AO!! (Ambient Occlusion)

I just cant get over how nice and professional an ambient occlusion looks on renderd objects, all being well, my fully renderd animation, will have a AO pass, so giving it that realistic shadows, oh and Kiril will be happy ;), i know hes in love with them too. As if we had more time for the last project, Bag Story would have had an AO pass too.
Also, i cant belive that i havnt moved away from maya yet?! but the thing is, i feel like im still breaking the ice, give it 20 years and i might know almost every part of maya's labrynth. ( i want to learn other 3d aps, but i just havnt had the chance, and when i do, the simple thing of navigation scares me, coz it different maya!! )

Finished animation to a point

Yes i have decided to go ahead and start the rendering now as i need time to work out any unforseen problems, as my pc renders away, i edited the playblast footage, which will be replaced with the renderd footage.
heres the final edit.

impressed

from looking at the close up cam renderd footage of my animation, i was very pleased and surprized how 'alive' the character apears, so anyway, it just needs those tweaks, a new hat, etc, and work those technical problem out, with syncing.

animation 1st pass

Ok well in the 3d animation buisness, as there are like a million hand,arm and body controls, best way to animate is to do it in stages. i have decided to animate the arms and hands 1st for gesture, then onto the body and head and then the legs, and last the lip sync.
So, so far i have done the arms and hands, and that the longest bit as there was a lot of hand gestures involved, and i had to get the timing right in order to look 'real' and to go with the audio i am working with.
Next i am going to work the body and head as that reinforces the gestures of what the hands are dooing, hopefully this shudnt be too time consuming, and as i go il probs work on legs at the same time.
Last is the lip sync and eyes etc, this shudnt take too long, as i will have a phonemes chart of mouth positions etc, itl just be a matter of following it perfectly.

Overall i have been working with the first piece of audio that is from the reservoir dogs film, if i cant time, i might try and also work with the other audio which is from some frankenstein film, or some different audio altogether, as that is what my character is suposed to be deigned for.

something that has been pi**ing me off recently

i have been spending too much time trying to make my mesh go with my rig, and these are just simple paintweights problems, but you can see how frustrated i have been getting. I mean look at the thumb, looks like he has had a horrific accident with one of those old fashioned mangels. (press clean and squeeze all water out of materials device). And then theres the ribs, it is just irataing that i have to spend more time on this than bloody animating! I wish i had got sumone to make a rig for me instead. maybe thats a thing i need to do for next time! Like i said before rigging is a real bitch sometimes!

texture at fookin last

i decided to use the artisan paint tool in maya to create an organic looking skin, im still working on it, but i feel pretty pleased with it.

more progress, im quite happy with the way the character is developing, looking more professional now and less quick mock up.

moddeling

yep, worked on my character more and have done a version where he has a more human looking body, al tho in my presentation i said i didnt want this much, i might be changing my mind, as a generic man character, to portray 2 different characters and posibly more, but all tho i ike the way he looks, i still feel, as he is a machine like character he should have a more 'bare skeletal' like look, when he is not playing any characters.

evidence of me working hard

todays productivity

yeh, ive been working on my character, i have come up with this so far, im still going to have a go with making a character in nurbs, but i just havnt had chance to properly understand them. My character has to be some kind of human oid which acts towards audio that comes out of his mouth, (the audio beeing from some carefully chosen film clips) i have yet to decide what i plan to do with the audio, whether make separate clips or make him sound insane, by splicing them together, i think the second option would work better, i just need to get some good audio tho. I have collected some already, but need to go through it thoroughly.

IK handles

yeh, heres a screen shot of my research of ik handles, as i had problems with such complex geometry, and i have solved my problem, well almost.

camp robot

I have accidentally posed my mock character into a very camp pose, so i gave him some props to work with.

Welcome back

well now ive been back just under 2 weeks now, and it sucks as we are not in every day, as i tend to easily get distracted at home.
Anyway, i now know what i am doing for the first project, as before i was in two minds before on what to do, i had two main ideas, and now i have decided between the two. Ok since i want to be a 3d animator, i have to work hard at doing some kind of animation. So for the first project i am going to work on some character animation. One of my main initial ideas was to use some existing audio from some well known films, and use it with a character, and this character originally is a robot of some kind, which acts to some audio that comes out of a speaker of his, in his mouth. I have yet to change my actual character to be more of an organic form, but at least i know what im going to do. I have yet to see the animated film wall-e, as i have been told there is a similar thing in this film, im gunna try and go see it as soon as poss.

Here is a still render of a character that i have been working on already, in relation to this first project, this is just a mock up, and isnt a final design, even though it is close. ;)

Mini project

Over the past few days i have been working to make a 3d monster/ dragon, as part of a possible t-shirt design for a certain band, as a previous bulletin on myspace was posted, so i decided to make a mini project and began almost straight away, as i knew of the style and what exactly i wanted to do, it also pushes my modeling and texturing skills, and its also a practice as well. It is clearly not finished yet, but i am getting the model slowly better. After i have refined it, it has to be textured.

Exhibitions

well as i have been at Download, from last weds to monday, i went in yesturday very early and left late, around 7.00pm. Me and liam pulled all the macs off the desks and cleaned them and the desks, and from now on, food is banned in that room! as it is spotless!
The other major thing is the stuff ive been working on secondlife. I have been building a few virtual themepark attractions. The best one is the 3d maze i have been working on. I had the idea of a pyramid and to have a few floors. The one that i have built has two floors and you simply have to make your way from A to B, or bottom to top. Its in a style of an ancient Aztec building but has been modernised with neon lights etc. Im pretty pleased with it. Also as a maze i have got lost a few times in it, and i made it! lol. So it seems to work as a maze anyway. I decoided to fill it with objects as like landmarks, so it isnt too difficult and annoying, as what it can be. Im still working on it, i feel i need to add more mysterious things inside, but pretty much there.

an animation of mine i did earlier this year

now with a soundtrack, you must watch it, its only like 30 seconds, and a few people who were watching it ealier almost died of laughter!lol

the End!!!

hahahahaha (laughs hysterically)
i am pretty happy that i have handed in my digital sketchbook, now i can focus on my other important stuff. :p

My blog for final Major Project

well this is my last post for the final major project, i dont no im going to last without blogging again after everything that i have worked on. Anyway, so yes, this is containing all my documentations of all the stuff that i have done for this project. The earliest post will be at the bottom, the newest at the top.

Evaluation

well heres my evaluation, all i need to do now, is organise all my assets etc.


Evaluation- Steve

From the very beginning of this Final Major Project, at around the time of the briefing, I had a vision. I imagined an animated short to be made by some or all of the people who do a lot of animation and 3d. I thought perhaps if we brought all our talents together, as we have individual skills in 3d and animation, it would be great to combine these skills. I went to the back of the studio and discussed this with Kirill Nagornych and Chris Meredith. Just the thought of me, Chris and Kirill making a single short film has great potential. At least this is the thing that I had decided to do for the last project, again I can combine my skills and on the way learn some new skills, which is always very useful as depending on the scenario that surrounds the plot. Certain short films might require certain special effects whilst others are just relying on the animation of a character. However as we were a potential group of 3, Chris decided to work independently on something that he was wanting to learn, which was more in the special effects area etc. Chris was explaining, that for this it was probably not quite enough time for the scale of the idea, it was decided however it would be good for the 3rd year. As I was still seeing my self as a film maker/ animator I still wanted to produce some kind of short animated film, with a good story as well. So myself and Kirill, was still up for the idea of making an animated short, all we had to do was to design a story for it etc. So over the Easter break Kirill and myself exchanged emails, we read each others bloggs and from there we developed a few ideas. I posted some short animated films that I had found on the very acclaimed ‘dailymotion.com’ and from these both me and Kirill noticed how different films had different ways of conveying a mood, and it would be good if ours could do just that. The other thing that I noticed, is duration, some short films would last for 10 minutes, and some for 2 minutes. Our story that we decided on, originally was sparked of interest from Kirill. He sent me emails of his bizarre awareness of plastic bags that have been stranded in trees and bushes and the thing that to him, is strange and the fact that he has not seen this in any other country. It seems that people just don’t seem to be bothered by the litter and plastic in the trees etc. After he had told me this observation, I also thought it was a bit weird, because recently I have been wondering a similar thing. So all in all, a film about a plastic bag was to be made.
From experience of the last brief that I had worked on, I had decided, now we have the theme, it was best to think of a good story and plot almost straight away and ahead of the time. We didn’t need to waste time re-writing a story/ plot, which we could be animating or editing, which takes a lot of valuable time. As we returned from the Easter break, Kirill and myself went into the other room to discuss possible scenarios for the idea of plastic bags in trees etc. We both brain stormed ideas and began to fine tune some of the most favourite outcomes, as before we decided it would be good if we could make the film very comical and less serious, we had decided to have series of gags in a sequence.
As the process went on, we both planned our time using Google calendar, and documented our progress on blogger, day by day, so then we could be in front of the schedule as much as we could to be on top of things in order to sort out potential future problems.
Starting off in maya, we both had separate tasks, Kirill worked on the character models and rigging, whilst I worked on the street and objects and everything in the scene, including lighting, texture maps and bump maps as well. After this we both worked on the animation of the characters, initially I worked on the first character (has a recycle sign on his chest), I had to make a walk cycle for him and later I had to animate certain expressions, like taking a packet of chewing gum out of a bag, animating a run, jump and cower and other expressions. Also I modelled and animated the dog character, this involved walking, running then jumping, then running and falling over. The dog was a lot harder to do. A dog walk cycle is much different to a dog run cycle, unlike in humans, a run cycle is a heavily exaggerated walk cycle, so I had to get my research by filming footage of a running and a walking dog.
As the time was coming to synching all the animations together, I had to do a series of still render tests, which would establish the overall rendered look of the animated film. I had a lot of problems, rendering was taking a rather long time to complete, and on a preview setting and small image size. In the end the problem was solved through logging into the computer locally and because it did not have any problems connecting to the uni’s server, it did processes much more quicker and so the render took a tenth of the time. We had a couple of issues, which we sorted when it came to synching our animations together and all on the same scene file, which then reduces complications, when it comes to batch rendering. After our first batch rendering that we did, it was first in an SD, 720x480 wide screen format. This was for the final crit, and after the crit we got some feed back which involved improvements to our animations and small problems like re-editing of bump maps and some more careful sound design. As we had a week after the final crit to get everything polished, we decided to re-render in high definition 1280x720, which made it look a lot more sharp and an overall professional standard. As before Kirill worked on sound design and I worked on the compositing of all the elements, which took a lot longer than usual, because of the detail needed for the bag.
There is always the question, ‘if you had more time..’, well all projects need more and more time, but I feel that if we worked any more on it, it would have been a lot more messy, even though it would be nice if we could have ambient occlusions rendered out, to give that more realistic lighting look.
On the whole, I am very happy with the overall look to our animated short that we have produced, I feel that we have both worked to a very professional standard and overall I could not be happier with our final piece.

end credits?

well i have been working on the end credits, and what i have created is a simple still with mine and kirills name on it, and then an animation of the bag, it just passes by. The background is meant to represent some kind of cardboard related to the scene.

making last touches

ive been maing the very last touches of the composite, i have edited key bits out of the film like what mike and anna had sugested, and me and kirill feel like that we are almost there. And it looks like Kirill has already uploaded it,lol, didnt even know, aww well, no probs, there is one last thing which i feel needs doing and thats the credits, begining and ending.

Bag Story from Kirill Nagornych on Vimeo.

today- more post production

I have just been dooing more of the editing of the compositing of the plastic bag etc, and finally some masking in after effects.

some pretty ace after effects tutorials

click here if you would like to see .They are quite good, like the digital tutors where they are videos of the actual work interface.

HD 720 rendering weekend successfull

Im glad to say that my rendering was a sucess and i was very pleased, and im sure Kirill will be too when he sees them. However i was a lil shocked when i saw the average size per image, 2.5mb!! it really does show though, very sharp images and clean lookng. The over brightness of the cars are lot better now and other camera angles have been put in. There was one camera, called final_camera that couldnt have been done, as it was on a different time line to the others, so i did it as soon as i got in this morning. Again i have been fidling with after effects and had trouble with one series of renders were playing backwards, so i had to pain stakedly find the best solution, i believed it was final cut, but i was wrong. So after wasting half an hour to fourty mins, i decided to go back to After effects and edit it there again, which believe it or not, i dont mind, and im rather quick at it, if you dont say so. So in the morning all i have to do is edit to the last edit for the crit and put in the other camera angles. I did notice that i had not got a camera angle of the dog looking at the man, so i can render that out in the morning whilst editing in after effects, i rekon.

bens a genious

he showed me this site which has loads of awesome fonts etc and he gave a whole packet of polos as he needed the foil from it. Cheers Ben!

Essay- starting

im actually very impressed with myself i have written over 1000 words already, and i rekon, ill probably have it finished by end of today, which is good, because the sooner its outta the way the better. By the way my essay is esentially about short film making and the importance of the story/ plot etc, and im going to also write about a short film called 'Flatworld', which i have new for a while, just not untill recently watched it all the way through.

Research for animators etc

I have found this really nice website just for the art of stop-motion animators, and it has a couple of profiles. As im also very keen on this style of art, it kind of inspires me to get very hands on. On the link that youl click, it has a lot od short animated tests, which are very humerous, yet excently executed.

stop mo shorts

HD 720 rendering weekend

while i shud ov blogged this yesturday, but i went to go see Ironman, which i thourughly enjoyed, and was surprized about it beeing sucessfull as compared to other marvel and DC flops etc. Anyway, just to clarify all day yesturday i tweaked a few animations and set up the scene for the second time (first time by Kirill) and added 2 more camera angles, even though one i still need to set to render, but it isnt a long animation so shudnt take long. So anyway i set everything up and logged into another 2 machines at the back of the studio, this is where i opened the scene up another 2 times and set the render time for a certain amount of cameras per computer, and go! Set them off rendering and as i blog, is rendering now, on a saturday!! hopefully anyway. I thought it was a good idea to upgrade to HD, we are rendering in HD 720, it isnt the highest, but it still looks pretty defined and much nicer than before. Also the reason for choosing this is because the rendering time per image is not so long, about 30 seconds per render, which is better than 1:36 per render. Its all about effiency people!lol.

after effects edditing and the old rotoscoping in photoshop

well today i started off finishing the roto-scoping and has realised that i had lost some of the work, i had merged two layes together so it was more easy to manage, and for some reason the third layer had vanished, so had to do some catching up to do. After a while i had spent re-dooing the frames, i decided to swap with what kirill was dooing. He had got all the renderd footage together, all i had to do was to edit it, and i had to do it in after effects as final cut did not have the '12 frames per second ' option, so it restricted us to use after effects. As it isnt designed for edditing it was a bit of challenge. At the moment there is some extra footage that is being renderd, as i needed it. All that waits now is to work on the sound.

What i have been up to

Well me and Kiril have been furiously animating.
Kudos to Kiril for his slight tweaking of the first scene that i brought the animations together, as he made it more dynamically correct, which i wasnt too botherd that my animations had been alterd, it just has more realistic feel now, and it is looking good. Also he has been working on the car crash scene today and while he was dooing that i have been anmating the first scene and the last, as it has the same character involved in them, so thort id might as well do them together. The first part of the scene i animated them yesturday, (a scene involving a man leaving a shop, stoping + piking a small packet of gum out of a bag and then hurls the bag, then crosses the road to another shop)

I have made many different walk cycles and run cycles and others etc. I do feel that i am improving my skills in the art of animation, as it requires a lot of knoledge of human dynamics etc. At this moment im trying to animate the factory which is going to violentlyt shake and then probably go distorted and then back again, then sending hundreds of bits of litter, like plastic bags all over the place.

sorry dont have any piks to show at the moment (on other pc's hard drive)

le rendering

has begun, i set off from LCAD at 8.00 pm, leaving a comp rendering, im just hoping that it isnt turned off thru the night, if it is, its not a massive loss, just gone me a slight pain. Also i solved the rendering problem, when i was logged in on my user, it took 7.30 to render a still image at 640x480, i logged out and then tried logging in locally and it took 15 secs to render!! makes sense really, from now on, i think ill be logging in locally all the time, since i have my own hard drive. By the way just purchased a 1 tb external hard drive, after the stuff Mike was telling me (threatened to mug me!lol) By the way the way the scene looks so far, with a blue hint, adds a more realistic look to it as well

bag animation

it is very difficult to get the very nice animation of a flowing bag, i decided it was best to do some filming first. Some time last week i set up a tri-pod and a handy cam, and thought it would be good to film it in front of a green screen, so i could have a go at removing the green and seeing how it would look on a 3d background, also it is there so i could easily draw over the top of it. Me and Kiril, still thinks its better animated in drawn 2d, to keep that look that we want.
The animation has been done in Photoshop CS3 using the new video layers, i knew it existed, i just didnt know how to animate on top of it. Once i found out i was thrilled as it has lots of potential. Anyway, this is how the bag animation looks so far. I haven't removed the background layer, so it can show an example of the way the bag is filled in, plain white.

animation progression

i have animated the dog and have felt that i have succeeded in what i wanted to do. The change from a walk to a run looks quite convincing and even tho it may seem a little bit robotic, it kind of captures that sense that it is made from cardboard, which is what i am happy with. Meanwhile Kirill has been animating the human characters, which need less complex animation, and theres a couple of them. All the animation is looking good so far, and i am very happy with our progress. Hopefully we can start to render soon. Anyways i have to start the bag animation, which is probably going to be the most complicated thing of all. So the sooner that it is out of the way the better!!

success

i have managed to create a simple walk cycle for the dog character and i am about to start animating its next pose, the dog next is going to start to jump and run and chase after the bag.

there is a lot going on in my graph edditor, it is a very good thing that there is a nice repeated pattern. By the way the last post i posted i confused Liam as he thought that i had done the walk cycle that was a youtube video, i wish,lol. My actual one tho isnt as good yet. By the way Kiril has also started to animate the people characters and we have both been helping each other out etc, for the movement etc. 'The animators survival kit' is a very good book and has lots of examples of different style walks, very usefull.

after i showed this first one to mike, he suggested i did something with the horrible tearing. I decided it was time to take some action and managed to keep the animation, but edit the mesh, the result....

the scene in full sunshine

yesturday after i sped the rendering up, i wasnt happy with the old spot lights on ray trace shadows as its slugish for rendering, yet looks so nice. Anyway today, i passed the scene to Kiril and he added a sun and a sky dome, which looks really nice and i have added two directional lights with only one with depth map shadows and have set them at 5000 resolution, but still needs some tweaking in the bias etc. (shud have posted the pik before the last post)

dogzz

well now ive finished the scene off, i need to start the animation process, and so, im starting with the dog. As i have already attempted a walk cycle and was pretty pleased with it, i now need to start him walking, then running and jumping all in one, so as to research have been looking at videoas of animated dogs etc. some are usefull and some are quite amusing.
dog walk crap

Ambient F*****G Occlusions!

As you can probably tell, it has not been a good day for me. It all started this morning when Jason showed me and kirill how to easily plug in an ambient occlusion shader to the existing shader of an object, it is a very simple and yet effective way of getting realistic lighting. I had a go, did some tests, (which are below, one is without the plug in and one with- you probably may tell by the subtle lighting in one), then after these tests i decided to have a go at it for the actual scene that i have come up with, and it worked, looked really nice, and immediately was transformed and i was blown away by it. However, rendering was a nightmare and from here on, i had loads of problems with the appauling amount of time that it took, even for a 640 x 480 size render! This was really confusing me, when after when i had unplugged the ambient occlusion shader it was still taking a very long time to render. I have fiddled with a lot of settings and was still having trouble, for a render size of 64x48, it took 40 seconds!!which is ridicules. I had found out later, that some how the mental ray data for the ambient occlusion was still taking an effect and couldnt find a way of stopping. I tried deleting all history, optimizing the scene size, then went into the hypershade and deleted all unused nodes and repeated nodes, then Chris suggested i deleted all unnecessary objects in the scene, via the Hypergraph and again was still taking a while.
After all these head traumas (upgraded from headaches), i decided to head for home and have another crack at the problem. I tried exporting ONLY the scenes objects and importing into a new scene, and low and behold, it renders quicker! The only reason why i didnt try this earlier was the fact that it was taking forever to render a single frame on a different scene altogether, so i just thought it may have been the network or a bug in the system. Just pleased that it is rendering stills much quicker and at 16 seconds- but only at preview quality tho.

getting there

well i have been spending time editing the main scene, and i am pretty happy with it, i feel the overall look is almost there. There is a slight more tweaking that needs doing obviously, like bump maps need to be altered and the contrast on some colours of the textures. something that Anna was mentioning to me last week was the similarity of the buildings and how it would be good to break up the irregularity of them, so i have done that as well, before i did the last textures on the factory. Need sleep now.

scene almost finished

well i have been working solidly for a couple of weeks on the main scene, and it is almost done. Meanwhile i have been researching the movements of a bag and how it moves through the air. I have actually seen few in leeds yesturday and had notied that they dont tumble much, they just more or less drift, which will save time for animating etc.

some videos for the previous blog post

dog run cycle test 1

Today i have been yet again refining my texture problem, i have solved it, as rendering does seem a lot quicker now for a still image, as ive reduced the resolution of the images, which does blur the image a small bit. I have fixed this problem, so all is going well. Meanwhile Kirill has been working very hard on the rigging and creation of the individual characters. He gave me a copy of the dog that he has just recently finished rigging, and i have just been having a go at a dog run cycle. Of course it is only a test at this stage, but i feel it is very highly accurate of the dogs movements of it legs. At this stage it does look a lot robotic, but this is the result of some filmed footage of my dog running up and down my garden chasing a toy. So i have done my research.

feeling terrible but must blog!!

Yeah not bee so good today but i still intend to try and do some work at home. Anyway, Anna showed me a good example of the very style which we are wanting to go for. It is an early video that Anna posted on moodle, i had just forgot about it.

Dynamo
Uploaded by biftoury

progress

Well today again i have been re-working the textures for the buildings as Anna pointed out to me the fact that the wooden door textures that i used in conjunction with the cardboard textures, that i needed to think about more the styalised approach that me and Kirill are still wanting to pursue. I had thought about this before, as i felt that it did need to re-work it. I am still working on other objects in the scene, as i need to get them to fit in with the other objects. However for now, i feel like i have just about finished the buildings texture. Oh and i checked that the bmp file was 59 mb!! so i had to make this smaller, just converted it to a jpeg, and its now 2mb.

i want to blog, but i don't no what i want to blog about. I think ive become randomly obsessed by blogging. The reality is i am just waiting for a test still render to complete. For some reason it is taking longer than usual, i am curious to why. Praps its the the size of the textures, the resulution of the buildings texture is 300, because i needed the extra space. I really am not a massive fan of texturing.

more textures

i have just successfully finished a texture for the car, and i am quite happy with the way it looks, just need to texture the wheels. After this i intend to texture all the other 3d models and start to think about some rigging.

buildings texture

Well frustratingly i have been spending more time than expected on the textures for the building in the street, probably, all in all a week, trying to get the bump maps right, the colour of windows and the sharpness and clarity. It has been taking me a while to get it right, and now it has, i am fairly pleased with the texture. At this moment in time i have been working on other 3d elements. I am rather pleased with the cra that i have made, it has a rather cartooned look to it.

the street

i have been working on a texture for the street, and it has been taking me a while, mainly because there is a lot of detail involved. I have also been using my wacom tablet, which has helped a lot made the building look a lot more like a street scene. However as it is a very styalised look to it, i dont want it to look too real. However i am wanting to add a feeling of an aged and dirty feel to it, as it juxtaposes the clean recycling factory. At this moment i am still unsure that i like the tesxture for the street, im still thinking what else it needs.

If there is one thing that i hate....

It has to be making the textures in photoshop, especially if there is a lot of detail to be put in. Im currently working on the street texture and it is taking a time getting all the little details. I had to make the image resolution bigger so then i could make images of windows really small and still have them very sharp and vivid. I also have to think about the big difference in the different shops on the texture, so have each one slightly different etc.

Also i dont much like mapping the textures and organizing them around to then take a cv snapshot and then go into photoshop. Its just a massive headache, but when you see the texture on your model, you do get that sense of great achievement, so it is worth it in the long run, as it does make your models look much better.

What i did today

Well i had planned to start making the textures for the street, but i didnt mangage to, instead i modeled a dog character which is to feature in our animated film.

Bag animation test

I have worked on a quick example of how the 2d will look over the 3d elements. I am going to do another more detailed test of the overall look, this will have the bag filled in with white and textures on the 3d scene.

2d and 3d compositing

as the project that we are dooing is going to feature a combination of 2d elements and placed on 3d, i thought some other existing examples of this highly styalised look would be good to research.

toon boom

I have just been experimenting with animating a bag in 2d, yes 2d! not 3d! It is difficult but, 2 dimensions is considerably easier. I have been working on some 3d work, so all is not lost, i have just been having a change working on some 2d, so here is an example of how it looks, more detail is to be added later. cio.

Our overall idea so far

Well over the past week, me and Kirill have been discussing various different story ideas, a few of my ideas, an idea of mine which began as Kirill's idea, and a few more of his. We have decided to go with a newer version of his original idea, which has been elaborated much more, has been fleshed out and re-designed. As Anna suggested, it is best to come up with one idea and really make it a good one, so then we are waisting no time at all. Our main story idea features a lot of comic gags which are all caused by this plastic bag, which has been thrown away by a man working at a recycling factory, which is of course ironic, but i suppose there is an overall moral in this story/ narrative, which is really interesting and has inspired me to do this film. So now you know the plot, the look of it is going to determine whole viewing satisfaction. The entire look is very symbolic and are all simple signs, for example the main character is a man from the male toilet sign, and he is featured in certain recycling symbols as well. The character is going to be virtually made of cardboard.

concept sketch

a concept sketch for the ultimate molten plastic explosion idea.

small discussion with Jason

Me and kirill talked to Jason about the idea of the environment for a subject for our short film that we want to make. Kirill's idea of plastic bags in trees, were mostly talked about the main idea of multiple comical gags. Also we talked about how they could be dark and sinister, still with comic value. From this small discussion, me and kirill have talked and have a few thoughts about it. I have been fleshing out other ideas about the short film, meanwhile, but i am very keen on the comic value of the potential of this animated film. For the bags idea, a favorite idea, goes as follows;
-A worker is in a recycling factory and has just stopped for a quick break. He reaches down to his pocket and digs deep and rustles around and then slowly pulls out a plastic wrapped branded chocolate bar.
-As his hands bring the chocolate bar into his vision, he the carefully unwraps it, and folds the wrapper neatly and then unexpectedly throws it over his shoulder, sending it flying and fluttering into space.
-The camera would now follow the fluttering plastic wrapper, it would slowly flow and land in a small opening of big industrial size paper guillotine. The wrapper lands and gets jammed in a set of sprockets, the plastic prevents the cogs from spinning around, so the guillotine jerks to a halt.
Camera cuts to outside of machine and sees the conveyor belt continuing to move and is still feeding paper, though there is no gap under the big blade, because it is jammed shut, so the paper is forcefully pushed up againt the blade and is folding and crumpling, a huge tower of recycled cardboard is towering higher and higher.
-The camera then is focused on the other side of the guillotine and zooms into the mess of huge sheets of clear plastic, which are getting bigger and bigger, as there is no card to be packaged, so it packs itself.
-Now there is a huge ball of plastic, and it rolls of the conveyor belt and lands into a fiery furnace, where it expands into a semi molten plastic fire ball. It then rolls all over the factory and destroys almost everything, as it rolls it pulls things into it and gets bigger and bigger until it finally explodes, molten plastic shrapnel is scene flying at high speed all over the place.
-Next the scene fades in to a room coverd in a whitey-grey layer of plastic. The camera does a full circle of the room and then stops at an unusual plastic lump, the camera moves upwards, more of this unusual plastic lump is revealed, then an opening of some flesh, then a chin, then a nose and then fianlly a full face with molten plastic in his hair. It is the same worker who tossed his sweet wrapper and has half of the chocolate sticking out of his mouth.

thats just one gag, starts small - ends huge etc.

Garys fall

A very humorous short animation about some scouse polar bears, its very very funny, has a very simple and ingenious script. I had to watch it a couple of times, i lauphed that hard!

Gary's Fall
Uploaded by Killstain

more research

I have found some more nice examples of short films, which i really liked and are possibly the kind of thing that i would like to have a go at.

Edit to my website

Just recently i have edited my website's links. This is mainly due to the fact, that i could be distracting what i am actually wanting to do etc. The main page, with preview clips has yet to be updated, it might be best to replace the flash animation with a video link, from blip tv or daily motion, as itl probably load quicker. still got loads to do tho, regarding personal development.

I have been working a cg character for a while now, and its driving me insane.

ma website

An interesting prison story

I found another rather interesting animated short, again french, very sadistic plot, which goes wrong at the end, as it is just wishfull thinking.

Jungle Jail
Uploaded by Killstain

another one

such nice animated shorts, very sureal, very nice.

Hotel du phare
Uploaded by Cornebidouille

lovely animated short

found this on daily motion and thought it was really nice. a good example of an end of year piece, if only the computers at college could handle the rendering. :( .

Solar
Uploaded by solarthefilm

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browse/type:1/cat:5

typical!

just found a tutrial, using dynamics etc for rop/cord.


rope tutorial

Critical studies

just found some research for me, for my essay! and its quite good!
ABout hyper-reality etc.

and im sick of spammers sending me irellivent coments, which are links to crap!!!! grrrrrrrrrrrrr

some piks