Soquili TG - A new collaborative font project.

[Gare]

Barbara had an excellent idea for creating and dedicating a typeface to Bill Taylor’s memory.

She’s thinking outside of the box.

Instead of patterns or Cherokee glyphs…Bill’s nym on tg is “Soquili”…”horse”.

One of the most famous series of horse pictures is Edward Muybridge’s motion study of a jockey riding a horse. The images are Public Domain (this study is over 100 years old, 1878), and what I did with this animated GIF is just take the guy off the horse. I think the imagery itself has a sort of majesty and magic, a fitting dedication, I feel.



So what about we re-render this motion study as vector art, and make each frame into a font character? Make the mane flowing, remove the saddle, make the artwork free and untethered.
And then we show people how to type each character on a frame in Xara to recreate the motion study?

I feel strongly that overall, it would be an inspired effort that matches Bill’s tireless spirit.

My Best,

Gary

[angelize]

I love this idea!

[wizard509]

Very cool idea. I like it. This would be like no other font that I know of.

[Gare]

Our Administrator has a unique vision here. ;)

"Soquili.otf" might be not simply a stencil font of different horse postures as it goes through a gallop, but each gylph would be a frame in a potential animation.

So it's more than a typeface, just as Bill was more than a tg Moderator to all of us.

I can help make this happen, but I'd like my role to be the guy who evaluates the project from an animation point of view: how well the gylphs work together both as artistic glyphs you can use to make patterns and borders and also how easily the glyphs can be used by the average Xara artist to make a swf or AVI file.

I PM'ed Frances that I have the highest resolution files from Edward Muybridge’s early photography. If we all agree, I can begin by cleaning up the frames for manual tracing.

I have some, but not an extraordinary amount of time between Christmas and New Year's Eve'.

Votes, all?

My Best,

Gary

[wizard509]

Sounds great! This sounds like the best course of action to me.

[angelize]

I think this will be a very good way to honour Bill's memory. Gary and I have discussed doing the horse in silhouette, to simplify the glyphs. It will be very important for us to maintain consistency with the glyphs or the animation won't work, and each glyph should be artistically pleasing for use as borders clipart etc. And as it now stands Gary is the only one who will be doing the coding work so when he is ready he will set specifications for size etc and will give us an example of what he will need.

If there is anyone who has experience with font creation programs (Gary uses Font Lab) I'm sure Gary would love to hear from you!

In Gary's words;

think,
Spirit.
Art.
Beauty.
Eternity.

[Gare]

A Day's End Report

I believe I wasted a little time because (again, again) I wasn't thinking outside of the box.

Attached are two frames that I retouched to remove the rider from the horse. These are about the best still images anyone offers on the web, from the motion studies of Edward Muybridge. It didn't take me long to trace one, but you know what?



We can do better, and really should, for Bill's sake.

So what I have here is a Poser horse (the DAZ Millennium horse, actually) in two different still poses. This is a LOT easier to trace, and because I can light the thing with edge lighting (as I taught in November in the video tutorial) we could Threshold the poses and make a more visually intricate typeface.




I'm exactly $14 from getting motion tracks for the model so it will leap, gallop, and do about 7 other pacing motions. This would fill the character slots for the font, you know? What I'd like to do is ask our 3D Moderators if they can think of a better approach. I did give this some thought, but perhaps gidget or Mike might see a better still way to arrive at our goal. If not, I'm going to get the motion tracks, apply them, and then present the group with an animation—that if you approve it—I'll break it down into assignment-sized frames and we could in theory get to work by the New Year.

the animation tracks shown on youTube
I can pose the frames better than the YouTube example.

My Best,

Gary