Lead Animators Final Thoughts..

Well here we are... tommorow i will be goin into uni, handing in my work and then thats it... im not a student anymore!! The chapter of three years coming to a wonderful end with a short animation film i am very proud to of been a part of. Back at the start of the year when i first heard Jono's pitch, I knew straight away that i wanted to work on his film. Although the story line is completely different now.. i have absolutely no regrets. I can also say that being the Lead Animator on the film was an honour and was very privaleged that Jono and the rest of the group trusted me with the huge task of literally animating the entire film. With a big help from Ben and Yemi, i am very pleased with the outcome of the animation. Giles did a grand job on rigging and the charcter, without him i wouldn't have been able to animate. Jenny's performance throughout the year has been outstanding. But i must pay a special congratulations to both Jono and Rob. They have stood out in the group. They took on the role as director and producer and without them the film would not have been made. The roles they took were extremely tough and they had the dedication to make schedules, (and made sure people stuck to them) put together different edits of the film throughout the year and also liased with different tutors to get advice from them for the benifit of making our film better.

This whole year has been so tough.. it has been very challenging and i have learnt so much. I came into this film with the specialist skill of being an animator, although there is always room for improvement, i am still very pleased with my efforts and am so impressed with my developments. With different people having different specialists i was able to learn skills from them and with everyone having to do a little bit of everything anyway it was good to learn and practise different parts of the production process.

Teamwork was the most important aspect of this film. and you cannot take teamwork for granted. While making the film i have learned that planning is the key!! although at the timne the pre-production process seemed to go on forever, looking back i feel that we could have done more... obviously this was the first film we had made in a group and i have learnt that nothing should be untouched.. you need to discuss absolutely everything in detail. and make sure everyone is absolutely clear on what is goin on..

But anyway i think im rambling on a bit now.. its very late and i have probably about 3 days worth of sleep to catch up on. But all i want to say is a big thank you to everyone.. it has been an emotional journey, an experience i will never forget, and i wish everyone the very best of luck in the future.

Deadline is Almost Here!

Nearly there!! Deadline is in two days time, and the film is pretty much finished.. we are just waiting on the finishing touches to the sound and then all we have to do is drop it into premiere and match it up with the footage. I'l post some render shots of our final film so you can get a little taster of what you can expect of our film:

Temple Lighting Untill 5.30am.....WTF!

Again was another ridiculously late night. Me, Rob and Jono were up until 5.30am!!! It is getting silly now the times we are getting to bed.. but it is a sacrifise we are willing to make at this stage because there are still a lot of little odd jobs that need to be finished promptly in time for rendering. Last night (or should i say, this morning) we were lighting the main chamber.

This was going to be quite challenging for us for various reasons... firstly the temple is going to be quite dark and dull and with the scene essentially at night time the lighting needs to be an effective moonlight... or sunset? also Jono made a good point when lighting, he said that you cant just plonk a random light anywhere you need to think where the source of the light is coming from. Therefore baring that in mind we used the same technique we used in the jungle for the temple. We made holes in the temple roof and made the light pass through them. However we had to use different lights for the temple because for some strange reason maya only lets you have six spotlights per scene!!??? very strange so we used directional lights and point lights. the only time we used spotlights was to highlight details of the scene which were too dark.. i.e the alter and the characters face.

Below are different jpgs of lighting tests:

as you can see with the picture above the light on the alter is very nice... its very harsh and draws your eye straight to it which is what we want. however going back to what i said before it doesnt work because there is no justification as to where the light is coming from.. it looks very staged and is not the effect we want, we want a more natural light.

This above image is a better example of the effect we want. This image was created by using lights through the holes in the roof. it isnt as harsh as the previous examples but still is effective in lighting up the alter.

This image again shows the effect of the holes in the roof. this time however we did use a spotlight because we wanted a more harsh lighting in some of the darker areas of the temple. Becasue this area is quite dark we think the bright lights contrast really well.

FOG EFFECTS -
These next images below are examples of the fog effect we gave the scene. We used an environmental fog which is attached to an ambient light. The effect is AWESOME and really brings the scene to life. The fog effect is in the render settings. I really like what it does to the scene. it gives it great depth and especially for the sunset/night time effect respectively.

Textures on the Models

TEXTURES 2

TRAP CORRIDOOR
SWINGING HAMMER


SPIKESCLOSING DOOR

TEXTURES 1

The past couple of days have been very productive. With a huge weight lifted off my shoulders with all the animation done! i have now managed to completely texture the entrance corridoor and the trap corridoor in TWO DAYS!! very impressed arnt ya, i can tell!!

ENTRANCE CORRIDOOR

Editing Till 4.30am !

I went to bed at 4.30 this morning!!!! and had to get up at 7.30 for work!!! This bloody project is certainly taking its toll i tell thee!! The evening started at about 5 when i arrived at Jono and Robs house, i was greeted with the guys in the middle of the edit and they had just completed the jungle scene. They played it to me and asked for my two cents worth. My first reaction to it was that i didnt like it at all!!! Only reason being is that the speed of it was SO SLOW! Obviously i had done all the animation for it so i had seen it a million times with all the bloody playblasts i had been doing, but the animation in this edit was ridiculously slow. I had found out to my dissapointment that Jono and Rob had changed the speed of my animation in the actual Maya file. They had stretched out the key frames to make him run slower.... they're intentions were obviously for the good. However i felt that they had totally messed up my animation because now he looked like he was running in slow motion. All was not lost though because i just made them speed up the run in premier. The both kept on taking the mick out of me because all night i was saying 'faster, faster, faster!!'. i just wanted the run to be faster and back to the speed of how i originally animated it. But Jono said that it was a little too fast and with the quick cuts the character runs past the camera in less than a second!. So the final edit of the jungle, the character was not as fast as i had animated it but no way near as slow as Jono and Rob made it. I also put in a lot of input to the cuts.. the version that Jono and Rob played me was fine but i think with me coming in as a new fresh pair of eyes was very benificial and i was able to pick at it with a fine tooth comb..

After i managed to get the speed of the run faster, Rob, Jono and Myself sat up to get the rest of the final edit complete.. (well when i say final i mean a final playblast edit of the whole film). It has to be done by tomorrow because then we have to give it to our sound people.... THATS RIGHT WE HAVE SOUND PEOPLE!!! we have been very fortunate as we have two sound people working with us on the project. Firstly Jenny's sister is supplying all the sound effects for the film. and then one of Jono's friends is our score artist composing an original soundtrack especially for our film!! ooohhhh fancy!! Obviously these guys need the edited version for timing purposes.... and they need a week to do it so we have to get it to them by tomorrow. The reason the edit took so long is because we were finallising the cameras for the whole film... i had used a few different cameras while i was animating which Jono and Rob really liked so we had to drop in all the cameras and animations into the master file to then playblast from. This was very tedious as the file took FOREVER to open up in Maya. A lot of time was spent waiting for files to open which was very annoying.

Below is some playblasts of the CAMERAS I SET UP myself in the film:

This playblast shows the character lifting himself up... i produced the camera that zooms over the edge of the cliff and also the other camera where it cuts to show him getting up after pulling himself up - however the only difference made to the edit we made in the early hours of this morning is we had the camera a little further away.... The best part of this playblast is the TRANSITION between the temple and the house. This edit is very important as it is the first time as an audience we realise the character is sleepwalking. I MADE THIS TRANSITION into a fade because i felt it was the most effective. However what makes it most effective is the positioning of the two characters. As you can see i have placed them in very similar positions so that the temple character almost falls into the sleepwalking character. I think it works very well and i was ver pleased that Jono and Rob were very happy with it aswell.

This playblast show the camera i set up for the jump... originally Jono had set up a very nice camera shot, and although we all really liked it, it unfortunately broke the 360 degree rule. So i set up this slight pan movement for the jump to give the audience of how far the character is actually jumping..

But anyway... i am shattered so im off to bed now!!! Need lots of sleep to catch up on...

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..........