Creativity Timeline

2023

Learned pixel art

Designed my own character and created sprite animations, using Aseprite, for a pixel 2D action platformer project in Unreal Engine 5.

2019

Learned 2D Art Basics

In early 2019, I decided to try to build up some basic 2D art skills for a limited period of time. I made myself some workflow manuals using my drawings.

2016

Exploring Expressions

2015

Uploading to YouTube

Christmas Holiday “get together” in Battlefield 4. It was a rare opportunity, so I wanted to be able to replay and share the memory with the ones involved, in order to prolong the bond strengthened through play.

I used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the video sequences, and added SFX, BGM and 3D rendered images to make it feel more interesting to watch. It was intended for personal use only. However, since dropboxes weren’t well known yet, I had to look into sharing through YouTube, followed by learning about copyright rules and how to write attributions.

2013

Experimenting with Realism

More practice with lighting and achieving realism.

2011

Learning Lighting

I made new attempts on doing animations, but with very little success. So instead, I looked into Reality plugin for DAZ Studio, which helped me better understand how lighting works, positioning techniques, and how to achieve higher degree of realism.

2010

2009

Discovered 3D Modeling and Animation

After having made plenty of movie clips with The Movies game, I found out about 3D modeling and animation, using Poser and DAZ Studio.

I was looking forward to adding even more realism to future movie clips! However, I knew nothing about 3D modeling or animation…

The first thing I did was to find a way to get my own and family member’s faces onto the default 3D model, “Michael 4”. I managed to figure it out by using Facegen software, after first modifying the meshes in 3DX MAX and later blending the textures in Photoshop. It wasn’t easy, but it worked!

I tried out some mocap animations, but wasn’t able to make them look good beyond individual ones, nor did I figure out how to adjust them. Doing animations also proved to be extremely resource demanding! So naturally, I went on to focus more on rendering individual images instead.

2008

Voice Acting My Own Movies

Game: The Movies

The Crystal Ball (2008)

Summary: Chris Stalball is an ordinary teenage kid with endless thoughts and millions of unanswered questions, mostly about his future. One day, while cleaning up old junk, he finds the old crystal ball he got from Santa Claus when he was a little boy. To his surprise, he now accidently figures out how to activate it, and so, the questions keep coming… and one question answered only leads to yet another! And whatever he asks, somehow the answers tend to always center around girls…

Project description: The game engine itself handled animations, camera angles, lighting and most of the SFX, and provided the meshes and textures.

I provided the custom face sculpts of the lead and supporting actors, as well as did the voice acting for all the characters, using Morph Vox and a simple microphone. The voice acting done for this movie evolved from evaluating my own voice acting performance in previous movies, mainly trying to remove unwanted accent and sound more expressive and natural, by exaggerating mimical expressions and adjusting the way I speak into the microphone.

I arranged and edited the scenes and came up with dialogue lines as I was looking at what was going on in the scene and the story as a whole. I had to be able to improvise, since I had to adapt to the animations available.

When telling a story, I like to twist things up a bit and have characters do and say what the audience didn’t expect (break social norms and instead be true to nature), but at the same time maintain consistency of the character. The twists are what reveals the character’s true nature and make them unique and set them apart from others. When building characters, I always try to use real people as references, and then try to promote their true nature onto the character, so each character has their own flavor and won’t feel like the same.

Day of Destruction (2008)

Summary: Sometime in near future, Earth is caught by surprise and invaded by a superior hostile alien force. After the initial devastating and humiliating defeat, human forces regroup and launches a joint massive caunter-attack against an alien occupied city. With the aid of skillful pilots in the sky, human ground forces manage to turn the tide of a losing battle, and re-capture the city.
In “Part 3”, the aliens are launching a full scale aerial retaliation against the re-captured city. It is up to the human pilots to fend them off and keep the inhabitants and ground forces out of harm’s way.

Project description: For this project I decided to try doing voiceover, using Morph Vox. I provided all the voiceover lines (except the one at 5:29 in Part 3). Unfortunately, the more I pitched the voice, in order to not sound like myself, the lower the sound quality got.
For earlier movies I had tried using text-to-speech and pitching voices in Audacity. Using Morph Vox for voice acting other characters, this was a huge step forward from before. And before that, there was only mumbling and using subtitles.

Recap Slideshow