A Pattern in Graphics Class

     I am still in high school, and i am taking a graphics class. And being one of the more advanced class, all of the other school organizations will occasionally ask us for posters, invitations, brochures and the like. A while back ,we had one we were assigned to do as a submission to the "Drive Smart" poster contest for the Colorado Springs Police Department encouraging people to drive safely. Now, at this time I was intently focused on another project and by the time the due date arrived for the "Drive Smart" poster, I had not a thing to submit. Since these submissions count as our grades, I hurried and completed a poster design in about half an hour, just so I would not receive a zero for the assignment. It was a simple (and frankly rather stupid) poster which had a picture of a meme from the internet with the caption "Students, y u no drive safe?". I hadn't expected much from it.
    However, come to realize that a month later when the winners were selected, not only had the runt of efforts won first place, the chief of police wanted to have it framed and mounted on his office door. And to further matters, the other project I was working on for over a month and that took up a majority of the time I should have been using to finish my "Drive Smart" poster had not received but a single glance.
    This was aggravating to me. Something I had poured all of my know-how in to had received far less attention than something that took the about same amount of time, effort, and devotion as picking your nose. My resolution to this? Do that every time. We will be given two weeks to do an ad for the school play, for instance, and on the last two days I will pull something out of my a** and hope for the best.
    To my surprise, I was receiving a lot more winning submissions than ever before. It seems that my last-minute spontaneous thoughts seem to out-gun my long and thought out work a million to one. And while I was still very appreciative towards all the praise, I still feel a bit misrepresented. I've been doing this system for about two months now, and it is painful how little what I do reflects what I can do.
    We have a free choice project coming up, in which every student designs something of their own free will. No contests, no competitions, no specifications, just what flows from you organically.
    I'm going to pour  everything I have into this; just for once have something impressive I can stand behind as a representative of my abilities as a graphic designer.

Desktop Warfare

After almost an entire year of production/procrastination, Desktop Warfare is complete. I had a lot of fun with it actually. I shot the film last year, and unfortunately I forgot about all about it. It wasn't until I found it squatting in my hard drive that I began to finish it. And I am really pleased. The effects look decently real, and the collaborative sound effects are just as good. The only thing I regret is the camera I used. In some scenes it looked like I filmed it with a potato. It was my webcam. I was experimenting with onion skinning which I must say was WONDERFUL, and the only way I could do it was with the webcam. Unfortunately the webcam is the only camera I have that can hook up to a computer. It was so much easier and looked so
much better between frames. The issue will be resolved eventually. As some people say: baby steps.

Desktop Warfare from Trellis Haynie on Vimeo.

It is finally finished. The project I had been working on for the longest time is now finished. And I can honestly say, I am content with it. I did all the green screening I could to the extent of my abilities and I am almost impressed by myself. It took a while, yeah, but it was pretty worth it. I must say it's quite a bit shorter than I thought. I expected at least 7 minutes, but apparently not so much. The story behind the actor in this is a painstaking one: I chose someone else before and this person was impossible to meet up with. He was always doing things, he never responded to text messages, and he was a bit of a brat. So I used my brother instead which turned out for the best in the end. It was so much easier. Anyway, I'll spare you the boring details. Here it is:

Idle Hands from Trellis Haynie on Vimeo.

I've Seen Enough of Green

 I'm starting to hate green-screens. I've pandered around with my most recent video project tirelessly, and the color keying is absolutely AWFUL. It's like picking up a toothpick with a pair of tweezers being held by another pair of tweezers. It can be done, but it is difficult. Now the deadline is fast approaching, and I'm still fiddling around with it. The next few hours are going to be long and hard. It's annoying at best.
And on top of that my laptop is really choking on rendering this stuff. It's like a diabetic trying to eat an 8 foot MarsBar.

The Trouble With Foley

Last year I had a stop-motion project called "Desktop Warfare". Initially it was a box of pencil top erasers at war with each other. They had paperclips for weapons, tape rolls and CDs as helicopters, and even a glue stick as a nuclear missile. The project was actually really fun to make, but unfortunately, after I got all of the shots, effects, cuts, and frame rate fixed, it came to audio and sound effects I drew a total blank. Not only did I have a lack of a sound effects library, but I was at a complete loss for what should go where. I manage to scramble a few gunshot sounds from a few of my old computer games, and that's frankly as far as I have gone up to this point.
But I vow to myself: Finish it. What I'll probably do is pay someone to time together all the low key things: individual gunshots, background noise, just the most tedious things. And since my teacher has a whole class full of kids who I think would gladly do it. In that case, I would still have to figure out what I want them to do and what I don't want them to do. I think I will tell them that to only put in sound effects for the standard paperclip rifle. Everything else like the crayon bazooka, the wire clip sniper rifle, and the glue stick nuke would be much easier to put sound effects in for.
On another note, I need to ask around and see if there is a program in After Effects that can match the frames color wise. Unfortunately, I used a regular webcam for the video, and since it is automatic in virtually every aspect, each frame differs slightly in gamma and exposure slightly from the one before it.
Should I ever get this finished though, I will definitely be proud of this. It's the first stop-motion film I've done where there are a multitude of moving parts scooting about at once. I do look forward to being able to post this online, and here on the blog.

Why I Prefer Stop-Motion

     I'm a big fan of stop-motion animation for two reasons:
a.) I thoroughly enjoy it
b.) I don't have to put up with actors
Even with the short films I've always been doing over the years, there has consistently been a problem of the actors/grips not giving a flying f#$%. I'm not much of an extrovert, so this generally does drain a lot out of me to constantly have to keep everyone else focused. It's exhausting for me. Therefore, I like using stop-motion. I don't need to get my actors rides to the set, I don't have to pretend to care what they are talking about between shots, and I can start and stop shooting whenever I feel like it. Not a single person in my way except me, which in itself is still quite a task. I have a lot of ideas I would like to put into paper, but in many cases I lack something that makes me rethink it completely. Whether it is the right camera, proper materials, or even sometimes the things I am using breaking. It's extremely frustrating on a lot of occasions.
However, it beats having to deal with other people.
Other people just annoy the living daylights out of me.

InkBlood

Over the past week in my graphics art I've been working on an image, and it's finally finished. What started out as a bored sharpie doodle evolved into something AWESOME. It wasn't too complex: just your average four-armed ink alien. I drew it on paper sometime in July, during one of the many hours I spend barred in my room. I started with the head, as I always do, and soon the rest of the body followed suit. And frankly, I've been fussed at before by multiple people for doing that. Of course, I try to follow their advice; drawing a quick basic sketch-skeleton and then merely adding details. Unfortunately I seem to draw worse that way, and drawing the head first gives me almost a theme for everything that follows. I feel it's almost a much more fluid system of channeling ideas to paper. Almost like a comedian performing improv. Sometimes the best ideas hit like a train with no warning or preparation. I'm proud of it frankly, no matter how much the rest of my family laughs at the connection I have drawn between the phrase "ad nauseum" (latin for 'to sickness'). The black ink reminded me of death and illness, and also the black plague, so i figured it was perfect for the title.