June the 9th to June the 13th

Aims

Finish the film and sort out all my folders.

I just have to do the after effects and Rob has already said that he can help me out with this so with two of us I don’t see why we can’t get it done. All the journey sequences are ready to go. As I said last week I’ve already prepped Holland and Egypt. So we need to go through the others to make sure everything is in the correct layers to be transported into after effects.

This week will be composed of compositing for me both in premier and after effects.

Goals Reached.

This week has been such a mad rush. Over the weekend I had to finish off and tweak some animations that were looking a bit stiff. Luckily I got those done and Andrew and I were in on Saturday and Sunday to get the film rendering over the weekend. Having finished the animation when I went back to check on it for some reason Maya had not saved the files. I was back to the start with one of my scenes. It was frustrating but I just had to sit down and do it again. But faster.

Andrew has been having problems of his own with the lighting but he’s working them out. We’ve had to settle for a simpler render than what we originally planned but I hope we can fix the other one for the degree show.

My laptop has really struggled this week as I’ve pushed it’s limits having Maya, Photoshop and Premier all running at the same time and it’s held up pretty well.

On Monday Rob and I sat down and started the after effects scenes. I gave him Holland and I took Egypt. First I imported into After Effects the stamp border so we had a size to work to to keep them all the same and made sure our compositions were set to 720 by 576 as I didn’t want to double stretch anything.

We then scaled all the layers that we needed so for example I imported Paris’ border separately then the background so that George would look like he was in the stamp. We also animated him riding on the bike in Maya and rendered it out with no background so we had just George on an alpha channel. I had to also apply a mask onto the layers that moved so that they wouldn’t show outside of the stamp border. The finished result looks something like the one below. I also had to animate the stamp’s flight through the locations and render that out and import it back into After Effects again. All the stamp movies had to be rendered lossless with alpha so that they we just had the stamp and no extra image around the border when i imported it back into After Effects for the final version.

Once finished this process and I had all the little movies I could start compositing them together again. This I was a little confused about at first.

I originally had to zoom into the first stamp in After Effects but after realising that the resolution would be far too small and all you would see was a blurry image I had to go back to Maya and change a few things. I had to make the texture on the book a much higher resolution so that all the little stamps could be seen even if up very close. This worked a charm and I could then go back to After Effects and complete Scene 3.

In After Effects I imported all the little movies of the stamps and then a background the same colour as the stamp collection books pages. This meant that the two images would blend together without a huge jump. I also imported flat pictures of the stamps (not the movies) so that I could make the films play and then stop when I wanted them too just by switching a still image with a movie. This worked well although there are jumps between some images as Rob had to adjust some pictures so they would work in after effects and I did not have the updated files in time for the final submission but they’re something I can add for the degree show.

My last task in After Effects was to make the background move off shot so that it runs smoothly into the film. This was a lot easier than expected as all I had to do was key in the background (the book page) to move off of shot and then when rendering make sure I set it to render “lossless with alpha” as this renders an alpha channel under all of your layers. So therefore when I removed my final background layer you can see underneath shot 1 of scene 4. Job done.

I think this worked really well, there are bits I want to change, mainly changing the flat stamp images to match the moving stamp images better and to try and get the page of the book to move off shot better. Maybe draw the edge of the book too.

The most important goal this week was to make sure all the renders were done and composite them. Seeing I’m not really in charge of rendering as that task has fallen to Andrew I had to composite everything together in premier. That sounds easy but with the journey the way it was mixing after effects and Maya renders and making sure it all fitted the Sound Mark and Alex did for us it was a lot of maths. I had particular problems as I had changed the zoom in to be rendered from Maya so I had to work out exactly how many extra frames we needed on the beginning and on the end. 44 to the end of Scene 2 shot 18 and 73 to the beginning of scene 4 shot 1. Luckily my Maths was correct and the sound was still on time.

I also made the credits in After Effects simply by keying in a frame for 2 seconds then keying in another with the credits written onto it until I’d mentioned everyone. This is another thing I would like to be able to change as I think it would have been a good opportunity to show off some of the concept art that we did. I hope I will get a chance to sit down and do this.

Having imported the sound and all the renders I just need to add sky to the background of all the Maya scenes. This was simply getting a Photoshop image that measured 1024 by 576 and importing it into premier and putting it on a layer beneath that of the film. I think it looks pretty nice. In this screen shot you can see the sky layer in the left window and the film in the right.

I’d just like to say well done to everyone and a big thank you to everyone who helped us out. I’d also like to say thank you to all the tutors and friends who have supported me throughout this year. It’s been really hard and thank you for helping me through it all.

2nd of June to the 6th of June

Aims

There are many things to be done this week and they all need to be completed or we’re in serious trouble.

Firstly I have to finish all the animation that isn’t already done. I also need to get Holland all coloured in and set up ready for After Effects. I’d like to have rendered a good portion of the film by the end of this week to so that next week we will have finished rendering by Wednesday and we have the rest of the week to get ourselves together and composite.

Goals Reached?

I finished Holland this week it looks really nice and I’m really happy with it. I used coloured pencils to give it a really 2D feel and hope that George will look ok up next to it for the windmill fans instead of using straight lines I made huge circles to get the feel for a turning motion, it’s just something small but I thought it was a nice effect. I’ve even gone over all the stamps and cut them all up you can see them all here. I’ve added print marks to them to make the look more authentic and it adds a nice touch.

We’ve only just started rendering which scares me. Rendering in general scares me as I don’t know much about it although I’ve learnt an awful lot this term about it. Andrew is really in charge of rendering as he has to adapt the lighting as he goes about doing it. I keep nagging him so I’ve promised that I won’t next week as I think I’m being a little too irritating he knows as well as I do that this has to be finished.

We have also had a little crisis this week regarding sound. Basically the sound guys, Alex and Mark came and told us that for their show reel and work they need a higher quality version of our film. We have had to go through the whole film re playblasting everything in a bigger resolution and putting in all the animation to the correct environments. To be honest it’s not too big a problem. We would have had to do it anyway but this way we had to do it and a lot quicker than we would have. We have to come in this weekend to do it and hand it over to them but I’m so pleased it’s done. It’s more or less like we’re killing two birds with one stone and I’m glad it’s done now. The biggest problem for the Sound guys was that they couldn’t clearly see where George’s feet were hitting the ground as the film really was tiny and they couldn’t re size it. I think this experience gave us a real kick in the right direction to get things moving faster. It was good to have the pressure put on looking back.

This also meant that many scenes were all up and ready for rendering as they had their animation and environment.

To do all this I had to first open up the animation file, delete all the old environment pieces that I had used for reference while animating then import the new environment. We then set the playblast to full resolution and I composited all of those playblasts together in premier over our existing animatic.

Now that Alex and Mark have our movie we can’t change anything so I have to be really careful with each shots length so that it’s not too short or too long.

The animation is now done except for a couple of shots at the end of scene 4 but they’ve got their basic animation I just need to sit down and tweak it.

It is hard to upload all the animation that i've done as i have done the vast majority. Instead it is easier to tell you what shots i did not animate.

Rob continued to help with the animations this week and did a really nice job. I had to tweak one of the animations and for some reason the constraints I set up on George and the book didn’t work properly but I’ve fixed that now so it’s not a problem at all.

Here are the shots from scene 4 that i have improved. It's taking forever to upload them and i can forsee having problems uploading next week as it will hopefully be the final movie. I'll try my best.