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....