during the week of
It's been a while | #21
Missed 3 weeknotes in the last months. I feel that many things have happened yet nothing much has happened.
– I finally got to watch spider-verse and learned about how it it illuminating uncharted territories for animations:
- The movie had no depth of field. Instead, they used traditional comic books CMYK printing to offset and “blur out” things that are not in focus
- The movie also had no motion blur. Instead, they drew multiples of the moving thing, e.g. they relied on drawing duplicates of hands to indicate hand movement
- To show the clumsiness of a character, they animated it on twos, meaning showing the same frame twice (12fps instead of 24 fps). What was brilliant about it was that the character would be animated at 12fps, and the surrounding (e.g. car) would be animated at 24fps.
- They added so much hand-drawn comic treatment to it that, if you pause on any frame of the movie, you’d have the illusion that it’s an image of a comic, not an animated movie.
While these animation treatments are new to the animation world, they are all classic comic books drawing technique. It’s kind of surprising to me that it took the animation industry this long to start experimenting with animation techniques. On the other hand, I can’t imagine how much politics this animation team had to push threw to be experimental with this film.
– I really enjoy meeting people I’ve never met before and I got to do that quite frequently over the past few weeks. It’s really nice to hang out with people who are not familiar with design.
– It’s really nice knowing how many people I know are also interested in gaining creative freedom and are willing to do something about it. I wasn’t expecting friends to respond so postively toward that career path.
– It’s so much fun to think about a space. What furniture should go in there? How do I want to feel when I’m in the space? How to organize objects in a space? While I appreciate how IKEA has designed and manufactured their products, I also look forward to a day where I have a house with nothing from IKEA, I suspect it will be very challenging.