Production Diary - 25.05.12

WE'RE DONE!


IT'S IN!


IT'S OVER!


We officially handed everything in just after 1, and since then we've been just adding a few pieces to our blogs and helping out other students with getting their projects finished.


It's been a huge relief to finally get everything handed in and done. It hasn't quite dawned on me just yet that we've finished with uni. No more summer projects, no more homework, no more essays... It's a very strange experience. 


Right now I'm looking forward to taking a few days off and relaxing, without the feeling I should probably be doing some homework. I'm sure it'll get old after a little while... But right now, having nothing to do sounds perfect.


I have the usual worry after a hand-in that I've forgotten something, Rob has the same feeling. But we checked with each other, made a check list last night, and double checked with Mario that we had everything, so I'm pretty sure we got it.


Right, it's been a long, strange, stressful, and fun trip.


Thanks to our lecturers for helping out, congratulations to the rest of our graduating classmates, and thank you to Rob for being a great work partner... We've been at each other throats for the last week, but we got a kick ass film out of it, and it's all been worth it!


Right, now I'm off to do absolutely nothing! Peace out =]

Production Diary - 25.05.12

It's officially deadline day and I've just put the finishing touches to my action plan and CV ready for handing in!


I'm overcome with a huge feeling of relaxation, hopefully it will remain tomorrow morning. All that is left to do is to get our action plan and CV printed and bound, and hand in everything first thing tomorrow morning.


Checklist:


3 Minute Film + Showreel - DVD
Action Plan - Bound
CV
Production Diary - Blog
Research - Blog
Poster + DVD Cover


Essay was handed in weeks ago...


That's everything to my knowledge... I really hope I'm not forgetting something!


Anyway, it's time for bed for me, we're getting another early start on our last day!

Action Plan Research: The Holy Trinity - Disney

I just realised I haven't blogged about the animators Holy Trinity, also known as Disney, Dreamworks, and Aardman (alright... I've blogged about Aardman). No I didn't forget Pixar, but "Holy Quad" or "Square" didn't sound as good, and Disney owns Pixar now anyway.


They are of course not the only large animation companies, but they are certainly the most dominant. They also each fill their own segment of the animation industry, rather than competing directly, Disney focus on traditional hand-drawn animation, and Aardman on Stop-Motion. Dreamworks and Pixar both do CG films, but with very distinctive styles that set each other apart; Pixar have a younger, cuter look to most of their films and are aimed at a very young audience, and Dreamworks create their films with the goal of entertaining all ages. 


Though while saying that I realise Pixar are about to break that trend with their new film 'Brave', which could easily be mistaken for a Dreamworks film. It's not out yet though, so my point is still valid at the time of writing =P.

With the trip to the Annecy film festival looming, and with many large animation companies on the prowl for new talent there I thought I'd better give a mention.


At the annual Annecy Animation Festival, representatives from Disney are there and ready to look at portfolios, and hold quick on-the-spot interviews. It's an exciting prospect, but reports from previous visitors to Annecy say that they're very strict about what they're looking for. Previous 3rd years went to them, expecting them to look through their showreels, when they were actually just wanting to see portfolios and drawings, I suppose it's much quicker.


Maybe if you have a good enough one, they give you a stamp and shove you into the next tent or something... The sheer volume of applicants at an animation festival teeming with students dreaming about working at Disney must be staggering, so I can see why they only need quick impressions.


With this in mind, I hope to collect together some of my sketches, and also to create more, of animals, characters, speed drawings, anatomy, and dynamic poses, all the things I expect they're looking for in a portfolio. It's a lot to do in a pretty short time, but if I sit in bed with my sketchbook a few nights in a row like I used to... I'll probably get a pretty decent collection together, certainly enough to look through in a 2 or 3 minute time slot... All this is assuming there actually are Disney representatives there this year... We will see!

Disney are one of the few animation companies still focusing on hand drawn animation. It set's them apart from many competitors, and it's good to see that there is still an audience for it. Obviously, to get a job at Disney, you need to be able to draw! 

Despite the cartoony and stylized appearance of Disney films, they like to see that a person is capable of drawing realistically as well as cartoon, and having a knowledge of anatomy and perspective is imperative. I think I have a pretty decent grasp on those things, hopefully I'll be able to show that in my drawings... 

Production Diary - 24.05.12

Well tomorrow is deadline day and we got everything finished today!

It's a huge relief to have everything finished, our DVD is made with our showreel and film on it and the menu has worked perfectly. Everything is now ready for hand in first thing tomorrow, just need to get some research bogged and my CV and action plan printed and bound.

We've had a small issue with rendering, which has been quite frustrating, after finishing our sound and rendering off a finished film we realized that on laptop speakers the film is just too quiet. Put down to the fact that we put our sound together, to sound right on full volume imac speakers... Didn't even occur to us this would happen. Ah well, live and learn!

The only way to fix it sadly is to go through the premiere file and manually set 10db audio gain on every single sound file, which Rob is currently doing right next to me. It's not going to take particularly long, around 20-30 minutes, but it's an annoying issue after we thought we were done.

Re-rendering the film soon, and then going to have to put the new louder footage into our DVDs. Probably be in uni for another few hours. Then home, and blogging alllllll night.

Production Diary - 23.05.12

2 Days o_O Holy crap!


Just kidding! OUR FILM IS FINISHED!!! 


That's right folks, all done, we thought we might not get there at a few points but here we are, with 48 hours to spare. We spent yesterday putting all of the shots together in Premiere and noticed a few continuity errors, which we fixed last night. Today we put the sound in, and it's finally all done!


Got to say I'm sick of hearing the song by now, but it really is awesome seeing it as a full and finished film. It looks fantastic! It was an ambitious project but I think we definitely pulled it off. I'm very very happy with how it's come out, and it should be up pretty soon! Vimeo limits allowing...


Mario has seen it and said he's happy with how it is now, but suggested a few things we could change. Which we're doing tonight. Just a few grunts and sighs to add so the mimes aren't quite so quiet... Nothing huge. 


Jud will be looking at it tomorrow, and hopefully we'll have the go ahead to render it off, and get our DVDs burned and ready for hand-in. Right now I'm going to concentrate on blogging my research for my action plan. 


Oh! Also, today Jud and I did my showreel, which will also be online and linked here soon =]


It's awl bleedin' comin' 'ageva!

Production Diary - 17.05.12

1 week tomorrow now to the FINAL deadline. 

Mine and Rob's personal deadline has been and gone, (it was Monday) and neither of us met it... The animating of the crowd is taking quite a bit longer than I had anticipated to animation and colouring is still going on. Should be done in the next few days, it's just a few small things left to do now. Mostly colouring...

Rob has been busy away getting our shots rendered, so has been in uni pretty much everyday, which apparently is making me look like I'm slacking. I'll email them, try to let them know I'm actually sat here 10+ hours a day drawing... everyday... 

Production Diary - 11.05.12

4 Days to go!


Well, it's been pretty full throttle the last week for Rob and I, the light at the end of the tunnel draws ever closer... Having a slight crisis of motivation today, I just want to be done!


It's all going pretty alright though, almost all of the shots are keyframed, just the crowd left to do for 2 shots... That's reserved for this weekend. A few shots left to be inbetweened (3 I think), and about 8 left to be coloured. 


I've broken down a to-do list for the last few days leading up to our deadline (which is the end of Monday) leaving 4 days, including today to get the last few things cleared off.


Basically it's worked out that Today, Tomorrow, Sunday, and Monday I have to finish keyframing / inbetweening a shot, and colouring a few others. It's a lot to do... The colouring takes longer than I had planned now that Oldie has quite a few more colours...


Oh, and I'm not sure that I mentioned Oldies new look, I know I mentioned he's no longer having stripes, his new look is similar to how he's been all along, his moustache is now a mid grey shade to match his hair and brows, and his sweater is a light grey, his skin and gloves are still white. Even though they're only flat colours, the additional detailing I have to do has more than doubled the colouring time per frame... But as I said, it's getting done.


Alas, I'd better get back to the endless grind of drawings... I can feel my soul dying! Just kidding...


...But I'm glad it'll be over soon.

Production Diary - 8.5.12

HOLY HELL SIX DAYS TO GO!!!

Just kidding... Actually everything is coming along swimmingly still, I've been inbetweening and colouring the shots for a few days now and they're almost all done! Just 5 shots left to inbetween and... Quite a few still to colour... But I can colour in zombie mode anyway and it won't take too long.

For practicality reasons a few changes have been made. Namely the shot from Oldie's feet looking up at him has been cut, now rather than cut to his feet and cut back to a full shot we just stay in the full shot through the 3 shots. The shot was giving me some trouble to draw, and after taking a good look at it, we realised it was there for pretty much no reason, it served no purpose other than making the shot really, really hard to animate. So now it is gone!

Also, Oldie's attire was going to have stripes, but after animating a shot with the stripes on, he didn't look right and the stripes didn't look good, they moved around a lot and it just looked silly. Now he has a light grey top on, his skin and gloves are still white, also we decided that there was really no reason why his moustache would be white, so that matches his hair colour now. Removing the stripes has made it much easier to get the shots finished.

I estimate I'll be done animating in 2 days, and colouring maybe 2 days after that... Which brings me 2 days shy of the deadline. Let's hope I can stick to that new schedule!

On Rob's side of things we've had a slight disaster with his computer going skitso... Hopefully it'll survive the next few weeks. We don't know what's actually wrong with it. Fingers crossed though. We're backing up extremely frequently now just in case it does kick the bucket.

Animating-wise he only has 6 shots left to animate, one a day is the schedule so it should come in on time! He's beginning to get nervous, but I'm confident we'll get everything done. 9 days for editing and a few bits of written work is plenty of time.

Production Diary - 02.05.12

Holy sh** it's May! o_O

13 days left to finish our animating! Eeek

Rob and I have set up a make-shift studio in my room where we can both work. Having each other looking over our shoulders is a good way of kicking us into gear... We really need to get cracking now.

Keyframing of all of the shots was finished last week, and I of course, forgot to blog it... I've been very busy after all! I've now begun on the inbetweens and colour filling stage, which is a fast process. In a fairly productive day yesterday I managed to finish 2 whole shots and another 2 today... Long shots too! Very pleased, I need to keep up this 2-a-day pace if I want to finish on time... Which I do.

I'm still confident we're on schedule... Behind... WAY BEHIND our planned schedule from the beginning of the year, but man were we deluded with that!

Stuff still left to do with the main project is finish animating (May 15th), find missing / better sounds, editting. Rendering will hopefully be beginning in the next few days (tomorrow ideally), but a few texture hic-ups are causing some trouble before we can start.

Anyway, I'm not quite done with my second of my 2-a-day shots, so I'd better get back to that! 

Peace out y'all!

Production Diary - 21.04.12

24 days to our deadline!

Things seem to be going quite well on the animation side. We've had quite a productive week this week!

A few textures were missing so I've had to spend some time making the missing stuff and fixing a few errors on the previous textures, all done now!

Animating is also coming along, only 13 shots left to keyframe, then I'm going through and inbetweening them. The keyframed shots basically look animated... Since I'm doing breakdowns (semi-inbetweens) for all of the movement, especially 3D movement. The inbetweens shouldn't take too long, but perhaps I'm being too optimistic! Time will tell... For now I remain confident we'll get it done!

There are a few shots that I'm avoiding animating at the moment, I won't ever want to do them... But eventually I'm going to run out of other shots.

The perspective shot from the ground is my most dreaded shot... What the HELL did we put that shot in for?!

For the sake of practicality we've had to make some cuts, for render times and work load we've removed a few of the members of the crowd. The girlfriend, because she had an awkward model that would have looked stupid without quite a lot of tweaking of cloth mods etc etc, and the grandson, just to save a little work animating him and allow us to slow down some of the movement in one of our shots.

Rob and I had hit a little bit of a brick wall with motivation at the end of last week. We're just drowning in work at the moment, but we took a long long long over due day off yesterday, played some squash and today we're feeling much better about things... Seems that the days off are quite important!

So for now, all is well!

Back... To... Animating...

Production Diary - 18.04.12

27 days until our deadline!

Jeez that deadline seems to be a lot closer all of a sudden! Productivity has definitely had a boot in the ass... Both of us are pretty much spending the whole day at our computers... Just trying to rattle of the keyframes now, just so we definitely have something resembling a finished film.

Amazing the amount of issues that crop up when you start animating something you expected to be an 'easy shot'. Every so-called 'easy shot' that I've started has been a pain in the ass, maybe less of a pain in the ass than the 'hard shots' but certainly not easy!

I'm realising that a LOT of Oldies movements are towards the camera, which isn't a great deal of fun to work out the angles for, it's damn tricky I tell you! But I'm not slacking... I'm making sure they all look right, and the movements look natural and fluid. So far I'm really happy with all the shots!

I just PRAY that they look right when they're composited together...

Rob recently uploaded our animatic to his vimeo account, so to save our house bandwidth of me uploading to my own youtube account, I'll link his video here...

Production diary - 14.04.12

31 days to our personal deadline! Not the actual deadline...

I finally have screenshots to show that I actually did anything at all for the first 2 months of this semester. As I mentioned before, I didn't think it was worth uploading images of the texture files, as on their own... They don't really look like much at all. The textures are now almost all applied to the scene and characters and things are really starting to take shape!

Here's some renders of Rookie's side of the canal with some textures applied (courtesy of Rob):

 

 Rob and I are both extremely happy with how the set is starting to look. I'll point out now that Rob did all of the modelling, and I created all of the textures, which Rob is applying. The sheer amount of files was slightly ridiculous, but it's looking like it was all worth it. I think the small details that we made sure to include add a lot of character to the whole set.

Here is another building textured... The marble textures (black bits) are a lot more detailed than they look! Slightly disappointing they don't show up more but on the whole it looks so good I don't feel like I wasted any time.

And last but certainly not least is how the first establishing shot is going to look:

There's just a few textures to go and it's looking fantastic! The central building at the back (the town hall) is much too bright (my fault) so I'm going to make some tweaks to the files, but otherwise the whole things is looking even better than I hoped it would, especially with the city scape back drop, which I also need to tweak.

In the mean time, I've been animating several shots, we're pretty much on track still, which is good, and I've mostly finished my action plan and have finished my essay ready for hand-in on Tuesday.

Things are looking good! Back to animating I go!

Production Diary - 09.04.12

45 days and counting!

It's the middle of the Easter holidays and I'm in Bath for a long weekend to welcome a new little person into the world. This means that I'm away from my main animation workstation computer (once you use a 27" monitor for animating / drawing it's hard to go back to working on a 15" laptop), so because of this I'll be spending any free time I get while down here on finishing off my written stuff... CV, Essay, and Action Plan primarily... 

It's now Monday and I've only had about an hour to do anything so far, but today Hannah has to go and visit several friends nearby, which gives me pretty much the whole day to shut myself away and get some words down!

Here's hoping that I don't get too side tracked!

Production Diary - 04.04.12

50 days and counting 'till deadline day!

Everything is rolling along at a steady pace, I'm still animating keyframes at the moment... I have quite a few shots ready for inbetweens now. I'm spending quite a lot of time on keyframes just because I want the poses to be quite dynamic, which so far I think I'm getting.

It's the easter holidays now, and on the final uni day my lecturers wanted to see the shots that I currently had, and thankfully they seemed to really like them, which was a nice surprise! I was quite anxious about showing it for fear of having to start again!

I have quite  a few more shots done now, almost half of the Oldie shots are keyframed. Then I just have a few shots of the crowds to do and then inbetweens. So I'm pretty happy with the pace at the moment, everything is coming together!

Rob and I set ourselves a new deadline today, which is to get everything finished and ready for editting by the 15th of May, after that our productivity could take quite a hit for at least a few days... So it seems prudent to get everything out of the way by then. That gives us 9 days to edit our showreels and the film together, which seems like a pretty realistic time-frame.

Good night all!

Production Diary - 20.03.12

Yet again it's been quite a while since my last post. Progress is in quite lareg chunks at the moment so we haven't had much to report in between posts.

So current progress on the film is looking good. We're a week or so behind schedule at the moment, but things are far from dire so far. The gargantuan task that was texturing is now, at last, behind me, and it's purely animating that needs doing now (for this project at least).

I finished making all of the character and set textures now, and Rob is in the process of applying them. So far so good. The characters are textured without any hitches that we can see:

He's onto rigging them now, so it's a pretty big step. I'll have images up as soon as the set textures are applied. I could upload the UV images, but they don't look like anything coherent before they're applied.

So for now, and the foreseeable few weeks, I'm animating. So far I'm concentrating on key-framing, as it is in my opinion the most difficult part. You get the flavour of the animation in key-frames, the in-betweens just make it look smoother. With time being a constant issue, I think it's best to get a full film of clicky footage and make it smoother, than to polish up every frame and risk coming short... Not that I'm worried about that just yet, but I'm a cautious guy!

Yesterday I went back to the animatic and added the shot numbers, shot lengths and total elapsed time onto the footage. We'll be using that animatic as our check-list of shots to animate etc, it's just much easier to scroll through a film and see what shots are where. It's also rendered out nice and small (only 100mb, which is TINY compared to most of our exports).

I tried to upload it to Youtube to link it here, but Youtube decided to be a truly colossal pain in the ass. So I'll try again another day, when the upload window doesn't constantly refresh with a notification of some damn competition. Someone needs a slap in the face for that annoying piece of code.

Animation-wise, 4 shots are pretty much key-framed now. I'll start adding inbetweens when I'm closer to having all of my footage key-framed. I'd rather have to tweak key-framed footage than fully animated 12fps footage.

10 weeks and counting! Back to work I go.

Production Diary - 3.3.12

It's been quite a while since I last posted and I really felt like writing something down.

I'm in Bath at the moment for the weekend so it's difficult to get any large chunks of time for homework, so updating the blog is perfect.

Rob and I are still pretty much on track with everything, we've had to make a few adjustments to the schedule, we were a little naive with our expectations before... There's a lot more work than we had anticipated.

Rob has pretty much finished modelling the character now and I'm currently texturing them so they're ready for rigging next week. Then I'll be able to properly get on with animating, which I'm actually really looking forward to now.

Animation has begun to a degree... I've keyframed about 15 seconds of footage, which isn't a terrible start considering that I'm actually not concentrating on animating at the moment, also one of the more difficult shots is pretty much done too (The walking towards the screen... Forward walk cycles haunt my nightmares).

As for texturing it's still ongoing but the light at the end of the seemingly endless texturing tunnel is finally nearing, this week should be the end of that! Another day or 2 at it and it'll all be done and I can stop staring at ugly UV wraps =].

I've now used up the amount of time it's socially acceptable to sit in a room on my own during a family gathering so I better get back to the crowd. Ta ra!

Production Diary - 16.02.12

It's been a while since my last update so I thought it about time to get something on here. 

Work still continues, I began keyframing last week as planned but the majority of work is still texturing... There's quite a bit more of it to do than I anticipated, but there is now a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm just a little tired of drawing wall textures... Looking forward to getting some variety with the characters.

We didn't want to import textures bit by bit as they're finished, it's better to wait for it to be done and get it all on in one go. So until all the building is done I don't have any progression images to show. Should be some finished texture renders up in the next week though! Hopefully they'll all fit together fine... Here's hoping!

Production Diary - 05.02.12

Well it's been a few days since I last posted so I thought that I'd better get an update on the interweb.

Animation has begun as planned, only started on 2 shots so far and only blocked in keyframes... We're being quite fussy with the actual animation on this one. I did 5 walk cycles to get Oldie's walk to look like Oldie's walk, and walking directly at the camera is quite an ache in the nether regions to draw!

The majority of work still ongoing for me is texturing, there really is an enormous amount of texturing to get through, and I'm trying to alternate between the animating and texturing while Rob is modelling. Speaking of which; the set is finished (modelling, about 50% textured) and modelling has begun on our characters! It's a very exciting time, though I know when this character is done it's another texture pack to do... 

Also regarding feedback, Mario had a look at our set and didn't like the floor texture (the one that took me 5 hours), he says it's too distracting. I can see where he's coming from, so I toned down the darker colours to be less bold, and now the whole thing does look less "in your face". Hopefully he'll like this version better... 

Some very nice screen shots from Rob's blog showing the set with the lighting rig in it, I'm loving how the whole thing is looking. Working in a group is giving us the ability to get a bit more carried away with details, and I think they will really add to the overall quality of the film.

Pretty hmmm?

It'll look better with the textures finished and some characters living in it!

Speaking of which, to achieve a more 'lived in' feel we've decided to use some royalty free pre-rigged characters we can find on the internet, just to walk around in the background, and make the place feel as 'alive' as we can.

I better get back to texturing again! Peace out y'all.

Work Update - 27.01.12

Another week down and Rob and I are now officially slightly behind schedule. It's ok, it's just taking a little longer to texture the set than we anticipated... Almost all of the 3D side still needs doing, we figure that being a group project, what makes us stand out more is attention to detail, so there's quite a bit of that!

The plan was to start animating this week just gone, instead I'll be officially putting pen to tablet on Monday, mixing in key-framing with texturing the set... Some animation really does need to start happening now! It'll be a load off when we finally have even a shot finished! It's my experience that everything seems so far form done for quite a while and suddenly comes together extremely quickly... I'm looking forward to that point!

Anyway, the set is modelled and getting there with textures, character modelling will be starting soon and camera set up, aswell as the 2D animation will be on it's way! Exciting times =]

C'est Fini! - 23.01.12

Finally the flat shapes are finished on the floor texture; here are the WIPs:

Pretty happy with the finished look of the thing, I tried to pay attention to not accidentally creating any noticeable patterns that would look obvious when it's repeated. There's also no distinguishable orientation for the same reason. 

Now to get to shading and texturing for the 3D side!