Final Revised

After a meeting with one of my graduate advisors, I have modified my story. I have taken out the aspects about the future. I have also taken out the "signal" aspects. I simply have an astronaut discovering a duck-family on the moon and eventually taking them back to earth with him. Its been a fascinating process creating this piece and getting to know this program. Getting to create a shuttle launch and a trip to the moon in one of my narrative pieces definitely wasn't in my plans before this semester began, but now with this after effects knowledge and the right tutorial video, just about anything is possible in there.
I tried to better focus just on the astronaut and making the ducks appearance more of a fun animal-in-the-wild type situation. The astronaut then just follows him back to his nest rather than there being some signal source or something.

Adelaide Paul lecture

I was very fascinated by Ms Pauls lecture. It was interesting to see her humble early graduate work and the slow reveal and escalation in quality of her most recent work. Not only an increase in quality, but a great advancment in focus of what she wants to make her art about. She was greatly effected by a trip to a place where euthanized animals are incinerated. Also an animal lover, this has become her life's work and cause. She adopts elderly unwanted animals and connects with them while she can. This also caused her to delve a little further into the medical side of things, so much so that she began drafting mechanical illustrations of the body parts of some of the animals, never having been an illustrator before that. She purchased prefabricated mannequins and then warps them to her liking to make them look like the specific breed of animal she wants. She then covers and stitches them with various leathers, sometimes sewing a glass eye or two into the pieces. Often pieces are shown decapitated to emphasize the beauty of their imperfections. I greatly enjoyed her lecture and as a graduate student was fascinated by the continual progression of her work.

Ellen Weissbrod's A Woman Like That.

Ms Weissbrod showed the college her documentary film about Artemisia Gentileschi. 10 years in the making this documentary contains compelling subject matter about a female painter in the renaissance/baroque era. Her story is one of an early powerful female icon. Unfortunately this piece suffers from having been made over a span of time that includes the lower end of video qualities. It is interesting to see the progression of the video quality improving, but it suffers from a nostalgic camera operator doing unnecessary moves and transitions because of the non-hinderance of the lightweight DV Cams. We're often spun into a new scene which may degrade from the elegant quality of the subject matter. The artist herself was as nice as can be and surely spent a long time working on this. Unfortunately, craft-wise, we can tell that she is an artist that happened to make a film and not a filmmaker making a film about art. Again though ill reiterate that the subject matter was fascinating, but being someone in the film field, i was constantly distracted by the dated methods used.

Music Made and Reel Updated

http://www.behance.net/erichber


Stanley Justice on Facebook


Stanley Justice on YouTube





Got an updated reel ready and this weekend we recorded music for my animation.

We have piano and duck sounds. Next will be the rest of the foley and the astronauts dialogue. As well as dialogue from the launch announcer and from mission control. Still need to get the footage of the future but that wont be too hard. A few trips to the electronics section and a coffee shop or two. I'm still deciding on whether to use "public" footage of the future since I can sort of apply free use to it....



ASTRO DUCK-YouTube from Eric Huber on Vimeo.

First Full Rough Cut

Rough Duck from Eric Huber on Vimeo.

Minus a few bits here and there. This weekend I will be getting "future footage" and laying out the first beds of audio. After that it will be working on pacing and deciding on additional shots to include.
The ducks may need to have some bit of a joint in their neck. In the ending "pity face" shot they seem a little vacant. But that may be a bit of a point to it that theyre animals... I'll also most likely be working on a poster and a withoutabox page for it this weekend.

Really Reel

Eric Huber Directing and Cinematography Reel from Eric Huber on Vimeo.

Got it down to under 4 minutes. There are some new projects I've worked on that I still need to get footage from other people. I think the scenes playing out help detail the directing side of things, but I can see how people may just want a music video put to their footage.

Volutneers not Volunteers

Volunteer not Volutneer from Eric Huber on Vimeo.


You can see most of the story line. The second half with the duck needs to have a lot more added and I believe the first half before the duck could be cut down a bit more.

Some of the replaced elements in older scenes seem to disappear. I must have not had them on the timeline for long enough. An easy fix...

I'm liking the opening, of course Ill have to do something different with the intertitles background just simple moving up...

The shot at the end of the clip is a test sequence to see if cutting to actual reality footage will cut together with this project. So a few filters were applied to it to help ease that transition and create a look out of it.

I think a lot more can be expanded out of the duck taking him to his nest.

I also need to create a background for the cockpit inside his lunar module. It occurred to me that the chap will have to sit down for the beginning and end of his mission.

Audio is still in test phases. I used audio for the take off from compiled youtube clip. I asked the fellow if I could have permission to use it but then all of the voices in it are talking about the mission from the clip and I think that'll interfere with the narrative of my piece.

So for right now I believe I'd really just like to hear the feedback for the direction it's looking to take.