Category Archives: video

animation, npar, self-reference, video

Brick-a-Brac (1995)

Brick-a-Brac (1995) from Cassidy Curtis on Vimeo.

Here is my first short film. I made this at PDI in 1995, during a gap between commercials. I modeled and rigged the characters, did most of the animation, and developed the wobbly ink-line look.

brick1

The pigeons’ torso was a metaball surface driven by a series of spheres along a spline between the head and the body, which were both separate IK joints (so I could easily get that pigeon-head movement style without counteranimating.) The eyes, beak, legs and wings were separate objects, each of which got rendered in its own separate pass. Each layer had its vector outline traced (using a tool originally written for scanning corporate photostats for flying logos!) I processed the curves using a procedural scripting language to give them some physics and personality, and then rendered them as black ink lines with varying thickness (using a tool written by Drew Olbrich). Finally, I ran the rendered lines through some image processing filters to get the edge darkening effect, and did some iterated stochastic silhouette dilation to add random ink blotches where the lines were thickest. Simple, really! ;-)

animation, events, travel, video

The Making of MADinSpain 2014

Making of MAD14 by Domestika from MAD by Domestika on Vimeo.

Here’s a cool making-of video about the design event I spoke at this past summer in Madrid. It was such a great experience. The organizers made a point of creating opportunities for the participants to really get to know each other, in keeping with the event’s theme of “connection”. I learned a lot, had tons of fun, and made some great new friends from halfway around the world. If you ever get the chance to go to this conference, don’t hesitate, just do it!