Animate!

Progress

I drew some slightly more comprehensible storyboards. I can see a few things that still need to be changed. I'm going to design a quick layout for my set which should help me to get better camera angles as then I will know where everything is. I'm actually better at doing camera angles in previs so I will probably change some more stuff when I get to that stage as well.

So today I drew/got together my super rough thumbnails and put them into premiere to make sure that my story was flowing right.

This was the first version which was exactly as I had drawn it after the story workshop. After looking at it I went back and edited the first half to change the pacing and cut some unnecessary scenes.

This is the current version, the timing is a bit all over the place and at this stage im sure some of those drawings are completely incomprehensible but its helping me to plan my story. Now I'm going to draw up some proper storyboards, and add in a few boards that I think are missing, before editing it again and getting some feedback to make sure my story is reading as I want it to.

I also had a quick go at doing my character's face in mudbox. I have found that if I start sculpting without really having a plan my character's tend to come out semi realistic which isn't really the style I wanted to go for. I'm going to go back and properly draw out my character's head then remodel it on Friday.

So as we only have 10 weeks left (terrifying) for our project I have revised my schedule. I had fallen behind where I wanted to be quite a bit due to Going Live but now that I can fully focus on this project hopefully I can get myself back on track.

This is where I'm at right now and this is a link to the Google spreadsheet
 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cyXKHxq3qjLk2EFtCzWA3pmTzWPjvjKa4_QmtPAHRjY/edit?usp=sharing

It seems like I have a lot of things to do this week but most of them are already started and/or nearly done.

So today I also finished my rough thumbnails (I'm going to put them into premiere tomorrow and see if I need to add any shots/re-arrange anything before I draw them up into storyboards) and I also took another look at my character design. My plan was to sculpt the character in zbrush unfortunately the uni only has 2 zbrush licences and one of them is in a computer that isn't working so I ended up using mudbox instead. The character is still pretty rough right now especially the face but with a few more days work I should manage to get it to where I want it.

So our first day of semester 3 (I think? Or our last day of semester 2? There isn't really a break so I'm not sure) we had another story workshop with Mark Gindle. We got to show him our Going Live film and then talk to him individually about our projects. He was so helpful, I had been really confused this entire semester about what the point of my story was, which is probably why I had like 10/15 different versions of my storyboards, but he talked through what I had so far with me and helped my look more at the character's emotional journey in the film.






 I'm so happy I actually know what I'm doing now and I can quickly do some new storyboards and get started on an animatic/previs.

Going Live is finished! I'm really happy with the final outcome and we presented the film to Axis on Monday and got some pretty good feedback. Axis pointed out some things that could be fixed by the degree show (some of the things were things we had noticed in the editing room and didn't have time to fix so it's good that we managed to identify some of the same points) but overall it was pretty positive.



We also did a report and a presentation talking about our individual parts of the project. I hope my report explained my contribution well because I think by the time I got to the presentation I was completely braindead. I really just crashed as soon as the Axis presentation was over so I hope my presentation wasn't quite as ineloquent and nonsensical as I think it was.

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)