Lip Sync Project from the First Term

This has been sitting on my hard drive for months waiting for me to finish the sound effects.  I didn't really enjoy this project at all concept wise, but it was nice to work with plasticine and stop-motion for the first time.  It was my first project at the RCA and I guess I was still finding my feet...

Drawing in Space and Her Favourite Positions

'Drawing in Space' is an experiment I've wanted to try for a while: using OpenCV and a webcam to draw in 3D.  Essentially you wave a coloured square of card around in front of the webcam and my code converts the path your hand takes into a 3D Drawing.  First it filters the image based on a colour you have chosen, selecting all pixels within a colour range determined by the mean and standard deviation of the patch chosen in the calibration phase.  It then finds contours in the filtered image, simplifies these reducing the number of edges, checks if any contours are square (concave, under a certain contained area, and with all internal angles within a given tolerance).  From all the squares found it then chooses which is the most likely square to follow on from the last based on the sum of the square of the magnitude of the delta in each point's position between frames (trying different permutations of the order of corners to account for rotations and mirroring).  If it can't find the square it motion tracks the corners from the last frame.  If any of these are missing it interpolates the data, and if all of them are missing it tracks strong features in the last image (in full colour, unfiltered) and uses a simple nearest neighbour algorithm to associate each corner of the last square with a nearby tracking point (if it was clever it would use some kind of error detection here to eliminate anomalies and then a delaunay triangularisation to interpolate points, but it needs to be lean to run at all).  If all of this fails, the script uses a third order differential on the last few points to extrapolate the next position, filling in the gaps for a few frames until data resumes.   The script also adjusts the colour it is searching for frame by frame to account for changes in light conditions.  Optionally you can also use the chessboard tracking instead of a coloured square.

The drawings are displayed in anaglyph as you draw, and can be exported as OBJ files.  I need some options to adjust the convergence point and so on, but its mostly there now.  A beta version of the code is online here (right click, save target as).  You need matching python 2.7, numpy 1.6.1, and opencv-python 2.4.0 compiled against each other.  If you're running Windows you can get numpy and opencv packages here.




'Her Favourite Positions' is an animation of 186 Portraits and 37 Full Body Poses from my Life Drawing classes at the RCA.  I matched them up frame by frame in AfterFX, and did a little warp correction here and there to get the proportions generally accurate.  I'm quite amazed that this even worked at all and that you can see a ghostly generic photofit face through the mess of lines.

'Tube' Lauches its Kickstarter

The summer before last I moved to Northampton, MA for three months to work on Bassam Kurdali's next open movie, 'Tube'.  I think its fair to say that in those three months I learnt more about CG animation, coding, model making and film making than I have in such a short space of time before or since, as well as having an amazing time living with the other interns Henri and Becky, cooking, cycling, swimming in the river, running up mountains etc.  I managed to do some work remotely for the project last year, but this year my own work has completely taken over.  'Tube' has recently launched its kickstarter project.  I really hope they manage to collect enough funding to finish the film and release the tremendous mountains of assets to the crowd: models, rigs, textures, scripts.  If you've got a spare dime, nickel, quarter or dollar, I'm sure they'd appreciate it...

Drawings

I spent yesterday photographing some of the several hundred or so drawings from my half a year at the RCA (not including the first 500 frames I drew last week for the film I'm currently working on).  Here's a very quick look at them, and below is, my updated drawing portfolio.



Or view it full size on scribd.

Specially Commissioned Banners

Hey, I'm sorting out this blog slowly starting with the advertising, which never made me any money anyway.  I'm installing custom banners which my best friend Julz drew for me.  They'll both link through to her comic, which is rad.

For Your Spare Time...

Since I'm currently writing this on a laptop that was manufactured no more recently than 2001, I'm unable to tidy up the films I made this term into an uploadable state, and won't be able to until I get in front of a computer that's less than 6 years old, which might be not for a week or so.  In the meantime if you need some alternative programming, which leaves you asking 'good God, what program did she use to make those?', and 'where can I find a tutorial on how to produce something with that kind of cutting edge graphic quality?', I can strongly recommend Stuff & Nonsense, by my sometime housemate and collaborator Julz.  Its rad.  Interrobang using the ask box.

RCA Term 1 Experiments

I'd been on 4 hours sleep per night for many weeks in a row including weekends, up until last Friday when the 'holidays' started.  The RCA is rad.  I barely have a moment to write about it now, but at some point I'll photograph some of my scribbles from the 60 hours or so of life drawing classes I've been to.  If I get a moment between watching films, catching up on reading, and scriptwriting for next term's film I'll tidy up the proper work from this term and post it too.  In the meantime here are some tests.


30 minutes at the lightbox


Rhythmanalysis tests