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.