pools, Draft Boosters and building constructed decks with Crimeworld cards, I’ve come to realize something surprisingly simple.

Initially, I thought I wouldn’t need a “Changeling”-type glue to hold everything together. That is to say, a malleable group of cards that makes the theme easier to execute on a common level. Lorwyn’s Changelings do this by letting the player substitute a Changeling with basic/suboptimal stats when they can’t round up enough creatures of the appropriate type to make a Limited deck function smoothly. Of course, initially, I was not trying to make so many creature types relevant, but as my world became more complex, it made more sense to include certain secondary creature types in the mix of “supported” tribes. My Development process is already suggesting that I may have “overegged the pudding” and done myself a mischief in the Limited arena.

Fortunately, the remedy for this has been staring me in the face all along and neatly fills in some actual blanks I’ve had regarding creatures of the Citizen type.

You see, the rank and file people who live in The City are known as Citizens. It doesn’t matter what their actual race or class is, everyone is technically a Citizen. However creatures that aren’t Knights or Mercenaries or Clerics or whatever are usually considered to be basic Citizens -- the kind of people who just want to go about their daily lives, keep to themselves and usually have no text in their text boxes.

Generally, Citizens are characterized by being civil servants and regular folk, doggedly adhering to their simple, nonmagical lives, encouraging others to keep this newfangled Magic business to a minimum.

Even non-creature Citizen spells carry a hint of the mundane, the ordinary, the unspecial*. Narratively and developmentally, this serves as the starting point for the fantastic to happen. The opposite of how this will should all end. (I know my Campbell -- If your hero is going to be strong at the end, you have to show him as weak at the beginning or else there can be no growth. This world will eventually be a world of wonders, but first we have to establish a boring baseline and create contrast.)

However, should a Citizen wish to become more, they can train to become one of the real movers and shakers in the world. This is my new revelation -- the thing I came up with today (as I write this, almost a week before you could possibly read it). Hopefully, I haven’t upset the applecart -- the balance of the whole set by introducing ways Citizens can gain new classes***.

Now, I don’t know if this is a strong enough change. Perhaps some of the blank Citizens could have class-adding clauses attached to them**. Currently, I’m just allowing any creature type to be grafted onto a Citizen creature, but ideally, I would want to limit these upgrades to the classes this block cares about. If I can work out a way to word it elegantly, I can lift the Citizens-only restriction. We wouldn’t want this sort of thing to become too narrow.

Once again, I seem to have avoided actually describing the thing I intended to describe in as much detail as is warranted. Oh, well, I’ve said a bunch and there’s always tomorrow.

Next time: Did you say Tribal??!

* [I wanted to include one of the “antimagic” spells that actively nerfs an opposing creature through the power of blandness, but all of those cards have more text on them than I’m ready to talk about right now.]

**  [I was proofreading and ended up writing this whole extra clause and inserting it at this point before I realized I already said the same thing in different words later in the paragraph. Great minds think alike! 

“, but that would necessitate specifying eligible creature types, which I am loathe to do both for space considerations and because doing so would put hard limits on the effectiveness of these cards.”]

*** [I just realized I used the term “classes” without saying what that means. In MtG a few years ago, The Powers That Be decided that most creatures should have a race AND a class -- Goblin Warrior, Human Cleric, Elf Druid, etc.. The intent of Second Career is for the player to choose “Soldier” or “Warlock” instead of “Dwarf” or “Vedalken” (hence the name of the card), but the player is free to choose any (valid) creature type since the rules do not specifically identify certaom creature types as “classes”. While my designs push at the boundaries of acceptable additions/alterations to the comprehensive rules of Magic, I’m drawing the line at creating even more (you’ll understand later) groupings of creature classes despite how useful it would be to group Magic-Users together under one vocabulary word (Magicians?).]