Animatic Scratch Audio Track

Today we recorded a rough audio track to put over the animatic, which will help give it much more depth and a lot closer to final film, I also put a stand in music track just to get an idea of the tone of the film and how it will feel. Below is a clip from the start of the Animatic.

The voices were mainly provided by by Sam Stainer who is also one of the writers on this project and I think hes really nailed the type of voice were going for, from the accent to the gruffness of his voice.

Big Top Rough Animatic

Last week Ceci and I spent a couple of days together working through the story drawing some very rough thumbnail sketches to finally nail down the story and start to nail down the shots and story boards. From there I went and drew up some less rough storyboards to work from, and then blocked out some rough 3D sets in Maya, put the camera in and then drew the characters in over the top. Below is a small section of this animatic.

Doing this really helped us see what some of these shots would look like and after talking through this animatic with Ceci and a couple of other people on the team we've got a much clearer idea of shots that need to be changed, added and paced out differently.

Second Car Chase Test

After the first car chase test I spoke to Julian, our stop motion technician and he thinks it will be easier and quicker to make a few sections of the ring and keep swapping them over ans we animate to give the illusion of a full disk and then a much smaller miniature for the wider shots of the whole circus. Below is what this test looks like from the close ups of the car.

I am happy with how this looks and can easily see it working for real in stop motion. Although it does loop quite quickly because it was done with three sections that were each an eighth of the full circle.

Above is what this looks like from above, here you can see the three sections being moved back to the start just below the camera once they get out of sight. Here you can also see where the camera would be, moving the camera in this set will also be a lot easier than before because the over all size has been reduces massively.

Car Chase Test

One of the scenes in The Big Top is going to be a car chase, so I've been thinking about how to do this. In the first pitch for this film Ceci talked about a big rolling barrel set and so working from there I came up with the idea for a disk set that has three sections and each can spin separately to make each section move at a different speed, to get my head around the concept I made a very simple 3D model of it. Below is my first test of this concept.

The Idea behind this is that the set itself would spin so that we could keep the camera still other than the movements we want. over all this technique would mean we would have much more stable footage, which would not only make the scene watchable but for the pipeline it would make the 3D tracking a lot easier. This shows how I was thinking we would go about it, because of the mixed media nature of the film, all of this would be stop motion with CG characters composited in to the cars. This means that even if we make the cars quite small this set would be very big, I'm expecting about five to six feet across.

I think we should build the three disks each with space in the middle for the next disk, and then ball bearings in a groove under each so that they can easily spin.

GigaPan Test

Recently George Quelch and I had another go at looking for ways to do Stop motion in 360 degrees and we think this is the best option. We did a test shot using a special camera stand called a GigaPan Pro which is a motorized stand that is designed for taking really big landscape photos, but we managed to make it do a full 360 picture. It works by taking lots of pictures in a sequence and then we can stitch them all together to get the full image.

Above is a picture of the stand itself.

Above is the final fully stitched picture it took, over all the camera took about 70 pictures for this one frame, it took about five minutes for it to move around and take all the photos and the final uncompressed photo was over 3gb so its safe to say this method has solved the quality issues of the other methods we have tested.

Mirror Testing

For one of the shots in The Big Top we want to have an over the shoulder shot of the main character looking at himself in the mirror. ordinarily this wouldn't be a particularly hard shot to get but because the film is mixed media with real stop motion sets, including the mirror, and CG characters it could be bit of a challenge getting the two to match up together.

After a longtime messing around in Maya trying to render the reflections without the mirror itself and trying to get alphas rendered with the characters reflection in, George Quelch and I finally decided to put a CG green screen behind the character so that that would be behind him in the reflection and then we could key that out in Nuke. Although this did work, there must be a much easier way of doing it because this also had problems like there was some green glow on the characters shoulder that we are looking over. We thought about maybe having two identical CG characters mirroring each other or rendering one from both angles and compositing them together. We will be doing more research and testing on this.

CG Practice

one of the aspects of animation that iv'e been wanting to have a lot more practice in and focus on a lot more on is CG character animation, especially now I'm directing a film with CG characters, so as a little refresher I set a couple of challenges for myself to get back into the swing of it and get my head round things like the graph editor in Maya as well as just catching myself up with Maya.

Here is a couple of giffs of the two little exercises I've done so far, I'm pretty happy with how the door knocking animation turned out as I feel she has looks as though she has got some weight behind her and her movements are fairly fluid. However I'm not as happy with the walk cycle because I was trying to go for a very sassy walk with a pause as she puts her foot down but im not sure it really works, I will be having another go at it soon.

The Big Top

Last week we got the results from the third year pitches and unfortunately our pitch for Oxygen didn't get through into production. However after the initial disappointment I jumped headfirst into one of the other projects that did go through called The Big Top.

An ex clown is confronted with his past when his once beloved circus returns to town, bringing with it the murder of his ex clowning partner.

The Big Top is a mixed media piece that will be a stop motion and CGI hybrid with stop motion sets and props and CG characters. Its very inspired by film noir and all the iconic imagery that comes with that. Set somewhere in the 1940's and 1950's in a big traveling circus it follows a murder story of a clown and his partners mission to find the killer and put to rest what happened. 

This film is being written and produced by Cecilia Hay and Directed by me because after finding out the results of the pitches my reaction was to jump straight into this project, I expressed to Ceci that I was very keen to get on board with one of the higher roles, and then she offered me the role of director.
However that isn't to say that George and I are giving up on the 360 stop motion, we are still trying tests and are planning to do more.

Third Year Film Pitch

Last Friday was the day we had all been waiting for, last Friday was the day we pitched our third year film to all 200 students on our coarse, the lecturers and some guest panelists from within the industry. I felt very prepared for this one, as George Quelch (who I pitched with) had been working on the pitch and the film idea in general for about six months, although it has changed a lot in that time we now have a pretty solid idea to pitch.
There were around twenty pitches and only eight to ten can go into production so were all definitely competing for the spots. I'm feeling fairly hopeful of our chances of going into production, but you never know.
Below are some pictures of George and I pitching.

Astronaut Models

As part of the prep for pitching our third year film idea I made some concept Plasticine models of the two astronaut characters and one of the alien characters. I modeled the two astronaut characters as close to the concept drawings that I have had a solid idea for as I could, I am very happy with how they turned out as are pretty close to the concept pieces.

For the Alien designs I didn't really have any drawings to work form mainly because my drawing skills aren't up to scratch and I really struggled to get the ideas I had in my head onto paper, however once i decided to try it in Plasticine I got it spot on to my ideas on my first try. I am very happy with how this one turned out especially with the shape of his head.

 

I am definitely going to do more model making as I found that I really enjoyed making these three and am very happy with how they turned out.

Oxygen Three Acts

During the summer George Quelch and I spent quite a bit of time working out the story line for our third year film idea in much more detail. From there I drew three concept pieces, one for each of the three acts, I tried to get across the basic structure of what was going on in the film in these three pictures.

The first image (above) shows when the astronauts first land on the planet and crush an aliens house when the door opens. they continue to unload all their equipment which further irritates the aliens.

The second image (above) shows the escalating events in the second act, after the aliens realize the astronauts are going to dig up their little village to mine, they start to attack to try and get the control panel for the drill, and to get rid of the astronauts.

The third image (above) shows how the film will end (Spoilers!) the escalating events finally peak when the tug of war ends with them flinging the control panel into the rocket which causes it to tip over and start up, it ends up flying away and over the horizon leaving the astronauts stranded.

Crew Shot

Over the last term I have been helping on the 3rd year film 'I Am Dyslexic' this is the shot I have done for it so far, however it still needs a lot of work done to it as the walk cycle is a bit rough and the cleanup doesn't really match the look of the rest of the film.

Live Brief Shot

This term I have been working on a short film called 'Dreams of Daddy' and this is the first shot that i have done for it. This shot took me quite a while to do because it has three diagonal walk cycles in it and because of the boiling effect we were going for which meant i had to draw frames that i would normally have left the same as the frame before or after it. Overall I am fairly happy with the result although i think the walk cycles could use some work because they seem a bit floaty. The background is black because it was rendered with transparency so that the director could composite it onto a different background easily.

Character designs

 

These are the initial designs for the characters in my third year film pitch, After doing some research into different space suit designs, I had a go at doing some of my own. Taking inspiration from different designs both real and fictional for each one I came up with some that i liked whilst keeping the same cartoony style throughout. I then took the two from above that i liked the most and tried three different colour schemes on both and found that different colours work better on each. I prefer the orange on the top row but the blue on the bottom row. I then did some final designs for the two different characters.

Setting designs

For my third year film idea, I've been doing some setting research and designs. these are three of them. This story is set in the middle of space, somewhere between the Andromeda galaxy and Earth. despite the vast emptiness of space there is a large amount of hazards for the two astronauts to navigate, from asteroids heading strait for them and wondering satellites to the vacuum itself. Because the film is stop motion all of the backgrounds are going to be green screened out and then replaced with matte paintings like the ones below, this will fit perfectly with the cartoony style of the whole film.

A Bit of a Setback

Soooooo....
Today we had a bit of an incident with the 360 lens. I wasn't around when it happened but George reports that it was just sat on the desk in-front of him and a piece fell off. It is especially annoying that it happened when it did because were about to go and get all the equipment to do another shoot with it which would have been our final test, so we had to cancel our bookings and workout what do do next. The most irritating part of this is that we are now going to buy a new one for the owner of the lens as it belonged to another student on our coarse and then try and fix this one so we can keep doing tests.
Below are pictures of the lens now.

Third 360 Test

Last week George and I did another 360 stop motion test using a new lens which allowed us to use a much better DSLR camera rather that a little lens on an iPhone.

This allowed us to try many more techniques like green screening. In the last test the final image size was tiny and compressed and although we did manage to do some green screening it was very poorly done because of the limits of compressed images. This time we had proper lighting and more green screens which meant we could do full production standard effects.

Although this is the second post iv'e put up, it is the third test because before this test we did the same thing but we forgot to set the camera to shoot in RAW files and so it only gave us compresses JPEG's which presented the same problems as the first shoot.

Below are the unwrapped animation with the green screen backgrounds removed and a new one put in. Below that is the same video but wrapped back up so you can view it in proper 360.

Oxygen Poster

In the last pre-production seminar we had, we were given the task of making a poster for the film idea were working and i immediately had this idea of the character shooting out of the rocket with a dramatic perspective and the character being close to the camera. I made a rough sketch in my note book to get the idea down and to try and come up with a tagline. I then decided to redraw it in photoshop to practice my digital painting skills. Im actually very happy with how it came out in the end and im epecially pleased with the lighting and shading on the rocket and the astronaut, however in mot as happy with the background and feel I could have spent more time on it and made it a bit more detailed because i feel the bottom left corner is a bit empty.

360 Animation Tests

To further work out our production pipeline we decided to play around with using my 360 phone rig to do some very basic stop motion animation and to see if we could cut out green-screen elements and replace them with other components in Nuke and then wrap the video back up and view it in YouTube's 360 video viewer. Below is the final cut of that test.

After this test worked very successfully I had to make an animated camera version in Maya like I did in the Last test with the still image except this time using the animated video. Below is the result of this test.

Below is the unwrapped version of this video so you can see what it looks like for us to edit in Nuke and Adobe Premiere, as well as a couple of photos of what the set looked like and the phone camera lens.

360 Animation Ideas

For my third year film George and I have had an idea to do 360 degree stop motion animation. This immediately threw up many pipeline issues, however as far as we can see no one else has done it, and we can see why. We are thinking of using my 1 sheet pitch as our story basis and so we will need to be able to cut green-screen elements out and composite in some 3D rendered objects. first things first, we needed to be able to shoot basic stop motion in 360 degrees. I bought a very cheep 360 lens that fits on my phone and started playing with that.

Above is the raw picture that this lens takes, from there we had to unwrap it and then work out how to view it in 360.

Above is what this picture looks like when we unwrap it in a very simple program called 0-360. from here we applied this to a cylinder in Autodesk Maya and animating the camera as a way of veiwing it in 360. below is the result of that test.

Jump Animation

I did this animation over the weekend and I am very happy with the way it turned out, I drew out some thumbnail drawings and then put those in flash to get the timing right and then drew over those to get the key-frames and then drew the motion curves for the head and both hands to make sure the inbetweens would be smooth and make sense. I think he spends a bit too long in the air in the middle of the jump but other than that I am very happy with how smooth it is.

1 Sheet Pitch

Last week we had guest lecturer Luis Cook in to help us generate ideas and show us how to pitch and do a 1 sheet pitch, this is the basic idea i had which i am considering taking to the third year and the picture above is the 1 sheet that i pitched to Luis Cook. I got a lot of great feedback on it and this idea has already evolved a huge amount and is almost unrecognizable.

Second Bifrost Test

These clips are from another attempt at water simulation using Bifrost. the first one doesn't work because none of the water can actually get out of the bottle, i'm not sure why this is, I think its because either the scale of the whole scene is way too small or the particle count is also way too small. So for the second clip I scaled i right up and upped the particle count as well, this works better but still not completely successful as i may scaled it up way too far and so there is an oceans worth of water in the bottle which is why it moves so slowly and there's a big wave inside the bottle

Listening Project Animatic

One of the projects I am working at uni at the moment is a live brief from the BBC where we have been given an audio clip and are making an animation that goes along with it. I am working in a group with seven other people and after we had a few brainstorming meetings we had an almost finished script and so from there I did some very rough thumbnail storyboards and after the script changed a few times I made this Animatic. all this needs now is some tightening up as i quickly cut this audio clip together from the full much longer audio clip, which is why there are a few long pauses and it doesn't flow quite as well as it should.

Bifrost Water Tests

I have decided to get back into 3D animation to broaden my skill set as I have mostly been focusing on my 2D skills. I made this using the Bifrost features in Autodesk Maya, in the first video it is mostly the default particle and emitter settings I only changed the scale and raised the particle count to make it look even more realistic, whereas in the second video I changed a lot of the settings making the whole thing a lot smaller and changing some of the friction and density settings, which is why it looks much faster and generally worse.

Fun Animation Time

I decided to do some random little animations for fun one day and these are the result. I'm not entirely sure what inspired them but i'm quite happy with the result. The top one is my favorite of the two as it makes me laugh every time  because laughing at your own jokes is always a sign of comedy gold.