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.