Post
by rose4emily » Sun Nov 28, 2004 8:09 pm
Thanks, Song. No need to apologize - it's my fault you have to re-record your half of the narratives in the first place.
I am now putting together the video for the widescreen narratives. It's taking me a little longer than I thought, mainly because I forgot that I hadn't yet composited all of the individual slides yet.
See, each narrative requires one image for every possible combination of eye position, mouth position, and on-screen slide. For a narrative with six slides (most are somewhere around this number), I need 2x3x6 or 36 images. For a narrative with eight slides, that's 48 images. The good news is that I've been doing the compositing from the command line, rather than in some GUI image editing application - so each one doesn't take very long. The bad news is that I still have to create about 200 slides before I can finish the widescreen narratives. Currently, I have about a third of them out of the way, and the rest are coming together fast. This just put a little unexpected bottleneck in my working process.
I have put together the encoded fade in and fade out for the widescreen narratives, and encoded versions of all of the widescreen titles fading in and out over the course of about 5 seconds. All of this is also done for the fullscreen section, I've just had to repeat the process with different source images for the widescreen set.
I've also managed to create an eyes-shut version of my widescreen narrator (I switched out Kawashima for Tsubasa's father [still from Kare Kano] after having some trouble finding a shot of Kawashima that would allow me to present him in about the same proportions and pose as Yukino, that didn't have strange discoloration at the top of his head [much of Kare Kano seems to have a darkened region near the top of the screen that looks somewhat unnatural in other settings]). I actually had to paint the shut eyes, and they lack the detail of the ones I found for Yukino. I'm not too worried about this, however, as Yukino had much larger eyes in relation to her head, and each blink takes place over the course of only two frames.
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Update on my plans for the end credits:
I've found that just "sliding" the image tiles I've collected across the screen to hide and reveal text looks pretty ugly, and poses something of a conundrum as to what I should do when the tiles intersect in the middle of the screen (I was bringing one in from each side).
So I've sketched out a new adaptation of this idea in which the tiles are rotating planes with an axis on the vertical perpendicular to the viewer's line of sight (so the planes rotate along a horizontal plane as seen by the viewer). I'm setting the spin to such a rate and phase that each tile is revealed once at full width halfway to the center of the screen, they meet when they are both edgewise to the viewer, and each can be seen once again at full width halfway toward the edge of the screen. This resolves the overlap issue and should be much more interesting to look at. It is also simple enough that it can be done entirely in the 2D domain through foreshortening tricks.
That's the part I know I'm doing. Here's the part that I'd like to do, but don't yet know how well it will work:
As each tile spins past (this is a fairly slow spin, think of somehting adrift in space) the current text, it will dissolve and disperse like dust. I know how to do this, but I'm a little concerned about the complexity of the required code getting in the way of my actually writing it by the time I get the remaining two narratives from Song.
As the tiles meet, they will "tear open" a vertical-ish particle column, from which the new text will coalesce. Once again, I know how to do this, but don't know exactly how long it would take.
I'll write up the "particle free" version first, as that one won't take long at all, so I'll have something done even if the "really cool" part fails to come together.
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The intro text is just a list of editors, presented in alphabetical order (sorted "Last First", shown "First Last"), with the word "Instrumentality" in somewhat larger letters at the end. "Instrumentality" then fades into "Animasia" - but I'm going to try that "particle-dissolve" idea on that, too, since I think it would look much better. Your names are revealed and collapsed by a pair of glowing blue lines, and the only two image tiles used are one of each narrator (the animated versions, not our real pictures), just before the presenation of the word "Instrumentality".
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The reason I'm writing all of this out in text, instead of just pointing you to something to download, is that my home connection is currently uploading at about dial-up speed on both the standard FTP and HTTP ports, and I'm afraid my account on Grace (RIT's server) would get revoked if it became the cause of some huge sudden bandwidth spike thanks to using it to share video footage with more people than probably visit the typical student page over the course of a month (I am just talking about the nine of you, not the audience I hope will see this after it's done).
I've a half-finished network file transfer app I started last year, but grew bored with. I might be reviving that this weekend if my internet connection doesn't open up a little - as it uses non-standard ports to transfer single files to other people using the same app (think of it as a really limited cross of a FTP client and a P2P file-sharing application, which has no search capability whatsoever and supports only a single directory of files). That app, as generally useless as it is, might be what I need to get this file out to you before uploading it for Local download.
I might also end up having one or two of you download a copy from me, and then share it with the others. I'd like to give you a chance to see this before it's fully locked as being in its final form, but you might have to jump through a couple of hoops to get it.
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One last time (I hope): If there's anything you want to see in this project that you haven't yet given me, there isn't much time left to submit it. The only two files I'm going to wait for, at this point, are Song's remaining narratives. Everything else gets in if I get it on time.
may seeds of dreams fall from my hands -
and by yours be pressed into the ground.
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