Zachary Willard Film/Blender

Past Themes Last year I focused on the themes of Invention and Fantasy, Politics and the Social Order, and Looking Outward. Ultimately the goal of all my films was to entertain the audience to some degree. In exploring these themes I found that I am most drawn to relationships between the characters of a story. I like watching them transform, change their perspectives, change the perspectives of others, and much more. However, I find it truly interesting to watch the characters change the perspective of the audience. To see the audience be transformed by a piece is the most satisfying conclusion to any work of art. I find that a story that has elements that require introspection are the greatest gift. However, that's not to say there is not a need for pure entertainment. I find a need to balance the themes and bring new topics to be discussed. At it's most basic, themes are just a broad topic of discussion. From these themes I've discussed and the insights I've gained, ...

Tristan, Andrew, and I began writing a new film. Eventually the path of the film changed but we had previously discussed a monster being in it. I immediately began working on creating a monster model in blender to see if it would work. The concept was a dark, grotesque representation of some sort of demon. The demon was essentially a foot-soldier for the angel of death in our film. We have since put this concept aside, however, I wanted to keep up to date on my modeling so I decided to create it anyway. So far I have the entire face done, still undecided on whether or not to continue with this project. I think for now I will get back to working on scripts. However, it was a good project to get back into blender and learn how to utilize some of the new sculpting brushes and navigate the new layout. First Render Final Render Mon - modeling Tues - sculpting Wed - sculpting Thurs - script writing Fri - texturing

Favorite Part of Class My favorite part of class was being able to work independently. Having the freedom to work at my own pace was a breath of fresh air. Also what I enjoyed a lot was being able to help with other groups shoots. Before we would only shoot in our own groups, but with the freedom to shoot outside of class it became a lot easier. Seeing how other people performed their tasks and managed their crew was also an interesting and insightful experience. What I Learned the Most I've learned the most about how to deal with people on a set. Being outside of school completely changes the dynamic and it really shows you who is a hard worker and who isn't. Being able to pick and choose who I worked with is great, but it is important to know how to work with people you wouldn't want to work with. It is a key role of the director to keep everyone motivated on the shoot. This is essential because if no one is trying than you aren't going to have a good movie. It t...

This very short rotoscope took a lot of my time. I was hoping to have at least 5 seconds of rotoscoped footage but that didn't happen. Just completing this took multiple hours so I didn't have anytime to spend writing more than a page. However, this has been a valuable learning experience. What I have learned is quite simple: use a green screen because rotoscoping sucks. It is a very time consuming and tedious process which, if done poorly, yields worse results than a green screen anyway. With the huge advancements in keying technology and higher resolution images green screen will only get better. I am very glad that I did this little experiment before I decided to make an entire sci-fi short film with multiple long rotoscoped shots.

I wasn't feeling the motivation required of me to complete the first draft of my script so I modeled instead. Honestly the hardest part was figuring out how to make the trashbags. What I did was take a bunch of cubes and randomly rotate them. Then, I surrounded with a UV sphere and applied the shrink wrap modifier. I messed with the settings until it looked alright. Then I applied all the modifiers so I would have an actual mesh, went into edit mode and fixed troublesome areas. For the material I used a plastic material I found online, then to get the wrinkles I applied a noise texture to the normal mapping node. To model the buildings I followed a very simple yet effective strategy laid out in the following video.

So far I'm continuing through at the same pace. I'm now on page 31. It is becoming apparent that the pacing is very inconsistent. However, this is an easy fix when I go to revise. All it means is I need to add in some places and take away in others. As I go along I am discovering things that I need to explain in the first act. This is also good news because it means I have more material to work with. My hope is once I'm done the script will be around 90 pages. Right now I'm not sure how accurate that goal is but I'm still going after it. By next week I intend to have the first draft finished without revisions. Here are this weeks pages.