I’ve been hard at work on a few projects, including comics based on my irrational fears. Check them out here!
Independent Projects
Eyeball from Fran Krause on Vimeo.
Here’s my animation for the CalArts “48 Hour Film” – in 2D and 3D!
Last year I read about a camera setup at MIT that could shoot a trillion frames per second that could capture the movement of light. I thought I’d try to do the same thing with my camera at home, and use water drops instead of light waves. The water drops wouldn’t exactly repeat every time, but I thought that would make it more interesting.
I thought that, since my camera could shoot 60 frame-per-second video, if I shot 100 water drops, I could weave them together to make a 6000fps movie.
I started off with a simple setup in the kitchen. My camera on a tripod, a mug full of water, and a recycled yogurt container with a tiny hole in the bottom to make the drips. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough light and the footage turned out blurry.
Next I tried to shoot outside, but the camera was too close to the mug, and the depth of field was so narrow that the whole mug couldn’t be kept in focus. Also, the outdoors was great for the light, but all the sun overheated my camera and I had to bring it inside to cool off.
Here’s the setup I used for the final footage. The camera is hooked up to AC power and hiding in the shade. The overheating warning light started to flash near the end of the ten minutes it took to film all 100 drips, but it turned out okay.
The camera setup:
Canon 2Ti
1280×720 video at 60fps
1600 iso
1/4000 sec shutter speed
f 5.6
300mm zoom
The footage was then broken up into 100 separate clips, each one starting at the first frame a new drop enters the screen. I then took a few hours organizing all the clips, by the height of the water drop on each first frame. The video was edited to show the first frame of clips 1-100, then the second frame of clips 1-100, and so on.
I hadn’t expected it, but around the eighteen second point, you can hear the noise of all 100 drops woven together. There is a delay, since the camera was about eight feet away, and at 6000fps the sound would have taken a few seconds to reach the camera.
I just finished a sketchbook I’d been working on since I was living in New York this July. Through most of it, you’ll be seeing cels from my new film, “Nosy Bear”. The bear character might look familiar, he’s been showing up in my sketchbooks for a long time, and even appeared in the very first post on this blog.
I tried a new technique for this film – I’d been having a lot of fun sketching with friends over the summer, and I didn’t want to head inside to the computer / light table / animation dungeon, so I thought I’d figure out a way to make my film while sitting outside in the park.
I made myself a tiny field guide, so I could trace a series of very small 16:9 fields into my sketchbook – I could fit about fifteen on each page. Then I animated with a nib pen and ink. People asked, “How do you test it, keep it registered, that sort of thing?” and the truth is I tried not to worry about it. At first, I shot quick tests with my cel phone camera, but after a couple pages I just tried to wing it.
The animation is done, along with the compositing and a preliminary soundtrack, so I’ve already started to send it to festivals. After Christmas I’ll be working with Steven Nistor, the sound engineer, to finish up the final audio.
I’m looking forward to showing everyone the finished work!
I needed to cut together a demo reel for that panel discussion a few weeks ago with Dave Levy and Brown Johnson, so I thought I’d share it.
The video Will and I made for Miles Kurosky’s new album has been touring the festival circuit for a while, but it’s finally online as of today!
I just wanted to share a portfolio of my work that I recently put together.
The music video Will and I made for Miles Kurosky’s “Dog in a Burning Building” is in competition this fall at the Ottawa International Animation Festival!
Yes!
Will and I have been hammering away at a music video for Miles Kurosky‘s upcoming solo album for the past few months. Miles, along with Nik Freitas, are the team that did the fantastic soundtrack for Upstate Four. Click on their names to listen to some of their songs on MySpace, they’re awesome. We asked for the shortest song on Miles’ album, which is about a dog in a burning building.
Anyways, I thought I’d post some stills from the video. Will and I have it broken up into fifteen-second chunks, and we’re each handling our separate parts. I’m working in Brooklyn and Will’s working in Providence.
The first chunk I worked on was animated with pen and ink in a flipbook style. The drawings are only about an inch by half an inch, but when I scanned them in at 1200dpi I found that they would work fine in 1280×720 resolution. Also, working small kept me from getting finicky about the animation. I made the border with construction paper, tearing little holes in it, scanning it in, and keying out the holes. It’s put together in After Effects with 3D layers. I’ve been meaning to try out the technique Javan Ivey created with “My Paper Mind“, but with a digital workflow. I’m not as into razor blades as Javan is.
Then I just had to go and make things complicated. Dammit. During the chorus, Miles’ voice is overdubbed many times, and it reminded me of the theme song from the Muppet Show, where the audience resopnds with “Why don’t you get things started?”, and it sounds like a crowd, but since it’s mostly Frank Oz and Jim Henson, it also sounds like two people.
So I decided to make a roomful of muppets singing the chorus. Again, dammit. First off, I had to make a muppet. I don’t own any muppets. I was lucky enough to find an old pattern from the 1960′s of a muppet. I also had some foam left over from when I made a scooter seat. It was too thick, so I cut it in half with a very sharp blade. A word of warning: don’t use thick foam to make a muppet. Thin foam, like the kind you can get out of a couch cushion, works best. Thick foam, like the kind in a scooter seat, won’t stay together with contact cement. Then you’ll have to glue AND sew the whole thing together. Also, thick foam insulates very well and after thirty re-takes under hot lights your hand can get pretty sweaty.
The plan was to use one puppet, but mix up the features and color shift it in After Effects to look like many different puppets. I made the eyes out of ping-pong ball halves and hot-glued thumbtacks inside so I could move the eyes around. Also, there are yarn wigs and felt features. The only color fur I could find at the fabric store was blue, so I made everything on the puppet cool-colored and shot it against a red screen. I only had my cheapo digital camera that shot at 20fps, so I slowed the music down by 120%, then when I sped up the shot footage, voila! 24fps.
Then, as I was going to sleep, I thought “Dammit! The song is about a dog! If I had put dog ears on the puppets, it could have been a theater full of DOG puppets!” The next weekend, Will was in town, so I shot about 20 videos of dog-eared puppets singing along. Much better.
With the new and improved footage, I started putting it all together in After Effects. In retrospect, Maya would have been a better choice because of After Effects’ problem with lights and camera moves, but that’s all hindsight. The dogs were put together in groups of five with their chairs. Seven groups of five were arranged to make the whole crowd. Initially I wound up with 597 layers, which makes this my biggest AE project ever. There’s about 2300 puppets in the audience. Of course, very small proxies were rendered so that RAM previews weren’t all that bad. The whole thing was lit with red and yellow lights, which really helped tie the colors together.
A couple tips working with 3D After Effects:
Motion Tile is a handy effect. The carpet of the theater is a motion tile. This allows you to repeat textures over and over for backdrops.
Camera moves are very tricky in After Effects because of rendering time and because of the way all three coordinates are tied to the same ease-ins and ease-outs. First off, shut off all unecessary elements. I roughed out the camera moves using just the theater set. Secondly, parent the camera to three nulls and use each null for a different direction. That way, you can have a steady Z pan as the camera eases to the left and right.
I think my next segment will involve pyrotechnics.
