26th of May to the 30th of May

Aims

Get as much Animation done as possible.

Give the final animatic that has been blocked out to the sound guys, Alex and Mark.

Goals Reached?

I’ve been doing solid animation all this week and am really getting on with it. All of scene one is animated now and finished and I have given Andrew quite a lot to do as well. It’s really now a matter of just sitting down and getting it done. I also managed to talk to Dave about putting a curve in the stamp so it’s not flat all the time and he did that for us. I also asked him about putting two different textures on one plane and he managed to do that too. Now I can go through doing the animation on the stamp properly. I’m half way through scene 4 now and that is composed of 20 shots all of which I have already blocked out.

Rob has asked if we need any help animating and I’ve been pleased to give him a shot to start with and will give him more if he wants them.

I’ve had a horrid time this week trying to make George’s book stay in his hands while he holds it and moves. One way to solve this problem is to key every frame but this still looks bad and is not a good solution as we have countless scenes in which the characters hold items.

To solve it I have put constraints onto many objects. The stamp book has been one of the biggest problems because it is not only Dave’s model for his film and we have had to turn it up the other way round and that has been super confusing when texturing but it has also had to be passed from one character to the next. In this way I have had to use the invisibility key option so that as one constrainted book is passed it quickly disappears but another appears just like I had to do with the scenes in scene 1. This screen grab above shows the drop down menu that enables you to use the constraint. I had to use the parent constraint as i found that this worked the best.

There are have been instances where i have had to change some shots from our original animatic as the animation was too complex to do in the time we had. When george sits down in scene 4 and hands Lani her book back was riddled with problems and i had to cut away in places as you can see from these two playblasts.

19th of May to the 23rd of May

I have just begun the animation this week but thanks to the blockout that I did it’s not taking too long. Some of it is not as good as I would hope but we really don’t have a lot of time and I want to get the whole film looking relatively good. I don’t want any bits not animated. Scene one has been finished this week. I particularly like the shot in which George tries to catch the stamp with his tweezers. I also blendshaped the tweezers after Andrew modelled them so that George can pinch at the stamp. I’m quite proud of this shot. The only really big problems I encountered were placing the box George has on the table. I had to turn off the box’s visibility and duplicate an identical box, turn off it’s visibility until George places the first box onto the table. What you are seeing are actually two boxes exactly the same.

This weekend I also went to the London Expo as I wanted to ask Tokyo Pop and other companies about a job over the summer, I discovered that there aren’t very many but they would like to see a CV so I need to send that to them.

This week i also gave the sound designers our final block out with almost all the animation complete. They were pretty happy and we should have the sound by Monday the 10th of June.

In this final picture below you can see the glow on the stars being altered as i opened up the layer options. The effect was really nice. There is a progress screen grab and the actual background layer as well. I like this effect as the glow is softer than the one before. You can also see that the eifel tower has moved to behind the trees.

12th of May to the 16th of May

This week I have been able to completely dedicate to making the 3D blockout. It’s going really well because of Anton taking on China now. I’ve received the China file from Anton this week and it looks lovely, much better than my version of China. I’m so glad he took that on and it took a whole weight off of my shoulders. I was also really pleased to hand over Paris to Josie this week as now I don’t have to worry too much about that either.

I had originally planned to ink in China in blue ink so that it would look like those white and blue China plates but Anton's version is much nicer. Here is my started lineart before Anton took over.

I have received the final copy of Paris from Josie too over this weekend which i'm really happy about although i wanted the colours changed a little so Andrew said he'd fiddle with that a little.

I also over heard Mike Hirsh saying that the Eifel Tower was horribly out of proportion so i have changed that and put it behind the layer of trees. I think it looks more believable now. Thank God i decided to do everything on seperate layers in preperation for After Effects.

The blockout is going well and i've had to learn to put IK handles onto George's rig in his arms so that when we attach him to the bike we can parent his hands to the bike's handles and his arms will move as they would in real life. This makes the whole process much easier as if i hadn't made the IK handles and parented his hands i would have had to key every frame for each animation on the bike. Dave very kindly made the bike for me but i put the Ik handles on myself.

In this blockout i've been setting up all the cameras. They may change before we finish the final film. However on some it has not just been a matter of placing the camera but actually changing the focal length on it too. In this shot the stamp lands in the road. We wanted to show the house in the background but still have the stamp close to the lens so i had to play with the focal length to make this effect work.

This week i also managed to draw the images for the beginning of the film that Andrew wanted to put in. The idea was that we would begin on a picture frame and see a couple of photos the first being the stamp collector, George and his assumed wife outside a very nice neat cottage. the second of him and her in a wheel chair indicating that she had fallen ill. They both hold stamp collections in these photos to show it was something they did together. The last photo however is of him alone holding two collections to suggest that she has died. Morbid i know but we wanted to show that he did have someone once and he cared about her but hes become lonely and let the cottage fall into a mess.

Here are the pictures.

HEre is the animatic so far

5th of May to the 9th of May

This week i got the Egypt file from Josie and made a few little changes to it so that it had an overall more muted yellow look to it. I also put some filters over it to make it look a little grainy like papyrus which is what the Egyptians used to draw on.
Here is the finished edit
i'm looking forward to putting all these images together now.
i've borrowed the book Dave made for his film and turned it upside down for George so that it looks like he's looking at the last page. I've just adapted the textures Dave had a little so that it doesn't look exactly the same.

I've started to do an animatic in 3D so that i have a really good idea of how the film is going to look but I've only started it half way through the week so its not very well done yet.
Its pretty bad because Lani haas no rig so shes just a block character that can't move.

These two notebook images are some of the many note plans i have so that all the timing stays the same and Andrew and i know how long each shot is. It takes a very long time to work all this out but its worth it and we've had no problems with it. The numbers on the right are where the shots begin on the timeline in Maya. I always save it in the right place sio that if Andrew needs the file the timeline is in exactly the right place already.

I've finished Lani's texture now i found a great Hawaiian print to put on her top. I was trying to put a flesh layer beneath her skin but it was coming up really nasty on her model when i did test renders so i left it off. I added some pink to her cheeks to make her seem more alive.

28th of April to the 2nd of May

We’ve recently heard that Asa’s group, The Day that I Died has been cut. It’s a real shame because the film was going to be really lovely. I wish I didn’t have as much work so that I could help out. Mike has sent us an email asking if there are any groups that need help as the members of The Day that I Died now need work. I’ve managed to get Josie to do some background painting for us on the 2D stamps which is a huge weight off my shoulders. I’ve handed Egypt over to her as this has been penned in already and simply needs colouring. I gave her what I had started and told her what I wanted it to look like. The task is quite easy but just time consuming. I made sure when inking that there were no open spaces so that colouring is simply a matter of paint bucketing the selected areas with the magic wand tool. Luckily Egypt can be done this way as the hieroglyphs were quite flat simple colours. Beneath is the in progress version of what i gave Josie as i had started it to show how i wanted the picture to be coloured.

I have also included a version of the line art as i had to do this by hand and it took a long time.

Dave has also given me the George rig now and I need the environment so that I can put him in and start animating him. I’ve also given him the Lani rig and I hope that I won’t have too long to have that although that’s not as big a deal. I can animate without Lani at the moment. Next week I want to start compiling the blockout in 3D so that it is easier of Andrew to animate on it and I can get the animatic the same as the drawn one I gave the sound guys Alex and Mark.