Software to Diagram Team Routines

[Russ Wilson]

I'm curious if anyone else uses software to diagram their team routines?  When we fly with JB there is no need to do this since he does a great job leading - making routines up on-the-fly so to speak.  His style is very organic and flows naturally - I'm not quite there yet.  When we fly alone, my family finds it better to have a known pattern we are trying to accomplish.  This is probably because I'm not very good calling maneuvers, but it is also helpful to have a visual diagram to supplement verbal descriptions.  I'm familiar with Reed Designs work:

https://reeddesign.co.uk/kites/stack/#QuadTeam

Unfortunately, those animations are not easy to extend and I'm not a big fan of Flash.  Wondering if anyone else has attempted to do something similar - especially on a team level?  I've been playing with a package called SynFig Studio and have gotten some basic routines outlined.  It might be nice if we had a community of people approaching the problem in a similar way and sharing their efforts.  

[frob]

Are you thinking about short elements with 5-10 steps, or are you talking about choreography for a complete song?  The Reed Design tools step along a small number of animation frames, but it seems like you mean full routines.

While I think you meant Flash videos instead of Adobe Flash (now called Adobe Animate), for me personally laying out things like that with Adobe's tools is easy since I've used it in my day job (game developer), and the editing tools allow straightforward manipulations of timelines with audio.  Now I'm curious, too: What do people who don't have access to that type of tool use?

Are there any kite choreography tools out there to the masses?   Is it something people need?

[Russ Wilson]

I've been looking at both - short maneuvers (elements) as building blocks that can be combined into more complex routines (choreography).  My eventual goal is to build out full routines with music - I think that will be easier for us to learn and master.  It really helps for us to see all three of our kites in motion at the same time.

While I am not a fan per say of Flash videos, I am open to switching to Adobe Animate if we can get a community building reusable maneuvers.  If I continue to go it alone I will probably stick with SynFig Studio.

I really like your last question - is it something people need?  When there were no responses I started thinking I may be an anomaly in this area, and most teams use more on-the-fly techniques like JB does.  I'm really interested to see if others are using any tools like this.

[Wayne Dowler]

Watty did a whole routine once, several years ago. It was to Queen's "We are the Champions" tune. Don't remember the software he used, but I questioned him and he threw a quick 2-3 maneuver sample together reasonably quick. But that program would now be a dinosaur in the computer world. 

Try this, hope it still works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YanEQ60dr3c&feature=youtu.be

 

[Russ Wilson]

Wow, that is exactly what I am trying to accomplish.  As with many other things, Watty has far exceeded what I was able to do.  I'd be really interested to know what software he used to put that together and how much effort it was.  

[Wayne Dowler]

Have a message in to him on another format, we'll see if he answers me. I remember he had the kite shapes saved with colors. He had to establish a horizon to separate sky and ground. And I remember him talking about importing the music to lay over the animation . But I don't recall the program used, that he knows.

[Wayne Dowler]

Just received word - " I used After Effects to make my animations".

It is an Adobe product and should still be available.

[Russ Wilson]

Thanks Wayne - I'd definitely prefer to use Adobe After Effects over Adobe Animate (the old Flash Pro).  The only downside is After Effects is $20/month - a bit pricey if you don't have other uses for it.  

[frob]

Yeah, After Effects could do it too, although that wouldn't be my personal preference.  

I'm internally debating about creating a simple tool on my own. It would be a big investment of time, costing far more in my own personal hours to me than a person getting a short-term Adobe CC subscription. I wouldn't want to commit to anything, but if there was enough demand it may be something worth providing to the community.

[Russ Wilson]

Not a bad idea - I'd be willing to toss in a few hours to an open source project.

For me, the big thing is whether "the community" would find it useful?  I'm glad to know there are a few of us this appeals to, but I kind of suspect the vast majority of users may not find it as useful as we would.  It'll be interesting to see who else posts on this thread.

[Wayne Dowler]

The idea of creating a "library" consisting of the different moves might be possible. Some fliers just can't "get" a routine down through animation only, they have to fly it to understand it. But it can be a tool for cataloging most, if not all our standard moves. 

[Mike Klaiber]

I like all of the comments but Wayne’s meets my flying the most. When I am able to fly in a team I do not know the names of patterns and this would be helpful. Although if it’s a while between opportunities I doubt I would recall. I can see great value for teams however.


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[Wayne Dowler]

Right now, almost everything we do is in someone's head or written down on shreds of paper. Yes the knowledge grows with more folks being "callers" and having to remember the moves. But having a place setup to go to for info or to refresh the memory - works for me.

[Russ Wilson]

I would really like to see a library we can pull maneuvers from.  We've flown with JB several times now and it is always helpful, but I gotta admit I easily forget the names he uses.  Unfortunately, I've even forgotten some of the routines.  Having a library we can refer to (and possibly use for orchestrating routines) would be a big benefit.

[Hasek]

I know the attachments aren't quite serving the purpose you all are speaking about, but they may help in memorizing terminology.

JST-4-FN-team-standaard-English-1.000.pdf

Revolution-Mega-Fly-Figures-v1d.pdf

[Russ Wilson]

Thanks Hasek, I refer to those two sources often.  They are both very helpful.

[dragonfish]

Sorry I did not chime in on this earlier. Yes, I would be interested in software to animate routines and/or maneuvers. I also do not have a good solution for it yet, although I haven't been actively choreographing lately, so I am not current on what tools are available. 

@frob, are you thinking about writing open source software for animating routines, maybe in javascript or something that can easily be run on browsers? I'd be willing to give feedback and toss some ideas around (although, I don't really have any good ideas for implementation right now). 

I just went to the SynFig Studios website and viewed their promo video. Looks interesting, but I haven't tried it yet. @Russ Wilson, is there a convenient way to share reusable building block maneuvers made with SynFig Studios? Would it be possible to then time scale the building blocks to speed up or slow down if one were to use them to create a routine set to music?

If you're interested in my past experiences with choreographing routines, read on. None of these things I tried are ideal. 

A few years ago, when I started flying pairs and team, I was looking for a way to document routines. I needed a way to communicate what was in my head to my teammates, and to "write it down" so I wouldn't forget myself. When flying individually, it is easy to improvise if something is forgotten. When flying with others, especially with music, it's hard to improvise and quickly communicate it before the kites need something to do (unless you're as skilled as JB). I knew that some teams drew their routines on paper, but I didn't want to be manually editing, tweaking, or rewriting the routine over and over again, which I knew would be inevitable as we polished the routine(s). I knew this would take forever given that I can get a bit OCD sometimes, and I would be erasing a lot if I tried to do this by hand. I ended up trying to draw using powerpoint instead. I could copy/paste the kites from slide to slide, and draw lines to indicate flight paths with a pen tablet. And hit undo instead of erasing if I was OCD about how a line looked. It kind of worked, but it still took time, and it was not animated. The one routine I started this way, I never finished editing/drawing it, because it still took a lot of time and effort to do, and I kind of gave up. Plus, it had no indication of when the moves happened in relation to the music. 

Another routine I have documented is written mostly in words. This one was a quad line 4 person team routine, and the majority of the moves were common ones that have names. So, I was able to write a time cue to indicate where in the music something would happen, and then the name of the move. There were a few moves that I made up for that particular routine, so I either had to give it a name or just tried to describe it. Those things we had to remember, but otherwise, this routine is fairly well documented. But, it is also one that is easy to communicate with existing terminology. The more custom moves there are, the harder it becomes to communicate, and the more benefit an animated routine would give. 

None of my individual routines are documented, because I don't have a good solution for documentation. These don't really need to be documented, since I am the only one who needs to know them. I just hope that I don't forget them. 

I have seen some animations of routines. I do not know what software was used to create them. To me, an important part of animating a routine is to be able to have moves synced to music. In a drawn diagram, it is hard to describe when in the music a move happens. But, that is very important when choreographing a routine set to music. It is also difficult to describe musical cues in words, just as it's difficult to describe what kites should be doing if it's not a move with an established name. So, in my opinion, a useful tool for animating routines will need to not only be able to control the movement of the kite images, but also to sync them to music. 

[Russ Wilson]

@dragonfish Let me preface my comments with the statement I am far from an expert in Synfig Studios, but from what I've learned so far it is not an easy thing to reuse maneuvers.  Yes, you can insert scripted maneuvers into a sequence of other maneuvers, but there is no easy way to do things like copy a single kite path to a second kite following the same basic pattern but shifted left or right.  This means maneuvers I script for a team of 3 would require heavy manipulation to scale up to a team of 4 or 6.  

While I have not done this yet, I believe the pace of a routine can be sped up/slowed down to match music.  I'll try to make time to explore this more in depth since I'd like to know that too.

[Russ Wilson]

BTW: I really appreciate people sharing their thoughts on this topic - there might be more community interest than I originally thought.

[frob]

21 hours ago, dragonfish said:

 I am not current on what tools are available. 

@frob, are you thinking about writing open source software for animating routines, maybe in javascript or something that can easily be run on browsers?

That's what I'm thinking about.  Again, I do that sort of thing as my day job, but only with simple, rudimentary tools.

If there are already tools out there they are likely far more comprehensive and polished. I would personally use something like Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash) since it is easy to manipulate timelines, adjust animation curves, and sync with audio.

But if the community could use a simple tool, the kind of thing that could be put together in 20-30 hours of spare time, it may be worthwhile.  That tool could never compete with something made professionally, where even the most basic professional tools have thousands of hours and the major Adobe tools have a half million hours, a million hours, or even more hours invested.  In that case I would rather push to use those tools rather than cobbling a poor tools together.

[dragonfish]

@Russ Wilson, no problem. I was (and still am) kind of thinking out loud, but thought you guys might be interested in my thoughts. Was just trying to get a sense for what Synfig studios could do, since I haven't gotten a chance to play with it myself. As for maneuvers for a team of 3 vs say a team of 4, I think those would generally need to be separate items in a library (if we were to work on creating one) because kites would need to be in different positions and moving at different angles. Take a ball and burst for example. A team of 3 would have one facing straight up, and the others facing 120 degrees downward (clockwise and counterclockwise). A team of 4 would have two kites facing 45 degrees up and two facing 45 degrees down. If it were possible to create a shareable, reuseable library of maneuvers, I don't think it would be too painful to create an item for each number of teammates (e.g. 3 vs 4) for each maneuver (e.g. burst, flythrough), if those maneuvers can then be strung together and timescaled to fit into a routine. Although...it just occurred to me the starting location of the kites for the second maneuver will need to match the ending location of the kites for the first maneuver, which can easily not be the case. It's easy to make things bigger or smaller, or fly something higher or lower when working with real kites, but sounds like it might not be with Synfig. Hmmmmm....I like this idea of creating a library of reuseable components, but execution might turn out much easier said than done. 

Seems like I need to find some time to play with Synfig Studios to see if it might be sufficient for what we are trying to do. 

P.S. The routines I've written so far are each for a specific number of kites. So, the routine written for 4 kites would never be flown with 3 or 5. In that particular routine, for example, there are things that happen in sequence, one kite per beat. The music is based on 4 beat measures. Therefore, that choreography would not work with 3 or 5 kites (plus blenders don't work with 3 or 5 kites either). So, from my point of view, it would not be necessary to be able to easily change number of kites from 3 to 4 or whatever once a routine is written. Here's the routine if you're curious: 

 

[Russ Wilson]

Good point on the ball burst - changing the number of participants will definitely change the overall structure of the kites.  I was thinking something a bit simpler - for instance having 3 people flying synchronized diamond patterns.  Adding a 4th to that pattern should be as simple as copy paste; unfortunately, from what I've seen it is much more involved than that.

[frob]

16 hours ago, dragonfish said:

I was (and still am) kind of thinking out loud, but thought you guys might be interested in my thoughts. Was just trying to get a sense for what Synfig studios could do, since I haven't gotten a chance to play with it myself.

That looks like a fairly good animation package.  It doesn't have anything specific to kites, but the animation controls and audio sync seem good enough to build this type of animation.  

It may have a learning curve, but it seems straightforward to me about building a choreographed routine using the tool.  Looks about on par with what I'd do in Adobe's tools, anyway.

And it is hard to beat the price.

4 hours ago, Russ Wilson said:

I was thinking something a bit simpler - for instance having 3 people flying synchronized diamond patterns.  Adding a 4th to that pattern should be as simple as copy paste; unfortunately, from what I've seen it is much more involved than that.

Animation keyframes generally don't work that way.  You can select portions of a timeline and apply a few operations to the keyframes as a set, but often that requires many modifications to fix up the animations when done.

As for making changes to a continuous sequence of an animation, typically for movement you need to select the entire sequence from the active keyframe all the way through the end, then move everything remaining in the sequence.  Unless you've got tools that allow re-parenting animation sequences, chained animations can be time consuming to build well.

 

[Russ Wilson]

Really enjoying the dialog and ideas.  If you are interested in SynFig Studio, you might want to take a look at the attached file.  It has a few maneuvers I threw together on a rainy day over the holidays.  It is still a bit rough, but it was enough to convince me this approach has merit.

Kites .zip

[Wayne Dowler]

Sorry - my old machine failed to open file!