grid project

my first idea was to make a piece with post it notes or cds
but i either ran out of space of materials in both cases.

So! my next idea was to attempt to emulate the sprite style of one of my favorite games, Mother.

I started with a pencil sketch of a wolf wearing a red flannel shirt, then i brought it into photoshop and cleaned it up with my favorite brushes!

Then I attempted to decrease the size and pixelate the image and make it 30 x 30 pixels, but it didn't have the amount of detail i wanted it more detailed, so it ended up being a 134 x 168 grid

i added color and tried to pay attention to how the colors overlapped and little details like aligning the checks on his flannel with the checker pattern in the background.

 I considered printing it out right then, but then i got the idea to 3D print it pulled out to make it a little different than a picture on a piece of paper

SO! I took the colored image into illustrator and separated it into individual colors and individual planes for each pixel.

Then i imported the illustrator files to maya, a 3d software

due to importing complications, i had to extrude each pixel individually and each color the same thickness so they would fit together like a puzzle

the black outline would also act as a backing for the printed object, the holes being open to place the colors inside, since the printer can only print one colored objects.

unfortunately, the printing software couldn't decipher and export the black object for the backing because it had over 1000 pixels, so it could do anything but show me an error message...

SO! in the end i had to settle for a large format printed version of the colored pixelated image

Opera Assignment - Barber of Seville

Marcus Berry
THE BARBER OF SEVILLE



For my assignment I recently watched classical opera for the first time in my life, and I loved it. The opera I watched was called “Barbiere Di Siviglia” which translates to English as, “the Barber of Seville” and I picked this show to watch because of the famous Bugs Bunny cartoon that borrows its music and setting from this play. At first, I was hesitant about watching any classical opera to be honest, it was spoken and sung in Italian and happened to be two and a half hours long. When I watched it, however, it proved to be rather entertaining and not completely dissimilar to the comedic style and story elements of a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon. But being very story driven, I had a bit of trouble trying to implement interesting ideas that would complement the natural progression and events of the opera.
    First, I’ll discuss what I liked about the opera’s story and the ideas that I thought were important to include in the making of a game. As I said before, I chose this opera because I am a fan of Bugs Bunny cartoons, and I found it very interesting how similar the comedic tones of these two mediums were. For instance, the opening of the play introduces us to our heroes right at the beginning. And, not unlike a Bugs Bunny cartoon, they are singing songs and dancing about so that the audience recognizes they are fun and likeable, all while the lyrics of the song are telling us about the character’s plights. Our first hero is a lord, desperately in love with a peasant girl he has never met in person. The lord sneaks out into the town at night and hires a dozen musicians and locals to shine candlelight with mirrors on his face in order to make his song to her more endearing. The next song is that of Figaro, the Barber of the small town called Seville. Because it is such a small town, most everyone knows Figaro as he cuts everyone’s hair. Figaro establishes himself as a clever man, with not much money, but many friends. Our villain is mostly a caricature, as he seems to have little depth and only cares about the one thing that keeps our main characters from being happy. He is a wealthy doctor who has a live-in woman that he intends to marry even though she has no love for him. The woman, of course, feels trapped by her situation and is unable to freely pursue the mystery man that sang to her. The story is much like a fairy tale in style, and the plot points are based on conversations and the reading of letters and the like. The comedy is well sprinkled throughout the play; the doctor has a comically pompous portrait of himself hanging above his fireplace, Figaro sneaks into his house disarming his servants casually by using a chloroform rag and a pepper shaker to cause a sneezing fit, the male servant of the doctor is a constant victim of slapstick humor and by the end of the play is covered in bandages, several obvious-to-the-audience disguises were used to trick the villains into letting the lovers spend time together, the doctor’s internal dialog is said aloud and directly to the audience, and my favorite part was when Figaro switches places with the leading lady during a dance sequence and the doctor accidentally kisses all the way up his arm. The humor and the music carry the audience through the plot, and I feel they are what needs to be represented in the telling of this story.
    That being said, it’s difficult to try and convert this classical opera into a modern day video game, because it has virtually no violence, combat, or high octane action sequences. My first thought was to make it a game about being a barber, cutting hair, washing it, and using favors and cunning dialog to gain favors and information from customers. But to be honest, Figaro hardly does any hair cutting during the play. So I came to the conclusion that the best adaptation of this story would be in the style of old point-and-click adventure games made for PC by the game company Sierra, who made the King’s Quest series, the Space Quest series, and many others. Games like this had the main character rely on their wits and collect items to use in clever ways to get out of difficult situations. The world of the game would exist as a number of static screens viewed mainly from one side, much like the stage of a play, that you explore and learn about the more you play. In the story, the characters often have to find ways to get around the villains without them noticing, to deliver letters to each other and by making connections and getting people to go along with their plans and disguises. For instance, the lord would have to find the captain of the guard and win his favor with a bribe to get a uniform to sneak into the house. Or, Figaro would go through his friends in the village to collect a chloroform and pepper to keep from getting caught by the doctor’s servants. These item collecting and exploration segments would be broken up by minigames, such as cutting someone’s hair in the right way as a favor to receive a specific item, or segments when the protagonist must sneak through the doctor’s house while actively hiding from the villains’ direct line of sight by hiding behind curtains and pillars. I can imagine that if the doctor catches you in his house, he holds up his keys and rattles them about to call for his servant. The game itself would of course use music from the opera whenever possible and wherever they appeared originally in the play. The main character would be Figaro, the Barber of Seville, but you would also switch between playing as the lord and the lady often, each having their own specific inventory making it all the more necessary to have the characters meet each other and trade items.
    In conclusion, I enjoyed my first opera greatly and I can honestly imagine a game like this existing. To be honest, I feel that the character of Figaro reminds me a lot of Bugs Bunny and the casual way he disposes of comical villains. The music and comedy were entertaining and I look forward to seeing more this genre has to offer.

Frame by Frame Book Animation

For my book project I decided to animate the first moments of a bird like dragon i made up for this assignment. Many of the examples I saw had to do with changing and morphing faces and objects, but I've always liked cartoons and happen to have a background in making animations, both object oriented and frame by frame.

It had been a while since I made a frame by frame animation by drawing it in an actual flip book, because I normally use animation programs for that, so this project was more difficult for me because i drew in pen and could not erase, and I also scanned each individual page and had to align them one frame at a time.

it took a while, but I'm proud of my little dragon!

Pjotr Sapegin's Madama Butterfly (Stop Motion)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E387c5RAhK4&feature=youtu.be&iframe=true&width=90%&height=90%


Wow! Okay...

From the very start of this video I didn't know anything going in and did not know what to expect.
All I knew about the video was that it used classical opera music, so it had to be something beautiful and magestic.

I was actually taken aback immediately as the stop motion video began with a very explicit sex scene, full of emotional and sensory shots of the man and woman swaying back and forth in the throws of their passion and clutching each others bodies with unbridled enthusiasm.

The story follows a presumably asian woman and her love affair with a presumably american sailor.
All set to the music of Madae Butterfly. The use of this classical music really adds an artful and beautifully sad tone throughout the animation.

There is no dialog in the film, which leaves it up to the visuals to tell the entire story.
I was very surprised at how many of the small touches had such a large impact on how I viewed the story.

The woman's body was pale, and to me seemed hand made. She seemed earthly and natural.
The Sailor's body was tanned and plastic, with a structure reminiscent of a barbie doll with unrealistic, better than perfect proportions.

This was most apparent while they lied next to each other naked in the straw.

of course, he left her on shore and went back to his ship, and we stay with the woman to watch her wait as she looks out on the horizon. It's revealed that she is pregnant and the child is his.

she opens her dress and her pregnant stomach is a fish bowl, with an anxious fish tapping against the side of the bowl. the water spills out onto the sandy shore and the clay fish becomes a child.

Having never been pregnant myself, i can't confirm this; but my friends who have given birth tell me that being pregnant is very strange because you literally have another being inside of you.

The allegory of the fishbowl hits me on many different levels.
The fact that the child is a fish, and her father is a sailor, the idea that when a child is inside a person he\she is intangible, and you can only imagine what they will be like before you actually meet,
and that the fish comes out onto dry land flapping at first, but begins to cry like a human child, not changing into one until after the mother takes it into her arms.

The umbilical cord is also very striking, the mother and child are connected together by a visible string, which of course is eventually ripped carelessly by the sailor. The idea that not only the daughter, but the mother too flew though the air like a kite using this string made the connection not only physical but clearly emotional aswell.

My FAVORITE part of the entire film was at the very end.
The Sailor takes the Daughter away and casually waves goodbye like it was nothing at all.

Then, like magic, the woman runs as fast as she can off the set of the shore, breaking the reality of her universe. Her pain was so great that she escaped her world, and while crying profusely she ripped the features of her identity off of her mechanical, doll-like skeleton, and broke herself apart in a fit of self destruction. She disassembles herself and in her final act she unplugs the lights of the miniature set to shut out everything that had happened.

I could say that this beautifully recreates her internal struggle visually bla bla bla...

But to be honest, I honestly am so impressed with the idea that a character could be so distraught that she breaks the rules of her own reality because it's the only way she can escape her pain, that i am utterly speechless.

This is an amazingly creative use of medium.

I've been looking at examples of ASCII art  and seeing what kind of images and styles it uses. From an artistic standpoint, i can't say i'm terribly impressed with the esthetics of the style, but from the idea of the work that people put into each piece i appreciate the time and work put into the images. That being said, using a generator to change an image into text doesn't feel terribly impressive, and to be honest it feels like a fancy photoshop filter, like converting an image to halftone for screen printing.