fatima puppet from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

Puppet Experimentation for Final

Trying to see what aesthetic we want for the final product... None of these really satisfy me... Thinking of other options.


Testing for final #1 from Joe Choe on Vimeo.




Testing for final #2 from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

Real Final

Blogpost will be up soon... until then... enjoy these!!!!

Were Girls or We're Girls from Joe Choe on Vimeo.


Fatcan from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

Green Screen

Green Screen Project from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

I wanted to finish this, but I got sick last week... and now I'm flooded with work. So, I will eventually get around to adding everyone, but for now... imaginatttttionnnn.

My final

So, basically... last semester, I made a film called "Sweet Dreams" which has since been renamed. Went through loads of production troubles... possibly the worst thing I've ever made. I suck.

Anyways, it's not done yet. I've been going pretty crazy on it because my actors were all f***ing amazing and I felt that the film didn't do them justice. The only issue I had with the film was that it was not representative of the performances I got from them. I pretty much had one of the other film groups from the class help me out and they all thought my actors were sick on set, but during the "final" product, it was like "What the hell is this?"

My actors agreed... the best takes weren't chosen.

So, I am in the process of re-editing and finishing the film. I got a game developer friend to help me with some 3-d monstering... and it's coming out well. So, I think I'll try to make it my final project.

Pretty much, what I'm going to do is ram the footage through photoshop. Draw things frame by frame aka rotoscope it all. Run it through another program... throw in my 3-d monster... then run it through after effects to add color and touch-ups/effects. OH, and finally... sound mix with a friend who will probably do it for free.

So yeah, haven't been sleeping much.

(I'm also composing it with another friend of mine... my brain hurts.)

tracking assignment

bouncing head from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

This honestly made me laugh my butt off when it was done.

I wanted to use Ben's head.... but I couldn't find a clean picture using my stalkerish stalking methods by searching names on google.

So, I settled for the next best thing.

This was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. Yet, I'm happy with it... should've made the head cleaner and made it done more complex movements since it's possible because it's attached to a null. But oh well...

btw, this is what I was referencing by my last project and america's best dance crew.

(vimeo will probably take this down eventually).

I wish this existed for film...

At the game developer's conference this year...

something really cool:
If you self-publish and make a downloadable game exclusive to the playstation network, Sony will match your development budget.

It sounds sweet and the best thing about it:
You retain ip rights and full control.

I'm not sure about the details, but anytime I hear "budget" and "guaranteed," I jump all over the news.

If the PSP were as big as the DS, this might've been much cooler. The DS just destroys in terms of sales/market penetration. I know that I own one and that I got my friends to own one... and none of us own a psp(which is curious because a lot of us own ps3's).

HOWEVER, something to keep in mind is that if Nintendo follows suit, their DSI which is releasing soon, or is released already in certain areas of the world, would greatly benefit from it as it is geared towards digital distribution of apps a la apple.(A big reason for this is due to homebrew hacks/piracy tools such as the r4, which is ridiculously cheap and reliable. I might be one of the only ones I know who actually buys ds games.)

Just thought that was some interesting news for the graphics students who are considering using their rtf background in the videogame industry.

(Just a thought: Most of the games on psn are amazing. Fat Princess looks like it's going to be good, Flower was amazing, and Calling All Cars is possibly one of the best party games I have ever played. Oh, and Wipeout HD is great. However, in terms of content, XBL kills the PSN... so this is an obvious chess play by Sony to combat Microsoft. Will Microsoft respond by offering a similar deal? It would be win-win for small developers.)

Particles project

sophack from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

the particles might be too small to see... argh...

I also tried my hand at tracking... I think I'll be able to do better for that next week.

This video is actually of my friend Sophack in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. It didn't have music, my friend Leo just told him to bust out some moves.

Watch for us at America's Best Dance Crew next year!

...

...

...

yeah right. haha

Text Project

A Poem by Mr. Feng from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

A poem by our classmate... Justin Feng... written by Joe Choe.

I scrapped the complicated plans for this... I did make another text one with hills and stuff... but to be honest, this looks cooler.

3-d assignment... late

I had this uploaded earlier today, but I took a nap and didn't wake up until right about... now...

Been really busy this week, I will expand upon this for the text assignment... there were originally supposed to be more flower petals.

Inspired by Jenova Chen, USC Film/Digital Media Arts Grad, who created the game Flower.



valley of flowers from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

Edit:

My goals for next week... or my idea anyways...

the hill in the front actually dips down into a valley where I was going to have a lot of weird fairy dust and flowers just fly up... I want to do that and have the camera ramp up speed as it flies through that valley towards the next hill, where something is happening(don't know what yet... a flower blooming or something).

While that goes on, I guess I want to have a poem or something animating across the screen. I don't want it to be just on top of the images scrolling or anything though. I think I'm going to try and have the words flying to the hilltop in a spiral formation.

I actually just got an idea of what to do... but holy crap, everyone's was so good. They inspire me to try harder.

Mattes and luna things... and other things!

Getting Closer from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

No idea what my inspiration was for this one... just wanted something creepy. I think I used this as an excuse to test out a lot of the effects/filters of Photoshop. The character is from a Castlevania game, the castle is just something I found and warped. Almost everything else you see was done with effects from After Effects. The keyed out animation part is a 3-d black and white cartoon I got off the internet.

Piano FILTERED! from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

I wasn't really satisifed with the first one, so I started to play around a bit more to get the animation part looking a bit better. I felt like it had no purpose in the first one and was covering up a lot of the cooler stuff.

Interestingly, this project let me play around with some of the differences between CS3 and CS4. It's a bit different, nothing too mindblowing... improvement? I don't know, I don't use them enough to know if it is or not.

Edit:

After rewatching the two videos above, I think I know exactly why I'm not satisfied with them. The animation in the front is actually distracting and I don't think it really adds anything, but rather, detracts. I know how to fix the first one... I'm not sure when I'll get around to it, but I think what I can do is matte it again? and have a totally different scene going on during the black parts of that swirly moving thing. I can't really think of a convenient way to do it though since that swirl thing moves so fast and constantly changes shape. I'll figure it out... OFFICE HOURS NEXT MONDAY! YAY!

Also, I saw Push this last weekend... seriously... Dakota Fanning was the only redeeming quality in that movie. So, basically... the last two movies I saw in theatres were Push and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans................................

Not only that, but I was sitting in a barnes and noble, reading a film magazine and a gay vietnamese man who runs a social networking site started to hit on me. This was peculiar for a couple reasons: 1. I'm not gay. 2. He was creeping me out(The guy would NOT go away... he was like the old man from Family Guy).

So, a fair warning to everyone... if a skinny vietnamese man walks up to you and asks you, "are you open-minded?" Don't be like me and naively answer, "Yeah, I'm pretty open-minded." Look at the underlying message of his question, then stare at him until he goes away and if he doesn't go away, go straight LA gangsta m**** f**** on his a**.

"YO HOMES, I'M READING A MAGAZINE. WHY YOU GOTTA BE SO CRAZY?! HUH?!"

(Story behind the quote: I'm from Southern California... and my childhood friend was telling me a story a month back...

He was chilling with his cousin in a sunglasses hut when a fight broke out between two mexican guys right outside.

Ironically, the one mexican guy doing all of the shoving was the one yelling, "WHY YOU GOTTA BE SO CRAZY HOMES?!"

So, in short... it was like a guy stabbing you and screaming, "YOU HOMICIDAL LOON!"

So, let's try and make this a new catchphrase:

"why you gotta be so crazy... homes?")

Ben Bays Kicks a turtle from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

ben bays kicks a turtle.

I used the graph editor to smooth out the jump. I accidentally made him slide on the floor backwards though.... lame.

Happy Birthday From the Darkside from Joe Choe on Vimeo.

First, I got some trees and a creepy looking carriage. I put them in photoshop and did the alpha channel doohickey thingy. For the carriage, I removed the wheels, so that I could put on some wheels of my own later on... which ended up being the moons.

I then put them into after effects and made them all 3-d objects and then added in a camera to swoop down and then bound up to the moon for my animation to play on it.

The animation on the moon was made frame by frame in flash, nothing too spectacular. It's actually my friend hitting herself in the head while with her dog and a pig(long story).

After seeing Anthony's, I really think mine could use some mist at the bottom of the trees. Maybe some clouds and stars in the sky to make the black a little less strong.

I probably should've made the animation longer... but I was getting tired.

Also, you can watch the video in HD on Vimeo... supposedly.

1st assignment... the real deal

So, I got some help from the proctors at the DML and I still am not happy with it... but it was far too into it that I realized that there was too much going on and no real clear focus... so I just added that crappy billboard sign... I'll fix this eventually.

This second one is just something that I did for fun.

1st assignment... WHAT THE CRAP?!

So basically, I own a nifty little device called a Zen Vision:M which acts as a really good mp3 player, video player(can play .avi and other video formats, which for the time, was really good), and you can partition a piece of the harddrive to act as an external. So, I put my photoshop project on there... but I ran out of batteries... and macs don't power up my player.

So, while I figure out a way to put up my project, here are some other photoshop things that I made while messing around:

For our after effects project... I'll probably make an animation dealing with this comic later... and I wish I could remember what people's hair colors are.

Introduction

Hi everybody!

I'm Joe Choe, the name rhymes. I'm from Fullerton, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, hopping between the two when I was younger. I moved to Austin in 2004, lived in San Antonio for a year in 2005. I commuted to school in San Antonio for another semester after that while working in Austin and eventually transferred to UT.

The reason I'm taking Visual Effects and Motion Graphics is because since I was little, I was always fascinated with media dealing with the subject. Being an avid videogame player, I dip back and forth between the worlds of videogames and film.

Having taken Geoff Marslett's animation class, I wanted to learn more about after effects and having heard good things about this class, I decided to take it.

I guess the one thing I'm interested in as of right now is how 2-d videogaming is progressing in the HD era and whether or not those techniques can actually be carried over to film and/or animation. For example, several 2-d fighting games such as Street Fighter IV, King of Fighters, and especially Blazblue are now incorporating new styles into their art to keep up with the times, leading to harsh changes to their visual core in order to remain relevant. The interesting aspect of this is the fact that they chose to keep the games on a 2-d plane because it's been proven that the fanbases for these specific franchises detest the 3-d versions that were played around with in the previous generation of videogaming.

However, instead of it being a pure 2-d, what they are doing now to create HD sprites as I understand it, is to create a 3-d model and then essentially rotoscope it(don't really know the specifics of it). Although this process is not that new, the look has evolved to a point where it looks absolutely gorgeous. According to the makers of Blazblue, the difference between their game and other fighting games is the fact that they hand-drew over the 3-d models to add in their own little touches. That piqued my interest as I really like rotoscoping and want to find new ways of doing so.

I don't expect to do 3-d in this class, but I think that learning a bit more on how to use after effects will allow me to move on to other programs and learn them a bit easier.

That's about it for what I am interested in at the moment, although... when I really think about it, I'm interested in all of it. So, I can't really say "this or that."

About me personally... although I wrote a little about where I lived... more in terms of my background in rtf.

Don't let the grammar in this blog-post fool you. I'm essentially a writer. I started writing novels in the 8th grade. As for film, I made my first really stupid film when I was 13 on a really cheap VHS camera. I taught myself how to write screenplays when I was 15 with one of my friends who is now a creative writing major in California. My family has a long-standing history of being involved in an entertainment sort of field. Both of my parents were musicians, my cousin was a stage-actor in California(now training to be a doctor), my other cousin is an editor in California, and the two cousins' brother is in the Korean mafia, supposedly.(I saw him with a rather large Asian entourage at one of my cousin's weddings and he just popped 500 dollars into my hand when I was nine).

The first "bigger film" I was in was in my junior year of college where I did some stuntwork aka getting hit by a car over and over again as an indie filmmaker kept complaining about how it wasn't looking real. Ironically, it was my car(the amazing 1987 camry).

Up to that point in my life, I had done no stuntwork so yeah... I was scared about dying.

That same year, I would get punched hard in the face after badly mischoreographing an action sequence. It was an experience. A bad one, but still an experience.

For those of you who ever wonder "what" I am, I am technically Korean. I don't want to get into specifics of "but I'm part this and part that" so it's just more convenient to say that since that's what I dominantly look like. However, I was born in Rockville, Maryland, and can't speak Korean fluently (I know nothing of Korean culture, so yeah, don't ask me questions about it). Ironically, I speak English, Spanish, a little Japanese, a little Korean, really basic French, and that's it.

And if you've read up to this point, yes, I am writing this much because I'm bored while at school and kind of sick, having been stuck in traffic for an hour and a half and missing my first class of the day. I just took a nap in the library and woke up with chills, not a good sign.

See you all in class!

-Joe Choe