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.