This is a Mudbox sculpt made from a sphere. It’s still a little too “ball-like” for my liking, but the more subtle vein-y textures seem to distance it from the classic tacky “sci-viz” look. I may just have found a way forward…
I got my feedback for Semester One’s work at the end of last week, and I was extremely pleased with my grades. There is always room for improvement however, and John’s primary suggestion was that – having already demonstrated that I can learn and use the technology well – I spend more time focusing on the artistic side of things. So I’ve bought a new sketchbook and I’m now trying to articulate what are – frankly – some pretty crude-looking scientific diagrams in my own style.
Yes. Exactly.
I’ve also been watching the BBC’s “Secret Universe: The Hidden Life of the Cell” again armed with greater scientific knowledge than I had last time I watched it, and it’s interesting to see how they have interpreted the different organelles, many of which I can now identify by name. For example, the cytoskeleton (top image) appears in microscope slides much as I have drawn it there – organic and sort of cotton-like – however the creative brains at Intelligent Creatures have represented it here as a sort of geometric cellular scaffolding.
The real question is – how much can I get away with? Granted, scientists’ ribbon diagrams can tell you how something is stuctured – but knowing the chemical structure of something is very different to knowing what something looks like (much as if one were trying to draw La Sagrada Familia based on the shape of the scaffolding alone). The news that – only six weeks ago – DNA was photographed for the first time ever reminded me that we really know nothing at all.
My conclusion is that p53 probably looks a lot more interesting than the lump of balls I’ve drawn it as, and even if it doesn’t… for storytelling purposes, it’s important to me that my story’s hero look more momentous than a lump of balls. So it’s back to the drawing board (book?) tomorrow for another attempt.
I have been working on more pre-viz stuff – visualising the DNA being damaged by the cell. There are many things I want to change about this, but I’m trying to resist my perfectionist tendencies and remember that this is only a dry-run for the actual thing. However I will document what went wrong, and what went right, so that I’ll remember the next time this scene comes around.
Note: this scene now plays out very differently from the animatic – the reason for this being that Angus clarified that the DNA does not go “boom” – the damage is rather more subtle. The photons act more like tiny bullets that punch holes in the DNA (or create a “dimer” – a fusing of two strands). I was rather disappointed to be denied an explosion, so as you will later see (in further changes to the animatic), we have found an excuse for me to blow up an entire cell.
Notes:
We came back to university on Monday, only to be thrown headfirst into proceedings with two full-day classes on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Tuesday’s class was a sound design workshop run by Dawn Campbell, a professional sound designer. We had to create a completely new soundtrack to a 30-second clip of the film “Megamind.” So Ross, Fraser and I set out with a Roland portable recorder and for three hours we were slamming gates, walking on Shreddies and setting off party poppers, and Fraser narrowly avoided getting arrested in a successful attempt to record some police car sirens (the last part was a joke… sort of).
I have to admit that I was a little complacent going into the editing stage, having used Pro Tools before, but as I found out there is a big difference between using a program and using it properly. In the end we only got eight seconds done, but I think we got it done very well. New things learned: how to “normalise” tracks (seemingly a form of compression), and also numerous keyboard shortcuts.
Yesterday’s class was run by Dawn’s sister, Sharon Campbell, and was about reflectiing on practice. I have to say that having suffered a few setbacks on my personal project recently it was extremely useful in that I learned to look at these setbacks more constructively.
Which brings me on to my personal project… I have found in recent meetings that the storyboard perhaps is not quite sufficient to communicate all the camera moves, particularly as there are some complex ones involved. Therefore I have started work on a pre-visualisation animatic, which will also help me with dynamics and animation tests. Here’s the story so far:
What did I learn from this exercise?
Two semesters isn’t as long as it sounds, that’s what.
Cell Shading 