Montages: Subjective Experience of Space and Time

The uses of Montage in films have always been interesting for me. Sometimes it is like a puzzle, and sometimes it is already made clear by the director.

Let's take a look at the Cosmic Sequences and Creation of Life on Earth from the movie Tree of Life

When I first saw this, I didn't know what was happening until it reaches around 8 minutes then I started to notice the microbiology scenes, only then I kind of knew this is the flashback montage of the Earth creation and Life on Earth.

I think our brain has an amazing power to link up scenes in movies, as well as linking up montages and quickly take a conclusion.

Here is another flashback montage from the movie Her

The scene goes with Theodore talking about his previous relationship while the montages are playing. And the scene ends with Samantha saying, "The past is just a story we tell ourselves."

On this use, the narrative is going clearer because the audience is still listening to the character. I think one of Tree of Life's main problem in the scene is that some people don't have the attention span of 15 minutes to sit in a movie without any interaction but background music and visuals, which still only make a little sense after a long time.

Her uses many mood montages and rhythmic montages which I can't share here because I couldn't find them online, but I believe the movie shows a great example of the use of montages in film form.

And I just remembered beside Memento there is one movie that goes back and forth as well, it has a lot of flashback and flash-forward montages, and it incorporates 6 parallel storyline in different timelines. Cloud Atlas is one movie that requires the audience to solve the story, and not just one story but all of them. However, only after 1.5 hours that the movie starts to get clearer for the audiences (some might even need a second watch).

There are just so many ways to narrate stories in filmmaking that we can look upon, there is no best way, so I think the explorations of film form are unlimited.

Technical Journal on Rigging (Week 4)

Continuing from last week, my explorations will be revolving around Eyad Hussein's Advanced Rigging.

Summer 2013 Review – Advanced Rigging - Eyad Hussein 

And this week, I have started to apply the joint based rigging:

Placement of the joints

Basically, after positioning the joints, the model is ready to be skinned. There are some tips on positioning joints and skinning:

1. Joints are used to influence vertices in skinning, so have in mind which vertices are going to be affected when you place your joints. (Don't place unnecessary joints, unless they are used for something else.) 

2. The movement of the joints can vary from rotation to translation. (depending on the desired deformation)

3. Your topology affects the placement of the joints. (As stated in 1)

In this case, I haven't explored the whole range of joint based facial rigging yet. But here is some lips movements I experimented with joints.

I made a smile and a frown, but they still look so raw. 

I hid the joints because it's unclear and messy in the screenshot. But the deal is, when we usually use Blendshapes to do our facial expressions and deformations, here we are only using joints influences to reach the desirable result. Blendshapes are only used for extra range of movements (for the lips) and final touch, which uses the similar method of Corrective Blendshapes. (It activates when the controller reach certain point of translation or rotation.)

In the end, this week I found that this method of Facial Rigging is using a different workflow (or pipeline) than the Blendshapes Facial Rigging, because its deformations have a more detailed control from the joints. It also gives a better in-betweens for change of emotions.

And furthermore, this kind of facial rigging can still be combined with Blendshapes, because the joints are affecting the mesh on a different layer. 

However, I think this method should be done only when a lot of details are focused on the face of the character. The heavy use of SDK might also affect the usage of the rig.

Pros of Joint Based Facial Rigging:
Better control of facial features
Better inbetweens from a facial expression to another
Higher Flexibility in Animating
Easier Animation Tweaks
Able to deform with more mathematical control (using translate / rotate to slide the vertices, scale to expand the volume)

Pros of Facial Blendshapes:
Quicker to set up, easily editable
Faster for productions when the rig doesn't necessarily need to do every facial movement
Lighter to calculate
Possible to setup extreme deformations purely by sculpting (some of which joints can't do)

Both are still advised to use Corrective Blendshapes to polish up the outcome.