I was called in to help animate and composite a CG commercial for a studio. I was putting in a lot of hours to help them meet their deadline with their client. I haven’t had much time for personal study and growth but I have satisfied my obligations with that studio and so have more time to focus on growing.
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Stories are not just a series of events, there is a essence to a story that communicates a dominant idea. This dominant idea is called the Theme.
Themes are based on human needs, and there are 3 categories of human needs:
1) Physical
2) Mental
3) Spiritual
Within these categories we find the basic needs of:
– Food
– Shelter
– Security
– Acceptance
– Stimulus
– Love
– Order
In movies, the theme can be obvious and sometimes it may be more subtle. It is often best to examine what the protagonist wants or is trying to achieve, this will give you enough clues to deduce the theme. It is the job of a good film to move the audience unconsciously towards the theme through their emotions.
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I like to switch from studies that are more abstract and literary to technical, I feel it helps keep me sharp. I have been examining Xpresso setups and how nodal arrangements in Xpresso script can speed up my workflow. I created a camera rig setup that Robert Leger challenged me to create. I could have used this 2 weeks ago when I was called in to help animate on a piece for a studio (which I will not name). It’s funny how you learn techniques that could have been used a week ago, or you will use in a week. I suppose it says something about staying current and not becoming complacent and satisfied.
Anyway, here is the simple Xpresso nodes I arranged to create a basic camera rig. It is very simple at this point, and to achieve complete control of the camera rig for any project I could add more user data fields to the camera control node and assign those fields to their appropriate node functions to share, but I will post a simple arrangement up for reference. Anyone can customize the rig from this arrangement. Pretty simple, and more importantly, USEFUL!
