By Tanya Roberts

The serene setting of Point Grey, surrounded by water and far-reaching views of snow-capped mountains, is a place of natural beauty and rich history. Facing the Georgia Straight, behind what is now the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, previous generations have long stood guard.

The Musqueam band of the Point Grey area used this site as a lookout for the approaching Northern Squamish and Haida Tribes of Vancouver Island. When the enemy drew near, runners hurried back through the wooded trails to alert their fellow tribe members. The Musqueam defense would meet the aggressors head-on in war canoes. This site was also used as a place for national defense during both the first and second World Wars.

During WWI, several 60-pound field guns were positioned over-looking the sea and in WWII, three 6-inch MK7 guns were stationed. Two of these positions still remain at the site, with one serving as a memorial. The third gun was destroyed in 1973 along with the cantonment area, while two searchlight towers still remain at the beach-site. The coveted location of Point Grey is now home to the University of British Columbia.

In 1910, the University Commission recommended Point Grey for the location of the University. The Commission recognized Point Grey as an ideal educational setting due to its natural beauty and separation from the booming urban city centre of Vancouver. The commission felt that students could still benefit from access to the city centre without being affected by the city’s “wicked influence.” The University Commission’s decision was made after long deliberation.

The construction of a Provincial University could offer much economic security, and many of British Columbia’s Euro-Canadian communities were eager to welcome the University to their town. Communities including Nelson, Kamloops, Vernon, Victoria, and Alberni worked diligently to prove that their landscape was best suited for the University. Much to their disappointment, the Commission overlooked their communities in favour of the Point Grey area of Vancouver.

Today, the University of British Columbia educates a student population of 50,000 on major campuses in two cities, Vancouver and Kelowna, and holds an international reputation for excellence in advanced research and learning. In the 2008 Academic Ranking of World Universities, UBC placed 2nd in Canada and 35th in the world. The University of British Columbia is also home to the Digital Media Academy.

Founded at Stanford University in 2002, the Digital Media Academy is accredited by Stanford Continuing Studies. The curriculum consists of over 40 different 5-day courses for children, pre-teens, teens, and adults throughout the summer. On par with University of British Columbia standards, Digital Media Academy instructors are highly respected, award-winning artists, filmmakers, master teachers, and other creative professionals.

From game Design and 3D Modeling, to Video Production and Digital Storytelling, the Digital Media Academy is doing it’s part to pass the torch to future generations. The Digital Media Academy is now accepting registrations for youth-centric 1-2 week summer programs at UBC. To view the course timetable and register, visit http://bit.ly/aeybjD.

UBC also boasts some of the city’s best attractions and recreation facilities, including the Museum of Anthropology, the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, the UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research, and forested trails in the adjacent 763-hectare Pacific Spirit Regional Park. With its surrounding beauty and first-rate academic ranking, UBC is both an ideal educational setting and fundamental facet of Vancouver’s rich heritage.

By Travis Schlafmann

I’ve heard that people were getting great results with Sony’s Z5U’s Smooth Slow record feature so I had to check it out. When shooting action sports and any fast motion that might be intended for playback in slow motion, it is much better to shoot more frames per second than to simply adjust the speed of the clip in postproduction. Slowing down a clip that was shot at 30 fps to %50 can look ok but usually results in an unsmooth slow motion that can be a little jarring or jagged. Shooting upwards of 100 frames per second will give you incredibly smooth slow motion with great detail in all the motion. For that reason this feature is very intriguing.
The camera allows you to activate this feature within the menu. You can shoot 240 fields a second (aproximately 120 frames per second) in 3, 6, or 12-second bursts. When activated, the camera has an internal drive that buffers the image and allows for recording once you’ve triggered the recording with the record button. The 3-second recording offers the highest quality. The 6-second recording option is slightly lower resolution and a bit lower resolution if you activate 12 seconds. The 3-second feature provides crystal clear results with stunning slow motion but I was skeptical as to whether that would be enough time to film snowboarding and skateboarding tricks.

So I decided to take the camera out in Bear Valley’s Terrain Park for an afternoon to experiment with this feature.

After filming several clips I found that 3 seconds is plenty of time to film almost every feature in the park even the biggest jumps. There were times when someone was doing a trick that involved a stall on a jib or something on the approach to a jump that I wanted to record, so I experimented with 6 and 12 seconds as well. I found that the 6-second feature allowed for great results that were very hard to notice the difference in resolution. However the 12-second feature was a much lower quality and never really found a time when I needed that much time to record a trick.

Another great thing about this feature is that it allows you to set the trigger point to beginning, middle, and end. Since the camera is constantly buffering the images you can set the trigger point to end and then follow the action with your camera, after the talent lands the trick you can hit the record button and it will grab the 3 seconds (or whatever mode 3,6,12 you selected) before that point. The camera then takes a moment to record those images to tape and gives you a display of your shot on the viewfinder while it does this. I thought this was great because especially when filming in the snow it’s difficult to see through the viewfinder and allows for you to check and see if the shot you got was the one you were hoping for

There are some things to consider when using this feature. It is important to note that you have to first switch the camera to interlaced recording before you can activate smooth slow record. Most extreme sports look better with faster shutter speeds and interlaced so I didn’t find this to be a problem. The only real disadvantage I found was that in this mode you cannot record sound. While it is nice to include ambient noises in extreme sports pieces, in my experiences editing I have found that more often than not I end up editing out the ambient sound. So this didn’t bother me too much but keep that in mind while using this feature.

When I got home and captured the footage I couldn’t have been more impressed. I’ve shot everything from surfing, skating, snowboarding, to mixed martial arts and I was amazed at how many great shots I got in just one day. The slow motion was so smooth and looked incredible on my playback monitor. I compared the results with other footage that was shot in 30 fps and then slowed in postproduction and the results from the Z5U were much cleaner.

Many features within cameras come and go and aren’t recognized within the professional community of videographers and cinematographers. The Z5U’s smooth slow record feature is one that is here to stay. I posted a video as a review of this feature. Every shot in the video is shot in Sony’s smooth slow record except for the opening montage, where I also used the interval record feature. I also experimented with taking the footage shot in this mode and then speeding it up to normal speed as well as slowing it down even more. I found that the results looked natural and clean. Typically I wouldn’t include so many slow motion shots in one 3 min piece but I did for the sake of this demo. I hope you enjoy and if you have any questions about camera operation with Sony’s Z5U don’t hesitate to email me. 

My email address is:  Travis (at) Digital Media Academy (dot) org 
(Just format like you normally would an email!) 
Best Regards,
Travis Schlafmann

Learn Maya Animation – Bouncing Ball – Part 2

By Geoff Beatty

In last week’s exciting episode…

Part 1 of this tutorial taught you how to set some basic keyframes on a sphere as a first step in making a bouncing ball. However, we could only go so far in using the timeline for our animation. Instead of a bouncing ball, we got something that looked more like a floating, wavy ball (screenshot). This is obviously not acceptable. If we can put a man on the moon, then we should be able to make a ball look like it’s actually bouncing. To do this, we’ll need to dive into the graph editor.

Graph Editor and Setup

The Graph Editor is one of the most important interfaces for creating animation in Maya. The viewport and the timeline are great tools for quickly interacting with an object or character, but they’re not very good at letting you refine the motion. The Graph Editor, however, allows you to have a very high level of control over your keyframes as well as the interpolation between them. Although it may look confusing, it’s actually a pretty common interface among software packages, and most 3D and 2D animation tools have something very similar. I’m going to assume that you are already familiar with the basics of the graph editor, but if you aren’t, it might be a good time to read through some of the Autodesk documentation to familiarize yourself. I like to work with a viewport on top and the graph editor on the bottom, but you can work with any layout where you can view the object and the graph at the same time.

Working in the Graph Editor

1. Select the ball in the viewport.  You should then see the curves load into the graph editor and a list of the animated attributes on the left (screenshot).
2. Go to your main menu and choose “Edit>Delete by Type>Static Channels (screenshot)”  This eliminates keyframes on any of the attributes that have only one keyframe (in other words, they don’t have any animation on them).  This will help weed out unimportant data from the Graph Editor, essentially uncluttering it for us.
3. Select the Translate X attribute from the list on the left, and then marquee-select all the keys except for the first and the last (screenshot).  Delete these keys (screenshot).
4. Now select the Translate Y attribute and hit the “f” key in the graph to fit the curve to the window.  Select the three keyframes at the top of the curve and, in the Graph Editor menu, choose “Tangents>Flat (screenshot).
5. While we’re at it, let’s use our Move tool (and don’t forget that you need to use your middle mouse button with it – a common thing to forget) to give each of those upper keyframes a descending value, to mimic the way a ball loses altitude with each bounce (screenshot).
6. Now, let’s select those bottom keyframes, the ones representing the point of contact with the ground.  Go to the Graph Editor menu and choose “Keys>Break Tangents (screenshot).”  This will allow us to change the in and out tangents of these keyframes separately.  You can tell that they’re “broken” because one tangent is brown and the other one is blue.
7. Using your Move tool (and middle mouse button) to orient the tangents more vertically (screenshot).

Why Did We Do What We Did?

In Step 3, deleting the middle keys gives us a simple linear interpolation between the first and last keyframe.  This simple line (as opposed the uneven line before) signifies a constant velocity for the ball as it travels from left to right.  If we were to look at some reference, we would see that, until a ball stops bouncing and begins to roll, it retains a fairly constant velocity in whatever direction it was thrown.

In Step 4, we “flattened” the tangents.  Just as straight lines define a constant velocity, flattening out the tangents of a curve give us an “ease in” and an “ease out” for a given motion.  This mimics the way that a ball gets slower as it approaches the top of its arc, and then accelerates as it approaches the ground.

In Steps 6 and 7, we adjusted the tangents of the contact frames so that they would look more like an actual bounce than the “floating” that was happening in the previous iteration.  It’s like the physics of a pool ball – the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection.

Next Steps

In the next installment of the tutorial, we’ll take a look at some of the refinements you can make to the animation to give it real character.  This might be a good time to take some more video or look at more reference footage.  You might even start seeing how this applies.

Maya Animation Continued Reading:

Start at the beginning:  Part 1: Learn Maya Animation 

Read here next:  Part 3:  Learn Maya Animation

A detailed study:  Learning Maya Animation One Step at a Time

Click here for classes for adults:  Digital Media Academy Course List

Click here summer camps for teens:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Teens

Click here summer camps for kids:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for PreTeen Kids

Click here summer camps for young children:  Digital Media Academy Summer Camps for Kids

That’s right, this summer The Digital Media Academy is holding digital audio & music production courses for teens! The class covers all you need to know about digital music production. Learn to record, use loops, sample, mix, master and output to make professional music right on you desktop computer or laptop! You’ll get a sense of how to work with a variety of techniques to produce outstanding digital audio under the supervision of an industry pro who will help you bring your audio ideas to life. In addition, you’ll get your hands on the latest digital audio production equipment and musical instruments. Each student will be provided their own top of the line computer equipped Logic Pro 9 and will be guided step by step in the creation of their own music and audio productions.

This summer course is tailored for all skill levels and is 5 days of non-stop fun and learning. If you are new to creating music, have some experience, or want to know how to make music that sounds like your favorite artists, this summercamp is for you!

Sign up today for a great summer computer camp experience @ prestigious Universities across the United States.

http://bit.ly/9rZi7Q

Kyle Knox, San Diego County. Photo courtesy Chris Owen. (c) 2010

I once spent some time with a very accomplished professional photographer who was in Ansel Adam’s photography home group back in the day. He told me something very shocking about Ansel’s philosophy of getting the “magic shot.” Just shoot, shoot, shoot.  It will come. I couldn’t believe it.  This is coming from not just one of the worlds most respected photographers, but the one who invented what we know as  THE ZONE SYSTEM. Most universities teach Ansel’s system religiously as a standard of where to start in the world of photography.

With the influx and availability of digital camera’s and media, the problem certainly hasn’t been one of shoot, shoot, shoot, but one of edit, edit, edit.  And honestly, in the digital world, it’s our biggest enemy. Overshooting that is.  At some point, we all approach a threshold where we long again for the art and simplicity of photography.   The balance remains in the approach.  Knowing when to let the shutter loose to sing, and when to move on and find inspiration elsewhere.

This Summer the pre-teens at UCSD will be jumping in the mix to learn about digital photography from a technical, yet highly artistic perspective.  All the basics of camera functionality will be covered, along with incorporating lighting, exposure and aperture to create both fun and professional images.

The photographic experience only starts while looking through the lens.  As the photographers of old used to say, the darkroom is 80% of an image.  Well, in this world, the digital darkroom (photoshop) is about 95% of making great imagery.  We will learn all of the foundational principles in Photoshop  that into creating great images.  Subjects covered will be using layers, adjusting levels for exposure compensation, and yes — removing all the little annoyances such as blemishes and red eye.

There’s plenty to cover, and the kids will have a blast while exploring their creativity and leveraging all the technical tools available to make images into the “magic shot” that all photographers, in every generation dream of.

by Chris Owen (www.chrisowen.com)