Research Practice

Hi, in my masters of Digital Video and Special Effects, i am learning new skills and techniques in all areas of this subject, in this part Research Practice i m learning how to develop my reseacrh about a theme that i enjoy, especially in special effects, editing and post production it will help me to research in a specif theme in this areas, and make a deep research so i understand the use and how its developed in the industry, searching in the internet, books, journals and online journals, one of my class that i had explain me how to use the online library of my university, how to research, where to find the right articles about a specific a theme and how to make a more advanced research about a specif subject, so that lesson was very useful and now i can use the library online in any part of the globe. I star to do some research about some techniques in speciall effects and post production, i search for tutorials about motion 4, to get more skills on the program but one big research that i m starting to do is about trapcode particular, http://www.trapcode.com/ or http://www.redgiantsoftware.com, trapcode is a plug in for After effects and there is not a lot of information about that and is not very cheap especially if you are not a student, but there is a really cool website with a lot of tutorials about after effect and trapcode particular that are very useful for me and helped me a lot in my projects, www.videocopilot.net, trapcode is basically a plug in that creates really cool 3D particles such as Puffy white clouds, shiny bubbles, swirling dust motes, rain, falling snow, realistic smoke, or flocking birds all of this is possible with trapcode particular and we don t need to leave after effects.
Now that i start to think about my masters project, i have much more confident to use trapcode in my project and after doing a lot of research about this and watch a lot of tutorials, because i think in this area tham i m study with pass of the years i realize that we learn much better and quicker watching tutorials and doing them, rsearching in a book in my area is not the best thing to do, there are a lof of DvDs with exercises on in, and is much easier to understand, i m talking about the experience that i had researching books sometimes were a little boring and not complete accurate about somethings. So to research about speciall effects i will be using much more internet references then books and specially trapcode that doesn t have a lot of information about it, i have to make a deep research and go to books and all the material that i can have access, other part of the special effects is particles in 3D smax im doing some projects using particles in 3D for the first time and they are very useful but not very easy to understand, and didn t find yet a lot of information about that.
I had class in last weeks and it was with a lady that told us to think in a subject that we were like to work on investigate do some experiments and try to understand that subject, i chosen Motion Capture but i didnt know what to do in motion capture i knew it that i want to do something and add some speciall effects, but till today im still thinking what can i do. I used motion capture before and i really enjoyed and there was a program call motion builder that we put a 3d character and it will do the same animation that we did, thats a good program for 3d artists, i m more a composer, but still i really enjoy to use that program but especially motion capture where i used the suite withe the sensors and was really funnt, so no im seeing some made of movies and games that use motion capture, live Avatar and football games, and try to get an idea for a project mine where i would like to combine motion capture with speciall effects and video, that only can be a great a result and i know that i have to be aware the ethics of doing a projects like that, what can i do, what can i say and what can i show, i had a class about ethics in animation and my teacher show us different clips from animations like family guy, american dad, english comedy from the 80s and etc, all of them were realy funny, but in the end the main thing was to know if some jokes will be agrresive for some people, like cultures, races, and countrys and think not, not at all, i think animation the sky is the limit is made to be funny and not real, is made to make peoples laugh and watch again and laugh again, because its animation its characters that dont exixt only exist on the computer and i think most of the animations or cartoons are made to be funny and to joke with everybody in everypalces, the only thing that i support is to show wicth age is the animation suitable for, kids or adults, i think is the only barrer that can exist in the world of animation and cartoons, not all the cartoons are for kinds most of them are but not all of them, and i love to watch cartoons and i always laugh a lot. I didn t like to make one because my area of interest is not 3D, is more composting and thats is where im going to continue with my reasearch and try to find new things and get ideas for my project, a teacher once told the best way to find good ideas is to watch our favourite movies, i think im going to start to do it.
Last session i discover a new software call hacker kinect by microsoft, this program allows to do 3D in real time, we just need a computer and we can do a lot of things with our selfs using 3d, we can out bigger smaller and draw 3d shapes around us in real time, is a nice program for people interesting in 3D, but i will not use this kind of software in my masters project, i am searching for special effects programs like particle illusion, that is a really good program with a lot of effects, and will help me t achieve what i want to do in the final project, i don t have yet the idea what is going to be, but softwares like that will help me to achieve my goals.
In this last weeks of the module i have done a lot of research regarding to my theme war short film and i realise that are a lot of different ways to do special and visual effects, powerful plug ins helps to create and simulate realistic explosions, smoke, and riffle shots, with this plug ins i will be able to achieve my goals and aims and to complete my final product, getting the highest quality possible and the most realistic possible this will be only possible with a great colour correction and with the quality of the render in 3d smax. Overall my research was very useful for my project i found new techniques of creating special effects, found software that will be useful for high quality like Fusion5 and research on professional films and series helped me know what to do and how to get the same style in all the scenes, so i m very excited with the final result of my project.