"Talent is Bulls***": An Article Review

"Talent is Bulls***."

An Article Review from nofilmschool.com

According to comic artist Ty Templeton, no one is "talented".

The people we attribute that word to have no innate knack for anything, but their high level of skill is the result of hard work, dedication and LOTS of practice.

In the nofilmschool.com article "Talent is Bulls***", Templeton shares opinions about eliminating the myth of having a "gift" for storytelling, as well as his thoughts on how to tell better stories.

He starts the video by claiming that every workshop he teaches begins by sharing his "Talent is Bulls***" philosophy, and he mentions in the video how Mozart is always brought up by a student when talent is dismissed. Mozart, they reason, must have had innate musical talent since he composed music when he was 5.

"Now, I've played Mozart's 5 year-old symphony," he said.

"It's sh*t. It sounds like it was written by a five year-old."

After hearing this I decided to see for myself what Mozart's early pieces sounded like.

Here's a video of his first works.

Keep in mind that he was five when he wrote this.

I feel like it's still an impressive feat for anyone to write ANY music at such a young age, but I can definitely see why Templeton thought these pieces didn't demonstrate outstanding brilliance or "talent". Taken in the context of the time, they sound like a million other Classical period compositions. His first pieces are sub-par and boring. There is nothing special about them other than the fact that they were made by a kindergartener.

As a matter of fact, Mozart may not be the genius modern listeners have made him out to be, as many symphonies that were thought to have been written by him were either copied or misattributed entirely.

But Mozart aside, the question still stands - 

Does talent exist?

I personally agree with Templeton's statement that "talented" people are only considered talented because of their hard work, but I believe innate ability is still present in some people. People choose to go into the entertainment industry not only because they have an interest in the craft, but also because they recognize that they possess the abilities and potential to be successful in it.

Someone that is fascinated with entertainment but is horrible at making films will probably not choose to be in the entertainment industry.
However, that isn't to say that hard work and commitment can't remedy that and result in a successful film career if they decide to pursue one.

In this case, practice really can make perfect.

Later in the video, he offers advice to writers wanting to increase their level of storytelling "talent":

"Tell a story your audience thinks they know how it will turn out, and then don't let it turn out that way." 

His logic is that a predictable story makes for a boring story. 

Always keep the audience guessing, and always have them be surprised.

The success of The Sixth Sense relies solely on this concept, as well as just about any Twilight Zone episode.

Now I'm a sucker for twist endings, and I'm fairly certain that most people are. The best stories are the ones that keep you guessing, and a story that causes such intrigue is a story that will draw the audience in. This, of course is one of the primary goals of storytelling: make the audience care.

One of my favorite twist endings comes from an episode of the Twilight Zone where a daring, bombastic and fast-talking employee desperate for cash bets his multi-millionaire employer $500,000 that he can stay silent for a full year. Being annoyed at the man's quick tongue and confident that he will fail, the employer agrees. Thus it's arranged that the man will stay in an observation cell where it's made sure that he won't say a word.

SPOILER ALERT

After the year passes, the man demands his $500,000 to the employers dismay. It's then revealed that the employer never had the money to give him in the first place, and that he is completely bankrupt. The employer congratulates the man, stating that he is the more honest man. He urges the man to talk, but the man writes on a slip of paper that on the day before the bet he had his larynyx removed, and thus cannot speak.

Here is the full vid.

This kind of twist ending is just the kind of thing to keep audiences guessing and interested, and is an amazing device that makes your work stand out. By choosing the road less travelled and ending it in a different way from what audiences would expect, the film will become far more satisfying to audiences who want to be challenged and see something new and exciting.

Later in the interview Templeton states that writing to show off your writing abilities does nothing to better the story you're telling. Everything needs to service the plot, and extra embellishments may massage the ego, but ultimately, the audience is there to be engrossed in your story, and anything that detracts from that will result in an unenthused audience.

Now we may differ in some nuanced viewpoints about talent, but I wholeheartedly agree with Templeton's thoughts about how to tell a successful story.

People may come to be entertained, but they stay to get sucked into the world of the story.

I concur with his claim that good writing always immerses the audience in the story being told, and that any kind of ego stroke through the use of unnecessary artistic elements will completely distract from the main point of the film.

In all, I believe that Ty Templeton has some very interesting viewpoints, but the overall takeaway from the article and attached interview was this: the story is the most important aspect of any creative project, and anything that distracts from that - including showing off your "talent" - will result in an uninteresting film for audiences.

Here's the Original Article

Animation Final: B-Movie

ANIMATION FINAL:

"ATTACK OF THE 100 FT. DUDE"

By Drew McCall

Well, this is it. The project. 

The BIG project.

It's the final animation of the school year.

I'm not happy that it's the last one, I love this class and am sad that I'm leaving. But I thought I should end the school year with a bang. That's right. A special effects kind of bang.

Our prompt for the final was to create a video that includes 3D animation, special effects and green screen elements. My group, which includes myself, Graham Petter and Valhalla Cartwright, decided to create a film in the style of a 1950's Sci-Fi B-movie. 1950's Science fiction movies are renowned for their horrible quality special effects, poor acting, and low budgets, all of which we had plenty of. We thought it only natural for this to be our final project. Eventually, we settled on creating a film about a man that drinks a growth serum created by a mad scientist and then becomes 100 feet tall. This is a parody of ALL B-Movies from the 1950's, but we also stole the title from "Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman". We called ours, "Attack of the 100 ft. Dude".

This project was LOADS of fun to make from start to finish. However, it was not without its fair share of difficulty. One of the harder things that we encountered when making this project was designing it to be as close to an actual 1950's B-Movie as possible. To do this visually, we made all of the clips black and white, added a grainy effect to them in After Effects, and added the hum of a projector in the background.

The good thing about making a B-Movie like ours is that you can make it as terrible as you want it to be, since its poor quality is specific to the genre. We purposefully tried to make it as cheesy and bad as possible (which, I'm not gonna lie, helped us out due to time constraints). Our storyline was very rough and had many plots holes but we did this on purpose to make as awful as we possibly could. We still put in a lot of work in despite our film's bad quality; we had to plan out what shots we wanted and still had tell a story, even though it was all a parody. Graham helped a lot in the creation of our story and pre-production, and he also served as the star of our film. We put a lot of time and energy into making this whole film. We worked especially hard on the opening sequence, which included several detail-oriented tasks.

The title sequence is made up of several different parts: first we made the MGM studio title, then we had a film countdown, then we finally had the actual title sequence. The MGM studio title was created as a joke since I played the lion in our school's production of "The Wizard of Oz", so I made myself the "MGM" lion. I began in Photoshop by taking the original MGM logo and adding a black and white effect and erasing the original Lion and making the inside of the circle transparent. I then changed "Metro Goldwyn Mayer" to "Valtro Grahamwyn Maycall", as a parody of MGM using the names of everyone in our group. I then imported the footage of me as the lion and layered it beneath the now, "VGM" layer in After effects. Ta-da! Instant studio title card.


We then created the actual title sequence in photoshop and After Effects. The background of the title sequence was stock footage of a skyscraper that we found online, but everything else was made by us in photoshop and animated in After effects. We tried to make this title card as close to a 1950's title card as well, complete with a roman numeral date at the bottom of the screen alongside various other notes and disclaimers and a little E-Comm title and logo. These details really helped make the beginning pop.

We spent a couple days filming all of the footage we needed for the various scenes like the lab, Graham as a giant, and the tank/ missile. We really had to plan out what shots we needed to get, and had to keep in mind what we would have to do in post-production to get the intended effect as well. The lab scene was fairly straightforward, but the scenes we filmed on a green screen had to be really thought out. We captured a lot of footage but ended up using only a little bit of it to create the final product. To make Graham appear to be as tall as a skyscraper, we had to film him against the green screen pretending to ravage the city. Then, we pulled the footage into after effects and used the "Keylight 1.2" tool to key out the green parts and make the background transparent. We added a black and white effect to the footage of Graham and layered the background footage into our composition. The final product made it appear as though Graham was towering over the school building.

Val created the tank and the missile in Maya, and we pulled the rendered footage from Maya into After effects. We then added the black and white effect (again) and made it look like a tank fired a missile at Graham to shrink him down to a normal size.

When we were editing it all together in After effects, we really had to search for music and sound effects. A simple search in youtube for "1950's B-Movie Soundtrack" sufficed, and after a short period of searching I found everything I needed. We did the same with sound effects, and we even included Godzilla's roar and the "Wilhelm Scream" in parts of the film.

In all, this project was all about the details. Even though the quality decreases as the film goes on, the details that really make a good parody were the priority overall. The one thing that I would do differently in this project is I would apply one filter for the black and white/ grain effects to overlay across the entire project instead of adding these effects to each clip one at a time. I really loved this project, though, and I think we did a pretty good job capturing the whole idea of a B-Movie. I want to add some changes to the original file to make the audio better towards the end, but like most animations, it's never truly complete. It can always be changed to be made better.

I learned a lot though this project and experienced first-hand one of the most important aspects of animation as mentioned earlier: the details are important. Never be afraid to look for something that seems off in an animation, no matter how small, and go about fixing it. It will make the final product far better, and your perfectionism will be rewarded. I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone that helped me with this project and to you, the reader, for appreciating all my hard work over the year(s). Thank you for everything, it's been an amazing ride.

Now, without further ado, here's Grahamzilla destroying the city.

RIVERBANK: A Tale of Sophomore Video Tragedy

VIDEO FINAL:

"RIVERBANK"

By Drew McCall

A tale of tragedy, wallets, time constraints, improvised acting 
and a whole lot of beef jerky.

The Beginning:

There once was a sophomore video final...

It didn't seem like much to my group, the assignment seemed like any other project we were assigned. The idea was simple: create a short film using what we've learned in this class. Write the script, plan it out, film it using the six shot sequence, and edit it together into one nice package. To Tanner Daniels, Diego Astorga, Bryce Prichard and myself, this was just another project, just another group. The only things that set this project apart for us were these requirements:

1). You must include a water bottle.

2). You must include a hat.

3). You must include a purposeful source of light.

4). You must include the words, "Lights Out".

So around these requirements we formulated our story about a group of guys that go camping in the woods. The guys find a book packed away in one of their bags, which tells the story of a camping trip (much like their own) that takes place in the woods.

The group in the book disappears one by one until one person is left: the killer.

Everything that happens in the book begins happening to the real camping group, and the guys begin to turn on one another in fear of who is the killer. 

In the end, the killer is the one that put the book into the hands of the group: a creepy sociopathic teen that was bullied by the members of the group.

It seems so simple, right?

We wrote the script, blissfully ignorant of what was to come. 

What seemed so simple turned out to be as tragic and surprising as the story we set out to create.

The Middle:

Our troubles began early on, when we were still writing the script. Due to the busy schedules of everyone in our group paired with the length of our script we lost precious time to pre-production. We ended up being one of the last groups to start filming. The final script, after several attempts to shorten it to fit our 3-5 minute time constraint ended up being 11 pages. This was our first mistake.

MISTAKE #1:

Script was too long.

Unaware of how ambitious we were being with our storyline, we set out to film the first few shots with our actors. We wanted to film with actual theatre people, so I called up my friends in the theatre department and improv troupe (take note of this, it will become important later on), and we decided to start filming on a simple Tuesday night. 

With the element of hindsight, we should've stopped while we were ahead.

When talking to Will, the captain of our school improv team and E-Comm video nerd, he said that we needed to get some high quality audio equipment, otherwise we wouldn't be able to hear the actors. Since our script relied almost solely on dialogue, he reasoned that high quality audio was essential. This leads us to mistake number 2.

MISTAKE #2:

Our script required us to utilize equipment

we didn't know how to work.

Here's where the real mistakes begin.

So after buying some beef jerky for our actors to make it look like a camping trip (which later became the only thing that kept our morale up as this video went to crap), we gathered our four actors together and began discussing schedules...

MISTAKE #3:

We used actors that had busy schedules before we 

realized it or cared to ask them about their time commitments.

We found a date that would work and asked them to meet at a wooded area outside of Bryce's house....

MISTAKE #4:

We wrote the entire film to take place outdoors just days

before a low pressure system would cause it to rain during our

time that we planned on filming.

We asked our actors to film from 5-8....

MISTAKE #5:

We wrote the script to take place at dusk so we only had a

few hours each day to film.

We also asked them to film in a park down the road to film a few more scenes in a few days...

MISTAKE #6:

We planned on filming in two separate locations.

The list could go on, but I like to stop at 6 because it's the number of the devil, and it felt like he was trying to sabotage it from the beginning.

So here's how the dominoes fell.

We didn't film all the shots since the script was too long.

We lost time on location since we were operating a boom pole to capture audio.

When we were able to film all our actors had schedule conflicts.

When everyone was able to film it rained outside.

When we actually filmed we only got a few minutes of footage since we only had a few hours to film.

And finally, we didn't even get to filming in the second location.

The End:

By the time we started filming at the second location, we had 1 minute of film to show for our 2 weeks of work. And the project itself was due in 2 days.

So what did we due? Well, after EVEN MORE complications that drove everyone to the edge (I'm just going to skip over this part so that I don't suffer more PTSD), we ditched it. Threw it out. There was nothing left to do. With little more than a few hours, half as many actors as we needed and tired and hungry people all around, we were expected to make the cinematic masterpiece that we had formulated in the writers room, the same one that seemed so simple just a few weeks ago.

Needless to say, we had to do something else.

Here is where our actors come to the rescue.

Since my theatre friends that we cast were all in improv club, they were experienced with making stories up on the fly. We threw some ideas around, and settled on what may be the roughest outline of a story ever:

2 guys in the woods find a dead body with a wallet full of money.

Conflict ensues.

On this super SUPER SUPER SKETCHY plot outline, we began filming. 

What you are about to watch is the result.

We made it all up.

In an hour and a half, we made our video final.

Am I proud of this? Yes, in a way. I was shocked at how well it looked despite the fact that we made it all up on the fly.

I learned loads in this project about teamwork, filmmaking, scheduling, friendship, and so on and so forth. But if I were to sum it up in just a sentence, it would have to be this:

DON'T BITE OFF MORE THAN YOU CAN CHEW.

That's it.

I'm done.

Please enjoy.

Thanks for a great sophomore year.

Here's to bigger and better films that will be made in the future.

This one, however, will be seen only in record books.

THE END

JOURNALISM: Brooke Biasella on Weightlifting

Full Interview: Brooke Biasella

By Drew McCall

JOURNALISM: Anton Owens on Family Traditions

"Paper Christmas Games: A Holiday Tradition"

By Drew McCall

Maya Modeling: 3-D Animation Projects

3-D Animation Projects

By Drew McCall

Howdy!

Ya miss me? It's been a while, but I've kept busy since my last post.

In fact, I've learned a lot since I've started working with Maya. Some of my previous posts are included in here, but there are plenty of new ones with the tools used described here.

HAMMERS

CUT FACE/ EXTRUDE/ BEVEL

Cool hammers, amiright?
I liked making this, but making the tongs was pretty hard. In order to make them, we had to use the cut faces tool to cut the back of the hammer in half and separate the halves by shifting the vertices. The extrude was used make the head of the hammer, and again the vertices were also shifted to make the handle. The nail was made by adding subdivisions and scaling them. This was a fun project to do, and now I know how to make a hammer. So, yeah.

BOWL/ GLASS

NURBS/ CURVE/ REVOLVE

Although "NURBS" may sound like an insult, it is in fact a tool used to create original shapes other than polygons. In order to create these vessels, I had to create a NURBS curve - kind of like a profile of the shape - and use the revolve tool to create the final product. Then I added a transparent texture to make the wineglass and added a clay texture to make the terra cotta pot. I rendered the image using Mental Ray, which adds a reflection in the phong and blinn textures.

POLY..........THING

LIGHT

It's a thing!

I seriously have no idea what it is, but it's well lit, right?

I made this by creating some polygons (as in spheres)  and using the difference tool which carved out the original sphere into the shape shown. But most importantly, I lit the scene using a three-point lighting scheme. I used directional lights mostly, and adjusted the light strength and the shadows.

SHAKER

CUVES-CIRCLE/ LOFTING

I'm sorry. I didn't animate any pizza to go along with this.

I think that this is one of my better 3D animation projects since the mental ray that I used turned out so well, and a lot of care also went into creating the lights. Originally we were told by our teacher to make salt and pepper shakers, but I wanted to give myself a bit of a challenge and create parmesan and red pepper shakers, which have a distinct curved shape. In order to create the original shape of the shakers I used the circle NURBS curves tool (LOL it rhymes) which creates a skeleton with which I later used the lofting tool to create the final shape. After altering the vertices to make the curve look natural, I began working on the lid. The lid is in fact a sphere that I scaled down and "differenced" to make the holes. I added some textures and lighting, and I rendered out the image via mental ray and badda-boom badda-bing: you've got yourself some high quality pizzeria shakers!

BOUNCE

KEYFRAMES/ GRAPH EDITOR

Ever seen a bowling ball bounce?

I have.

And you're about to see one bounce if you press the play button.

This was the first project that I actually animated using keyframes and the graph editor. The actual create of the balls was simple: They're just spheres that have been textured. The hard part came in when we had to time out the keyframes to make the bouncing appear realistic. We edited the height in the graph editor, and imported the rendered images into After Effects. 

ICE CREAM

BUMP MAPS, LOOPING MOVIE

I scream, you scream, we all scream. 

MINIMART: An After Effects Character Animation

"MiniMart"

It's 3 AM in the inner city. 

For sleepy old Greg Ormansen, this is his 9-5. 

For Markis Ricardo, this is chance to pay back his loan shark.

By Drew McCall

It's been a while since my last blog post because my E-Comm teachers (whom require that I turn in my assignments on this blog) have changed what they want in the posts as far as content goes. The posts will likely be way more "in depth" now and go "into the details" of the project, whatever that means.

Anyway, let's talk about white gangsters that drive astro vans.

The purpose of this project was to exercise our abilities using After Effects for 2D animation. We had to draw the characters, scan them, color them in photoshop, rig them in after effects, and animate them.
What's that?
Sounds easy, you say?
Obviously you've never used after effects before.

Like all films (good and bad), I started by outlining the story.
Most ideas for my work either come from exploring a concept that I find interesting (as is the case with Carl, a script I came up with after thinking about imaginary friends; the film itself is about an imaginary friend coming to terms with the fact that he doesn't exist), or out of necessity. In the writer's room it's important to accept ideas even if they aren't good, because they can sometimes lead you to a fantastic idea. I actually created this project several months ago when I didn't exercise this technique as much, but since I'm just now updating my blog post I thought I should include it.

If you don't mind, here's a quick tangent about storytelling:

 itcame up with the idea after thinking about making a movie about a robbery. After considering options for the story, I decided to make it about mistaken identity, where the robber is mistaken for a person applying for a job. I was unsure how  to tell the story without them talking, but after some research, I found a program that was capable of animating mouth movements called papagayo. I used it to animate the mouths only, everything else was made in after effects. I recorded my brother's voice for the character's voices and edited in iMovie. It took a very long time to make, hence the reason why I am late on posting this.

Next time, I would definitely take the time to draw out all of the backgrounds, because I used pictures off of the internet for the backgrounds inside of the minimart. I did, however, like using the software to animate the mouths. If I ever need to quickly animate mouths, I will definitely use that software again. I really liked this project and am happy with the final product. Plus, I think it's pretty funny, too.