Okay, ignore the last post (yes, I realize it probably would have made more sense to just delete that post. However, I want to remember what I was thinking initially). The NEW idea is to try to improve either my iPod building project or my music video project. Now, I plan to include my entire iPod building project. At the end of that video, where the room inside the ipod will be, I will place my music video inside the room. The iPod building will provide a convenient segue to the music video and will hopefully be hardly noticeable.

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Update 12/15/10
What actually happened over the past few weeks is as follows: I added a camera path to my iPod building and added a couple of 3D aspects to my music video. I attempted to imitate the flight path of an airplane or helicopter. This didn't work very well because things started to get mixed around. The flight path started to get very complicated because this was my first try at using it. I imported my music video file and placed it on top of and directly in front of the iPod to make it look like it was a video playing on the iPod. I also added 3D chemical bonds on the music video and 3D blood cells to fill out the scene in the artery. I used keyframe animation in Maya and then exported those animations as a sequence of images, which were then imported to After Effects

Showcase

For my next trick, I will perform quite the impressive feat! I will be creating a slideshow of sorts of all of my projects up until now. I will be doing this because nothing has really been completed to my liking. So, I will start from my earliest after effects project of me falling from the top of a building. That one was the simplest. At the end, I will have my most recent project, which is the iPod building project, which has yet to be unveiled. The video will progress in chronological order of completion/assignment

3D project-- a little more

This was a somewhat frustrating experience. The outdated hardware and software that we are using in this class, in addition to time limitations, caused me to have to turn in yet another project I'm not completely happy with.
My original idea was to have my iPod standing, as if it were a building, in an empty spot between two buildings on a sidewalk. Taking the right pictures was a problem, so I had to settle on completely making my own environment for the iPod.

The simplest part of the video was the iPod, and even that was riddled with complications. At certain angles or positions of the camera, the wrong layer would be showing. For example, if the camera moved sideways in front of the iPod, instead of the front showing, the side or the back might show. My teacher took a look at it and told me that calculations were being done wrong by either the program or the computer itself. The solution we came up with was to turn down the opacity of whatever layer it was, for that point in time. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to go through and do this. Software/Hardware: 1. Me: 0.

The next big thing I had to do was piece together four separate pictures of the Cultural Center into one image, and duplicate that to make the four walls of the building. This went pretty well, using the transform properties in Photoshop. However, the image was too big for After Effects to use it in the ways I wanted, due to a limitation in the computers we are using for now. Software/Hardware: 2. Me: 0. For the third building, I took one picture and duplicated that. For both of these buildings, I created the roofs myself in Photoshop. I chose two older looking buildings in order to create the contrast with the iPod and make it stick out more.

I also couldn't add any special lighting, thanks to some strange issue that it seems a lot of people were having. Software/Hardware: 3. Me: 0.

The last part of the video (which is shown first in the video) is just 2D images that I added keyframes to and edited in Photoshop in order to appear to be three dimensional. I cut the road out of a picture in the middle of the road, I took the sky out of a picture of a random city's skyline, I took the sidewalk out of a picture of someone jogging and transformed it in Photoshop to appear that it was on the side of of the road, and I found a picture of the Chicago skyline. In the end, I had SOMETHING to turn in, so the final score is Software/Hardware: 3. Me:1. Which is okay, I guess. I guess.

The 3D Project

My idea is to create a fictional iPod building inside Chicago. Inside this iPod building will be a 3D model of my room. It is going to be SWEET. I will probably take multiple pictures of my iPod nano, which is roughly rectangular and then inside the screen will be my room.

3D Eraser

A few days ago, we started learning to use Adobe After Effects to make three dimensional objects. We  started with an eraser, and took 6 pictures, one of each surface of the eraser. I'll leave out the precise technobabble of exactly how we did it, but we used After Effects ability to make new cameras and shift the perspective on the layers. Each layer was rotated on an X, Y, or Z axis so that when your (that is, the camera's) perspective changes, what you see of each face of the object changes. This has been a slightly frustrating experience for everyone, because After Effects wasn't built specifically for 3D modeling. Later, we'll use Maya for that, and my teacher says that that will be a lot simpler. Perhaps simpler still if we somehow get new computers. Well, here's a look at the eraser. It's very rough, but it was our first attempt. Enjoy!