August 31st, 2010 at 6:38 am | Filed under: Blogging | Tags: Secret Project
Tabico once told me not to let ‘perfect be the enemy of good.’ Which is another way of saying that its important to know when you’ve taken something far enough and that expending any more energy at that point may not pay off with additional quality in proportion to the time spent. Since she’s quite intelligent, I tend to listen when she talks, but this piece of advice is difficult sometimes because its in my nature to be a perfectionist.
With my current secret project being so complex, I find myself constantly triaging my work; there’s so much to do I can’t get hung up on the little details the way I might if this were a single manip. So, I find myself in a constant struggle to know when I’ve done enough and that its time to move onto the next thing.
Last night, I had one of those ‘forest for the trees’ moments and realized that one of my characters didn’t match across all her images. I had the same model, on the same set, but the images weren’t from the same photo series. The lighting was different and, more to the point, her clothing was different.
Disaster. Calamity. Despair.
I considered my options. The effort required to fix things of that magnitude would be enormous. The only alternative would be to replace the images and totally start from scratch with this character. It seemed an impossible choice. I had spent so long finding this series of images; how could I just let them go now and find new ones? It made more sense to work with my existing images; however long it took.
Somewhere over my shoulder, I heard Tabico whispering sage advice.
In a true moment of inspiration (as in the thought lept into my mind fully formed), it occurred to me that I had a set of pics I’d been saving for a rainy day that might work with just a little photoshoppery. I did a few quick tests…there was a heartbeat here! I got to work and here a few short hours later…well I’m back where I started. But it was a necessary detour and really the only choices were scrap the whole project, spend another week just fixing my mis-matched images, or take an evening to retrace my steps a little (but only a little).
In the end, I’m happy with the outcome and happy with myself for not letting my perfectionism throw a wrench in the whole affair. For a person like me, that’s a profound thing. I’ve quit more things in my life than I’ve finished; all because I felt some shame that it didn’t represent my best effort. I’m really happy to have not let that happen here.
The compromise I made will have consequences; the new model is such a stark departure from how I had intended the character to look, I’m going to have to write my way around her appearance. But, and this just occurred to me this moment, that’s just opens up another opportunity to be creative; why would I cheat myself out of that?
August 4th, 2010 at 6:19 am | Filed under: Blogging | Tags: Secret Project
Welcome back dear reader. As we move into August, I am juggling more freelance work than I can shake a stick at, and yet, somehow, I’m also making measurable progress on the animated manip project I’ve been telling you about. So, I’m back with another quick tease of my latest venture and a little peek behind the curtain at the process of putting it together.
As I’ve hinted at previously, this new manip is quite complex. In the past, I’ve done plenty of photoshopping in order to make elements fit together the way I need. Once or twice I’ve even pulled a character out of a photo and dropped them into an entirely new background. However, in order to really achieve what I want with this new manip, I’ve had to go a step further and create an environment from scratch.
As you can see in the teaser image above, I’ve completely removed the original background from behind my subject. The next step is to place her in a virtual set created in 3D and set up my virtual camera to recreate the perspective from the original photo. I’ve got some temporary grid walls standing in for the background so you can’t see them, but I also have to use virtual lights so the new background I’m creating will match the direction and quality of light that’s hitting the subject.
The immediate goal that I’ve been working to achieve has been getting the virtual set created and integrated with a 3D model that will be visible in several frames. As a proof-of-concept, I’ve selected one panel from the series and completed a full set up with camera and lights just to verify that everything I’m planning to do will work properly. I’m very pleased to tell you that I crossed that milestone this evening and am now ready to proceed, full steam ahead.
From here, I have to create similar set ups (camera, lights, etc) within my virtual set for each of the panels in the series. Once that’s finished, the work shifts to masking all the subject’s poses from my source pics to drop her into the virtual set. Finally, I integrate the animations that I mentioned previously and tackle the detail work, special fx, etc; then, finally, write the caption for each frame and drop those into the completed panels.
Its still to early to give you any idea of a release window, but things are really moving under their own power now. I’ve crossed the two biggest hurdles in the whole process and from here on out its just using the assets I’ve created to start fitting all the pieces together. For now, I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief glimpse behind the scenes and I’ll see you again with another update.
July 7th, 2010 at 6:59 am | Filed under: Blogging | Tags: Secret Project
Welcome back faithful reader. Last time I teased you with an image and the news I was working on a new manip. I’m practically jubilant at the moment having just overcome a major hurdle to the project. Allow me to explain…as I said last time, this new series is an animated manip and the particular animation(s) I had in mind are not especially easy.
Again, it all comes back to this geometric design that I showed you last time (and which I now unveil in all its full-color glory!); a person with a better grasp of programming or mathematics would probably breeze through it in an afternoon, but alas that person is not I. So, I have had this major hurdle out in front of me for several months now and frankly I didn’t even want to get started because I knew how much work it was going to be.
This week though, I was able to get caught up enough on other things to finally dedicate some time to it and although its taken three days of intense work, I’m happy to report this particular milestone is now in the ‘completed’ column. Now the manip itself isn’t done, but a very significant portion of the groundwork is; from here I move on to more traditional photoshopping and writing. Still no release date yet, too soon for that, but I’m motivated now and I tend to get impatient when I get that way.
So stay tuned for more and if my workload continues to cooperate, I may just have this thing finished before the summer is over.
May 10th, 2010 at 5:42 am | Filed under: Blogging | Tags: Secret Project
Greetings faithful reader. Life these days is busy and breaking away to indulge this site isn’t always easy (though it is often on my mind). I find myself frustrated at not having adequate time to work on spicy manips, animation, and video but ‘real life’ duties must take priority. However, while my time is sparse, I have been able to chip away at a manip project I’ve had in the works for some time now. Its a multi-part animated manip not too unlike my last big outing: The Room.
I’m not ready to say more at this time, but I thought with a “I’m still alive” post, I might at least tickle your imagination with some abstract imagery that will factor into this manip in a big way. So, at this point you may have been asking yourself about the geometric construct pictured above; I can only say that it is the key to this new series. While I have had the story and base images for this manip series finalized for many months, the technical requirements of this image you see now have proven to be quite an undertaking. Perfectionist though I am, I’ve considered several times just going with a non-animated version to put it out there and be done with it.
But, we all know I love a challenge way to much to do that.
So, while that delays the final unveiling, I do think it will make the wait all the more worthwhile. I’ll tease you again sometime as I get a bit closer to completion; until then, know that I’m just as eager to share this with you fine folks as (I hope) you are to see it.
-Callidus
February 10th, 2010 at 6:46 am | Filed under: Blogging | Tags: hypnosis, mannequin
The day after Christmas I found myself at the local mall with some friends who were anxious to spend several gift cards they had received during the holidays. There are many things I expect from a visit to the mall; pushy vendors of hand cream products, annoying people, and a full-blown mc-junkie on mannequin duty at the newest trendy fashion outlet.
Okay, I lied about that last one but it was a welcome surprise nonetheless. While my friends pretended it was completely natural (and the shoppers around us made sure I knew it wasn’t), I snapped a few photos of this delightful, tranced plastic lady. If the designer of this window display wasn’t thinking about a pocket watch or crystal swinging in front of her face I’ll eat shoes…or something.
I’m repeating myself a bit here, but the part of me that wishes I’d studied anthropology in college, can’t help but look at perfume ads, fashion photography, and displays like this and wonder what it is about the mind control fetish that keeps it an unspoken yet consistent staple of media. Content that plays into fetishes concerning various parts of the female body are rampant. The last several years have seen latex-clad dommes and candid reference to D/s & BDSM used in television commercials to promote parental awareness and pistachio consumption. Yet, to me, it still feels as though people are quite reticent where the sexualization of hypnosis and mind control is concerned.
Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe I want it to feel more present in mainstream media to alleviate some latent embarrassment at being turned on by an ‘odd’ fetish. Maybe I’m just biased. But maybe the person who designed this mannequin did so just for us; so we could wink at each other as we pass by; so we could share the silent joke that this display is far more lurid than the Victoria’s Secret counterpart next door.
In any case, it made the trip to the mall quite worthwhile; we’ll see if next year’s visit lives up to the precedent.
Tabico once told me not to let ‘perfect be the enemy of good.’ Which is another way of saying that its important to know when you’ve taken something far enough and that expending any more energy at that point may not pay off with additional quality in proportion to the time spent. Since she’s quite intelligent, I tend to listen when she talks, but this piece of advice is difficult sometimes because its in my nature to be a perfectionist.
