Maelsantiago's Weblog

The last two short films I’ve uploaded.

maelsantiago — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:05:04 +0000

“Hastío” and “Simples Causas” are the last short films I’ve made. They were both shot using a HV40 and edited with Final Cut Pro. I made the first one during the first weeks of my Christmas vacations. The story came to my mind like a flash. Like I do most of the times, I set a day, an hour, and a location with the actress, but there was no script to develop yet. So the day before the shooting I went to bed at twelve o’clock with nothing in mind. I didn’t know what was I suppose to shot the next day. But don’t you be sad, this is a happy ending story. When I woke up, the first thing I saw was my little drawing figure (those small kinematic figures made out of wood one use as reference when drawing). It seemed to be such a cinematic object. I decided to make the short about a drawing wooden figure that gets tired of posing. After conceiving the idea I took the figure and I made an special make up for it using shoe wax and a teeth brush. The short was shot in one day and post-produced in two.

There’s a lot more I can talk about the second short film. It’s the longest video I’ve ever made. Editing was a pain. Again, I didn’t write a script. I just discussed the ideas with my friends (the actors) while I was holding the camera. But I think the result is great, considering this was a 99% improving project. The voice-over is spoke in Spanish, so if you are from the US I’m not hoping you to understand anything. The voice-over is the only pillar that holds up the story. If you understand it, then you may be crazy or your health may be in danger.

Hope you enjoy it.

Cliche phrase: “Comment and rate =D”

And these two are short documentaries about Venezuela.

Walking away from CGI

maelsantiago — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:25:35 +0000

Since the last Sausaguy II Trailer I made, I realized CGI is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. So I decided to start working on that other thing I’m good at: Videos. So for the last few months I’ve being dedicated just to shot and produce video stuff. I do everything, including short films (very crappy for now), music videos, documentals, and some random stuff. The most of my work is uploaded to YouTube. Im going to paste some links to those videos at the end of this post. The equipment im using right now is working perfectly. I bought a Canon HV40, replacing my old-unreadable .TOD format JVC Everio GZ-HD7. The Canon captures amazing vivid and sharp images. It also shots at 24f so the videos achieve to get that same look film has. The colors match the reality amazingly, and the resolution (which is actually 1440×1080) is acceptable, considering I render at 720p. I bought the camera in the B&H stores in New York. They gave me the Rode Video Mic for free after buying the HV40 (Unbelieveable!). I’ve got an average price tripod with the one I get convincent smooth camera pannings and a borrowed Final Cut Pro license to edit all I shot.

SAUSAGUY! The winner wiener!

maelsantiago — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:09:50 +0000

Remember that cool tempered sausage that came from the outer space and ended landing in a world where human beings ate his brothers? Well, that unic sausage has won the first prize in FILA, an art festival that had it’s debut here in Venezuela. The animated short did won the “Best FX” and “Best original music” prize too. It was a very great succes in the theater where it was projected, people really enjoyed it. Hope you did it too.

The Film that doesn’t sleeps

maelsantiago — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:24:51 +0000

For the last few weeks I have been walking all around Manhattan. And since I am from Venezuela all I can think about New York City is how amazing it is. People walking from everywere to anywere just to keep it awake!

I also met China Town, the big chinesse corner of manhattan! There me and my family met with some friends, one of them a film maker. In this moments he is working on film (About a subway crash or stuff like that). During our chat we talked about the film industry in New York. He told me about production issues, ups, downs. After I noticed the dude was completely relationed with production stuff I showed him my shortfilm (sausaguy). I was amazed, he really liked it… Even beeing just two minutes and a galf he said it was well done.

Since that day I have been trying to focus my mind in just one proyect, so that I can finish it earlier and at the end put ‘em all together to create a really useful portafolio.

I’ll tell you more about it later…

The Sausaguy Shortfilm and Making!

maelsantiago — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:29:26 +0000

Finally I post it! My first shortfilm! Sausaguy, the intergalactic sausage!

Software used:

Cinema 4D 10

Adobe After Effects 7.0

Sony Vegas 8.0

Garage Band (I did not use any instrumental loops from the program)

Enjoy!

The short:

The making:

Also the lipsync animation of the upgraded model/rig:

The Sausaguy projects

maelsantiago — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:14:51 +0000

After I made the rig I used the character on a lot of different sets. This is relacionated with the movie The Exorcist so I just duplicated and changed the Sausaguy model a little bit to create the Doctor and Regan. I did this during my intern ship.

Also I worked the last few weeks on this improved version of the tony model. it took me about three or two days to finish it. Much better right?

Animating

maelsantiago — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:02:12 +0000

So, after all the rigs and crappy technical works I had done in maya I decided to start doing what I like the most: Animating. For some weird reason I was a little afraid about it. After watching all those Animation Mentor reels I thought that animation would be more complex than rigging or modeling (which is a very stupid thought). But guess what, it is easy to do and I love it. You just need a lot of patience and creativity. I was too tired to build a rig, so I downloaded a very cool one from highend3d.com (very similar to the rigs used in Animation Mentor lessons). I just animated this little biped dude jumping on a box. It took me about an hour to finish it. I hope you like it!

Also watch the last upgrades for the mosquito character!

My very first rig

maelsantiago — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:58:36 +0000

In this post I am showing you my very first rig and humanoid character model. It was made in Cinema 4d. I did it on January. The rig has a lot of issues. For example: Wrong joint orientations, foot twist when moving the hips, no Fk arms, Ik neck and spine, and no hands rig.

After I proved that it was not useful for animation I started using it for promoving a YouTube Channel that I was willing to create called Imanimation (I never created the channel). Anyway, the point is I realized that with a friendly model like that, a simple rig and some good lighting you can create a lot of cool stuff such as this.

I hope you like it! I will write more later.

Tony, my best model

maelsantiago — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:21:09 +0000

I uploaded this picture just to show you what can be created with time and patience. I finished this model after 5 days of full time work. The texture map was done in photoshop. I will show you the face rig when I finish it.

My new character “The mosquito”

maelsantiago — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 23:55:45 +0000

The day before I started school I desinged this cool 3d mosquito. I was inspired by an idea I got during those days. I started modeling it from a cube, I defined the base form and then I subdivided the cube to get more geometry for the details. The model is pretty simple. In this type of projects the real deal is to get a great rig and animation. For the UVs I used the automatic UV tool. I did not want to add textures or anything like that to the character so the tool in this case was very usefull. I think the result I got is great.

I have already made a rig for this character but when I started making animation tests I realized that it was not working at all. May be in this case I need to investigate a little more about squash and strech joints and new rig structures. The rig structure I used for sausaguy worked well for sausaguy, now I have to create a whole new system for this mosquito. I will be investigating about new rigging techniques and some mel scripting.

Well, here is an image with the mosquito doing some fighting poses. Hope you like it!