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.