Animate!

So its less than a week till we present our Going Live film to Axis. Everything is rendered out and we only have 2 more shots to comp together (barring and quick re renders we find tomorrow). Looking at the film right now I'm pretty proud of it. Iv'e spotted a few thing I would have liked to have adjusted animation wise but overall I'm pretty happy with everything. Comparing what we have now to what we had even a few weeks ago I think the look of the film has improved so much. I will write a proper evaluation thing of the film after the Axis presentation but for now here is the nearly finished edit we did today (there are no credits in this version as they were still rendering).

(Also apologies for the low quality but youtube said my 1GB video was going to take like 2 hours to upload so)

So today Andrea, Li, Stathis and I took the shots that had been comped already to the edit suite to cut them together to make sure they all looked consistent and to pick up any problems in the animation/lighting/rendering/comp. Overall the shots looked really good together I think. There are some minor problems in some of the animations and occasionally the smoothing of the models but overall we are pretty happy with the shots we tested today. We fixed a few of the issues we found in order to re-render if we have time. We are going to do the same thing on Monday with (hopefully) the rest of the shots to see how the whole thing looks.

(Its very odd seeing it with bits missing, I can basically recite the dialogue in my sleep now so it really throws me when bits aren't there)

(And here is us awkwardly posing for a photo as things rendered out of premiere.

So here are some (very) rough thumbnails for my personal project. I'm still having a bit of trouble with the beginning of my story. We have a story workshop on the 18th so I'm aiming to have an animatic and hopefully a mostly finished character model finished by then so I have something to work with. I'm currently working on refining my thumbnails into storyboards which will hopefully help me to work out a better way to start my story.

So last week we had a Skype session with Axis to get feedback on our renders and they told us our lighting was very flat. Looking at our renders again we totally agreed so we decided to re light and re render everything. Despite deciding to do this with like two and a half weeks to go we have actually managed to get through it quite quickly. I think we have all of the shots out now with just some re renders to go.

So I got to light a few of the shots (with a lot of feedback/help from Andrea, lighting is not really my forte but I gave it a shot) and I took some renders of my lighting progress with one of the shots. So these are going to be a lot of very similar images as I tweak the lights about but it should give you an idea of my process.

[EDIT: ADD MORE IMAGES. (I forgot my pendrive)]


On Friday Matt Cameron came up from London to give us a lesson on NUKE. I have used it very briefly before to camera track but that was like 3 years ago and I really couldn't remember much about it. We had a talk about the kind of work Matt had been doing in London and his experiences working in both London and Scotland before we moved on to the practical class. Matt showed us around the interface then showed us how to comp out a tracking marker with a plate from a short film he had worked on. In the afternoon we showed Matt the one of our renders with our new lighting set up and he went through how he would composite that in NUKE. He showed us how to use our depth pass to blur the background and give our shots a sense of scale. He also went through how to add grain to our shots to make them look less cg. The results we managed to get from NUKE were a lot better than we had managed with after effects and after briefly talking it over we decided to comp our Going Live shots in NUKE.

I really enjoyed working with NUKE, i thought I would be more intimidated by the node based interface as i'm much more used to working with timelines but after a little while getting used to it I actually found it much easier to see what I was doing using the nodes. I think I'm going to, if I have time, maybe do some NUKE tutorials and try some more compositing stuff out.

Now that we are in the final stretch of Going Live its probably time to talk about my final project again.

Here is my character for my final animation. (The suit won't be grey in the final film that was just to help me work out the sections.)

I'm still thumbnailing the exact story (and we have another storytelling class that will hopefully help me completely lock it down) so in the meantime I have been getting on with my character.