The end is getting near!

Ah, some more updates, There wont be that much to write about mostly pictures. Basically its been a  couple of weeks since my last update… yes, I just realized just how many weeks ago it was since I updated this journal. But no matter.

There has been a lot of progress, we only lack a little animation on the goat and  I dare to say thats all we need to say that we are complete with all the CG stuff… NOT! Well, not much else, There is still the intro part that I wish to begin working on asap. Most of the lightning is done, just waiting for that last part of animation just to get it optimized on those shots. I’ve done all the lighting so far, and its difficult and time consuming, A lot more time consuming than I’d anticipate. And I don’t feel its that good either. But its acceptable  for this kind of project. Right now it kinda looks a bit flat since we only just the most basic textures most of the time, and we kinda forgot to put Specular on some (Most) textures, so it kinda looks a bit flat. We have already rendered out 1/3 of the shots. So, I guess that’s the style we are going for.

Currently I’m adjusting the lights (again) in one of the scenes. Hopefully done this evening, so that tomorrow I can begin working on the intro /ending shot, which will be all made in After effects I hope. Except certain elements, like the tower/smoke. My plan is to render out the tower, have it as a plate and comp in elements that will be in the shot and make a camera in after effects – basically. I haven’t really done it before but I think I can pull if off – reading it now, that doesn’t sound very promising giving the time left. But i have some experience with After effects.

Hmm, Now over to my thoughts about the time we have left, two weeks I think. In worst case scenario we might have to ask for one more week. We have one guy who works on the sound, one guy who works on finishing off the particles and does the rendering and he’s soon done with the particles – just a bit of smoke left. One guy who is animating the goat done, I think he’s got a couple shots left, not so much. And me who is adjusting lights and gonna get the intro shot done, and I’ll start to comp the shots as soon as they a done I think. So gotta work a bit between those this week.

We are rendering out in 1280×720 and using render elements so we get it out in its basic components, and comp it so we can do some changes if we like more easily.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The Great Outdoors

And here we have the outside, no texturing done here yet. This will also be a very short scene, so basically not adding more details than necessary, perhaps some more when we texture it. All the stones on the walls will be baked into a texture as a displacement map so that we do not have to have hundreds of objects in the scene. And it kinda looks better which is good since when I created this scene I was worried if the stones would create to much “noise” The planes in the background along the wall I’m thinking to put some bushes with an Alpha map to them, if I get the time. We have so much left to do that I’m worried that we will not make all of it, especially since one of the characters at this point is not yet completed due to unexpected complications with the rigging, hopefully that will be sorted the following weed and animation can begin on that as well. Since CJ is quite quick to animate and basically all the Servant animation and wizard animation is complete more or less, except polishing. there is still hope left. IF everything goes quite well the following week we might begin to render our first shots next weekend! Tho I wont get to high hopes.

Note: The characters meshes in the scene is just there to help get the right proportions.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Wizard Study

So, the wizard room is more or less done, We’ve done most of the texturing there, as one can see, there is not much else to say than that, since the shots are not yet complete I’ve just placed everything in the room ready to be altered, moved around or deleted according to what we want in the shot. There has been a lot of reusing of the textures naturally to save time, especially with the wood, I’ve basically just changed the contrast on the colors on some of them to get some variety. Thus there are a couple of individual wood textures. But my logic is, since everything happens so quickly, and the viewers are not focusing on the environment that much I feel its safe to reuse textures. There is about 10 – 14 different book textures. I did not want them to have just plain colors on them, but they where quick to create. I have not yet set up lights in the room. As with everything I suspect it will take more time than I’d anticipate.

Side note: and yes, looking now I do notice I need to add something behind that door hehe, A mistake that should be easy to fix.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

A short update – Servant room.

So, another update and yes its a while since my last update, so I’ll post a few updates today. First one is that we are done with all the modeling of all the environment, well we will most likely add and remove things for each shot if necessary. So basically the servant room is a small room, it is located not to high up into the tower, outside of the window we got a small shed that works as a support for the goat, as we did cut out the part where the goat actually climbs this shed, But the shed and the window will most likely be in a short shot to make the connection. Well it will be fairly obvious when the goat sneaks into the servant room through the window. Well the room is small and is connected to the spiral stairs that goes up the top of the tower.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Finally the Environment – Wizard Study room

So, another short update.

It was back when I made the previz room for the Wizards Study I found out roughly how I would make the room. Back then I did a lot of small tests to attempt to find some unique shape for the walls, since it is on top of a tower,  as one can see here;

At this stage we also played with the shape of the tower, since at this point we where planning for the goat to climb all the way up and into the room! However when we trashed that idea, the outside vs the inside was not so critical, well, not much else to say about that. So, after a couple of attempts I found a look I liked on the room:

I basically decided to give him a bit large room,  actually, it was huge, way to large so for every Version I made of it, the room became smaller but usually a lot. we had not worked much to how to scale things at this point nor did we have any characters.  Anyways, These are all very early version that I made for to have something for the PreViz.

And here we got work on the “final” which I’m currently working on,

However, when I started putting in models that me and Andre have been working on, we found out that.. ouch. The room is still huge. We noticed it well when we started filling the room up with objects, so basically, I decided to cut a away a section of the room, which would be the 2nd “floor” Doing that kinda sucked cause I liked it. But it was necessary and I think it will look overall better and perhaps a more home feel to it. We will begin to texture it next week.

So this is the room, as it looks now, considering the walls and where I cut it, its not yet done, but I felt it was important to get all the major changes in the post before just posting something final.

There is still a good amount of details that is missing, but which will probably get done tomorrow. And on Saturday me and André is planning to get the Servant room done, its a lot smaller and got fewer details. And here is a close up of the wizards main work area, Note that nothing here is final! there will be many changed as to where stuff is placed etc! I find it bit amusing that that area which got so much detail is only going to last but a short moment. But I think it will be worth it.

A few updates.

So basically last week I dedicated to the wizard as I mentioned in my previous post. I am more or less done with all the modeling on the wizard, However I will not have the time to texture him or rig him at this point simply because I need to get busy with the environment. The servant is now completed by CJ and he’s already begun with the blocking stage. Then some environment would be nice to have, so for the next couple of weeks I will probably be busy with completing the environment and texturing. I’m not sure at this point how long this will take, hopefully not to long with the models, texturing will be the time consuming part here. And when I’m done with that I suppose I got the get the wizard done and ready for his one shot. If I will animate him at that point I do not know, or if someone else are going to do it.

There is also the issue with sound, as when we spoke with Deryck our web-tutor last week he gave some good advice about that, perhaps we should spent a day or two just on the recording bit splitting up in two groups getting as much soundtracks to work with as possible, hopefully before the animators completely gets engulfed with.. animating.

Now, over to my wizard, and finally some screen-shots next to the goat Lars made! We had a small discussion about his size, the goat was already a bit big in an earlier version so he had to scale it down

So, well here he is, Now this is a bit late update because the last couple of days I’ve been working with the environment.

AFP – and so the story goes

So, after several weeks in to our last project I have completely neglected the Journal post, forgotten about it and so on. Well I’ll try to keep it updated. I’ll write a bit about what we have been doing the last couple of weeks.

So, a short review of what we have been doing, basically we worked out this idea, an old wizard living in his tower, with his servant. Now he stumbles, falls down and accidentally gets his magic wand to turn him into a goat, yes a goat. In doing so he accidentally alerts his servant whom sits in his room a floor down. Comes up and see the goat and think that its a real goat that somehow got inside the tower. Throwing the goat out. Now the wizard ( goat ) got to get inside again to be able to turn himself back, but when he manages to get the wand he gets interrupted  by the servant and breaks it, turning the servant into a dog who, will chase the goat, and that’s it.

The first weeks we pretty much work more as a group rather than individual parts of the project, we spent a lot of time just finding an idea, I’ll admit we weren’t that effective mostly because we didn’t know what exactly what we wanted to do. we went everywhere from a meditating monk to a mailman viking going from floating islands to deliver mail, this was where we somehow got into the idea of having a goat in the film, we played with the idea for the mailman to deliver a goat to someone living in some strange place and so on, we liked the floating islands quite much so we got stuck with the idea of goat and floating islands. Then we went back to having a wizard mixed in the idea and thats where we began to  flesh out the part where the wizard got turned into a goat.

And well, now we are here. we have four characters we are working on at the moment one for each person in the group, I think perhaps its a bit overkill to make four characters for a minute and a half long film. Hopefully we’ll get them done as soon as possible, this week or so.  Then me and André got to get busy making all the environment, get the basics in so that the two animators got something to animate in.

I got the responsibility to create the wizard, I’ll post some updates this week on the progress on that. Hopefully I’ll get it all done the following week, but honestly, I doubt it. One of the big challenges with creating the wizard and the goat that is, is to make sure they look like the same character just transformed. Its going to be tough just to get a pleasing result, but I cannot spend to much time on a character that is only going to be in two or three shots making it  10 – 20 seconds at most. Compared to the amount of work that remains on the film, and to point out we got two “dedicated” animators in the group, and two “dedicated” everything else.

This recipe will hopefully get us done in time since Animation will be the most time consuming part of the whole thing. So the logic is when Lars and Cj is animating me and Andrè will get the time to finish the environment, texturing, lighting and rendering and compositing. We’re planning to have a shot-production mentality. Tho I suspect the “who does what” might blend out a bit in the end, since I suspect the animators might be get tired of animating after 6 weeks of it – I hope not.

I really hope we manage to get some really nice looking environment and animation, and characters. Well to say I really hope it will be a good short film, but I should probably not have to high expectations, since well this is our first film and the first of everything well, usually does not go as planned.

Now, do I think we will actually manage it on time  errrmmhh…. No. I suspect we’ll have some sort of a panic attack sometime in production having to cut out stuff we have probably spent to much time on.

The second week of this assignment.

The second week of the assignment we picked one idea, and made a storyboard a indent to a  fictional “Company” name to support the idea. Since well, we have agreed on the and developed the plot etc and so on a bit further I’ll just copy paste the plot and pitch here. We voted  to go with the “Danny the robot”  I like the idea cause it is simple and easy to work with given the time period we had ( one week ) and it was bit amusing idea. Here is a link to his journal post, we divided work and made the story board and here is the link to the Indent we made which Christer did quite a lot on!

Danny the sweeper robot.

Danny is a sweeper robot, spends his days by sweeping his masters floors day in and day out. This day he spots a dust bunny tumbling across the floor and he chases it. It flies out the open window and Danny becomes sad, but spots another one behind him.

Plot.

The story begins with us seeing Danny rolling around on the living room floor doing his thing wondering how it all came to this. Why couldn’t he have gotten a better job, like sweeping the queens floors? He stops he spots something in the distance, a dust bunny blowing around in the draft of the open windows. Giving it all he’s got, he heads over towards the dust bunny. Almost there and the dust bunny picks up speed. It’s almost like the dust bunny is alive. Danny ends up chasing the bunny all over the room back and forth. Suddenly the dust bunny heads towards one of the open windows and flies out. Danny stops below the window and becomes sad, turns around and slowly heads away from the window with a sad face. Another dust bunny then floats around in the other end of the room. His face lights up and he speeds towards it and the movie ends there.

Here is the Storyboard: Three pages, it represent the story alright.

Self reflecting – selling ideas.

When I think about it,  there are indeed many ways for me to sell my ideas, trying to “sell” my idea to the rest of the study group is not exactly a difficult ordeal, since well, it is easer to communicate to them rather than some, lets say a real producer. There is literally no formalities within the study group. If I where to “sell” my idea in a more formal way to a producer, I’m not so certain as to how I would proceed to be honest. I guess I would just have to figure out that if that time ever comes. And yes, well even tho what the teachers have said with tips and so on about how to “sell” an idea. I’m pretty sure its a different game when it comes to actually doing it.

And lets be realistic, if you have an idea. It better be somewhat good before one would even attempt to pitch it to a producers or your boss even. In the study-group its a lot easier, especially everyone got an assignment about pitching ideas and so forth. But lets say I had something good, and I knew it was good and perhaps I’ve even made, a Previz or some other kind of clip that was nice to look at. There are always forums, communities with people that “knows” people that perhaps would be interested, so yeah. If I really wanted my idea to be known there are always ways to get it out.

Project Conceptualization

Now, a little update to the Journal again…

This time around our assignment is indeed to pitch two ideas for a animation short and write a little about what style and inspirations I used.

The Pitch:  A fish named Spicy, who lives in an aquarium.  Spicy and his best friend, miss Scuba diver, an aquarium decoration who blow air bubbles  into the water for a living. Spicy feels that he is unappreciated, one day getting enough.

When it comes to style or look to the short, I’m going for the cartoony look, with simple models and textures. However there will be a good amount of environment details in the short, considering its an fresh water aquarium it will be plants, a “background” in order to get the typical aquarium background, at this stage I’m unsure if there should be any other fish thats shown in the camera. Perhaps he is the only one there. Also this photo here do not represent how I want Miss scuba to look. But it basically got the same function in the aquarium.

Most people have heard about Finding Nemo by Pixar which is a good animation movie. There is a scene there in the beginning where Nemo is put into an aquarium which I find to be a rather interesting environment. An artificial underwater environment fish tank. Studying that scene can also help, and not to mention a real aquarium.. which of course I got access to hehe. The Lighting here would be a challenge, especially when it comes to create the mood of the film, seeing that Spicy is rather lonely, and perhaps a little dampen atmosphere . Still there would have to be done more planning and research into that to find what I’m looking for than there is time left of the assignment.

The Plot: Spicy lives his life quietly in the little aquarium. He is not quite like other fishes in the aquarium whom which spends their lives without a concern, except the occasional how much food will we get today, and hope that someday someone will drop the entire food canister into the water. No, Spicy has his attention elsewhere and his eye on miss Scuba whom playfully blow bubbles into the water for Spicy to swim and play around in.

He do however have a hard time understanding miss Scuba, thinking she is a bit quiet and perhaps shy. Over time Spicy has grown into a more romantic view towards miss Scuba. Concerned that she does not feel the same way. He goes into more drastic ways to get her attention. Its easy to see that memory is not his strongest side because of his constant anticipation on the wait for a response.

In hope to get her response, we see him swim into the scene holding ( with his fins) three rocks and attempts to juggle the rocks, but after a quick juggle he stops and waits for a response not getting any he throws the rocks away, quickly swims out and quickly swims back into the scene this time doing fish acrobatics, still no response . Having saved the best for last he pushed a tiny plastic barrel ( Aquarium decoration) into the scene, in front of miss Scuba – which he then pulls “magically” out from “behind” his back two dinner plated complete with fish food, then quickly ties a napkin around his neck and begins to gobble the food, looking up to see that he has been rejected one more. Now upset he lets his anger take control, tightens his right fin and smashes the barrel, that despite the hard “impact” gets a little pushes and slowly falls over to the side because of the water.

Now he swims up and gets the courage the push her a little and as it turns out she is not that stable and slowly tips over, Spicy now shocked that she’s moving, finally a reaction! Now suddenly become concerned since she’s falling to the ground and the air hose connected to her becomes loose. Spicy now panics as she lies there with no bubbles coming out. Ignoring the bubbles thats comes out of the sand – in his mind those have nothing to do with miss Scuba and are just ordinary bubbles.

Now in despair, he attempts to get her up, or turn her around with no bubbles. Thats when he looks up to the surface and down on her, up again and down. Thinking that perhaps I need to get her to the surface, in an all out struggle he manages to get her to the surface, only to loose the grip. Now seeing her fall to the group, he gives up. From Miss Scuba’s POV we see he swims away and then to his little hideout, where we will see that he falls to sleep / rest.

When he wakes up, he swims around the corner only to find her standing in her usual spot blowing out bubbles once more, ( The owner fixed it). Thrilled and happy, all of his previous troubles now gone, we see him Swimming thrilled over and continuously swimming around her as we move away from the scene. Forever “doomed” to love her. And thats basically it.

A small note here, I’m still fairly unsure about the ending, I have a few different also, but this one is the one I feel working better at the moment. If I am to pursue this idea in the future a lot more work has to be done with Plot.

Mr Frog

This is my second idea that I will present to the current conceptualization assignment, I like this one better than the one with fish I think it is because it simpler in several aspects, specially in the plot, here it goes:

Pitch: A frog sitting at his pond when a fisher manage to toss a fishing fly next to him, the frog mistakingly thinks that its a real fly and attempts to eat it, it turns out to be a tug of war for the Frog in order to survive.

When it comes to the look for this idea, I’m still very much in the cartoony look world. But perhaps a bit more simplistic version than I presented for the first idea. Here everything happens in one little scene, just a little corner in a larger pond. The world will be fairly simple. And colors, I’m thinking actually perhaps slightly “washed out” warm summer green on the surroundings, trying to create a more warm, a bit dry summer day. I suspect strong colors will make slightly tiresome to watch -perhaps- But I don’t know quite yet. As a frog, I’m thinking a bit more classical mid-sized frog, who of course is very flexible and his front legs works as arms when he needs to grab on to something – if he needs to use them. I can’t say I have found many related shorts to this idea. I found however a few interesting videos with frogs of course and this one.

Plot: A frog sitting on his usual rock close the  edge of the pond, snapping life out of mid air, enjoying the insects. We see him relaxing catching two or three insects when a rather peculiar insect lands near him, very hairy. The frog however does not notice the line attached to it. A bit curious and laid-back , he shoots out his tongue, grabs it and as soon as he does that. The fly reveals itself to be a fishing fly! The fisherman (not shown) Now begins to pull the string, and it literately becomes a tug of war, where he have to fight for his tongue and life. Grabbing whatever he can, pushing his feet down into the rock, going back and forth. Suddenly the hook snaps off the tongue and “shoots” back in to the mouth. The frog quickly over his mouth with his hand and sits still for just a moment and then almost begins to cry, just when he spots another real insect flying by. Loosing his attention on the pain the quickly snaps the insect and eats it, enjoys it just as another insects comes into view, now he’s completely forgotten about the fishing fly. As he continues to enjoy life and eating insects another fishing fly lands near him, now this time a bit suspecting, raises an eyebrow and shrugs, ending the movie with him shooting his tongue out and catching his expression right after he realizes his mistake – again.

Here are some more inspirational pictures, there are plenty of interesting frog designs to look at :