A Week Late Culmination of my Final Projects

I'm a bit late on the posting but I've been enjoying my first week of summer break by just not thinking about school work entirely but it has been ahwhile since I last updated this and in all honesty there are only so many splatter films you can watch in theaters until they all start looking the same to you. So here are my finals below.

Lip Syncing with Python #1 -- Digital Sausage Tutorials from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

This was my final for Programming for Animators class, we had to make a tool that we wanted to use and then make a video demonstrating the tool without it being a boring voiced walk through, I sort of did a deconstruction of that. What I did for this was make a simple character set based lip syncing interface to make the process of lip syncing in python closer to what I'd do in Flash where I'd switch out the different mouth shapes as symbols. The script worked surprisingly well for me and I was able to get the lip part of this video done in only about 15 minutes, and it looks better than my previous lip sync which took infinitely longer.

Feel free to download the code here and give me any feedback if something in it goes horribly wrong. I wrote the code primarily as a tool for myself to make the lip syncing easier for my senior project next year.

Men in Black Kinetic Typography from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

Likewise, here is my Final for AfterEffects class. This was due a week before all my other finals because it was a Communications Design course instead of Digital Arts so luckily I didn't have to do this in the midst of my other projects but it was a lot of fun regardless. Here I took a 30 second clip from my favorite scene from Men in Black and animated the dialogue in it. Cool! Said scene below...

Chris Cookson Demo Reel (Spring '10) from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.
This is the demo reel I made for pre-production class to send around for internships, check it out in all it's one minute glory.

For film history class, on top of a traditional written final exam, we had to hand in a poster based on one of the films we watched in class. I chose the slapstick Obi-Wan Kinobe vechicle, The Horse's Mouth as the source for the poster. Why not?


...and lastly here is the final render for Character Design class, you've likely seen the concept drawings of her earlier on this blog but here it is completed and with a quasi-dark backstory to it as well.