CRANES

Production Notes

     On more than one occasion, I’ve been told a story by my critical theory professors about an infant who was kept in solitude without any real human contact, as some manner of (presumably cold-war era) sensory deprivation experiment. Allegedly, the baby was able to see construction cranes working from the room’s only window and eventually developed a language of gestures and screeches to “communicate” with them. A commentary on entry into language, to be certain.

     Oddly, although I’ve heard this story a few times, no traces of this particular case seem to exist on the internet or otherwise. Whether it’s a matter of physical archives disappearing (or not being properly created in the first place) or if it truly ever happened to begin with, it seems to have all the makings of some kind of postmodern fable or urban legend.

     That being the case, I thought it’d make a great subject for a visual assignment for one of these very classes. A total of about 6 solid days of planning and drawing resulted in roughly a minute and a half of animation and accompanying foley, offering in the process a few opportunities to test out some technical ideas that I’d been considering for awhile. All in all, things worked out fairly well, and there were a few approaches that may be worth describing.

     This was the first time I’ve attempted to use the black and white format to attempt a sort of “noir” approach, and somewhat predictably the lack of ability to use colour in any capacity caused some difficulty when trying to create visual distinctions between the character and the setting. One method that I quickly settled on was to use a narrow depth-of-field effect via varying degrees of blurring… a fairly standard principle which did the trick for the most part.

     I also was able to craft a few focus pulls this way, but as is constantly an issue with Flash, the complexity of filtering made it impossible to play in a Flash player without issue. As is quickly becoming standard procedure for my Flash work, I had to render everything to video in order to make full use of these effects.

     Another visual standard that seemed to work well was using excessive texturing for the foreground/background areas, while keeping the characters flat via flash’s internal vector drawing tools. Although many of the basic shapes were first set up in Flash, I later drew all of the textures in Corel Painter and Photoshop.

     This worked fairly well for the crane itself. After importing the crane texture back into Flash, I ran a vector trace on it and thus was able to break it into pieces which were then used to create a faux-3D effect.

     Basically, all of the parts of the crane which were intended to represent separate planes or angles had to be placed as individual objects on their own layers. The result (for anyone familiar with the inner workings of Flash) looked like this:

     By arranging all of the objects into one perspective, and then into a second perspective by pivoting them on an imaginary center point, the 2-dimensional planes can be tweened to create the illusion of a 3-dimensional rotation. Positions 1 and 2, as represented as the beginning and end of the above timeline, appear like this (different colours in the wireframe correspond to different layers, indicating separate objects):

     TL;DR? Of course, it’s better to see it in action than it is to read the dry tech breakdowns. The end result looked just right, and with a touch of softening via a gentle blur filter, everything came together.

     Considering the length of this short and the amount of time I had to put into it, I was fairly pleased with the results…. but even more pleased when I scored a Daily First award on Newgrounds, followed by some time on the front page. The best thing to come of this exposure, in my opinion, was some vague closure on the research I had been doing which came in the form of a viewer comment:

     ”I vaguely remember hearing a story when I was studying Language that the Ancient Egyptians once left a child alone in a room, and only fed and watered it. They wanted to see if language was divine and came from the gods. The baby started bleating like a sheep; he was near an open window next to a sheep farm.”

     Thus, my suspicions regarding the original story were essentially confirmed. Surely the allegorical nature of the supposed ‘case’ in question was of greater importance to the retelling than any historical fact or record, if indeed such an event or experiment (in any historical/social context) ever actually took place. One way or another, this conclusion alone left me with a satisfied feeling of completion. The end, for now.