Current layouts

Production

Confusion, Edits and Pipelines


I've been battling with myself whether to write this or not, but unfortunately, I feel I have to as it is affecting my work.  Before Christmas and at this stage my confidence is fluctuating constantly and quite often don't feel I'm receiving enough support from tutors.  I ask for help/ask for a tutorial and PROMISED and it's cancelled or put off, mainly because the same student is being seen and seems to get priority over everyone else or it's forgotten about even though I remind them through out the day. It has happened for around 3 months now.  Also, in the least pathetic sounding way possible, for some reason on a Tuesday even when a tutor is going round the 3rd year to help them, register order, I'm walked past and ignored..the only one in the room, why me?  I shouldn't take it personally, but it's beginning to get very difficult not to.  At this stage I'm  even starting to think they've been told not to help me and I don't even think this is an impossible scenario!  This has happened every single time so far, so I'll have to jump around in front of them next time, whilst everyone else is casually approached.  Mean while,  I tried to ask for help several times and  I've been told I'm "too talented" and therefore don't need any help... I don't know how else to write this, it sounds awful but those are the words.  Instead I've been asking for more advice from friends in class and this has been quite helpful.  I feel very frustrated and alienated as I don't feel like I'm doing as well as I could be, and I want to discuss the direction of my film with the tutors who have said they specialise in certain aspects.  I'm not exactly the most confident of people and I just don't know what to say to get the input from them.  I don't want to have to dance around for attention,  to get a good grade and I'm not going to. I guess there are still about 4 months so I'll see what happens.

I'm now in production and am going to take the concepts and change the perspective a bit.  I'm also going to think about colour, temperature, tonal-values and scale in more detail.  I'm posting updated edits, colour pallets and references.


Colour and Temperature


At the moment I'm looking at the Cave layout and deciding what kind of element I want the rocks to be made out of.  I know I want there to be a clash in colour, in order to show a change in temperature; the heat will obviously be from the sun and the coolness from it being a cave, underground.  So, I could use a yellowy-orange, I guess a Champagne kind of hue, to represent the sun beaming in from the cave entrance. Then I'll use shades of Blue and perhaps Purple for the rocks and body of the cave.  I want it to be icy cold, in fact, frozen.  I'm still unsure whether to put a human figure in somewhere to help with a sense of scale- I'll think about that in post-production.

Showing perspective and value test

Rough test compositions

Animatic Submission (with sound)

Submission animatic

On reflection, I'm not that happy with it because all I actually want to do is concentrate on the environments and not the film making.  I might take out the bit with the roundabout!

More concepts

New Concepts- W.I.P
Woodland (oldest to newest)

Set Extensions
I haven't finished this part of the illustration yet, but I'm thinking in advance about how it will fit in the composition.  I don't have enough space to produce a decent amount of camera movements, so I'm going to make the scene wider.  Below is an image of a rough idea of how it might look.

I want the vanishing point to be over to the right and create a perspective, as I want the main area (painting to the right of the scene) to be approached from close up.

Adjusing layout

This is a screenshot of my layered layout in After Effects.  I'm not happy with how flat it is, so I'm coming up with some new concepts, with more perspective and from a different angle.  Below is a on going block-out of one possible adaption.

animatic update

Render of first scene so far

This is what I've done with the room so far, for scene 1.

I UV mapped and textured the floor and cupboard.  I made the floor texture by using a single blcok of colour and added some noise.  I then motion-blurred the noise and liquified it to produced a realistic wood pattern.  Next, I used the burn tool to create the lines, replicate the seams between each plank.  

 Above is the first result, which was too big for my scene- the planks looked too big.  Below is the second attempt, which I have used in my scene.

For the cupboard, I took a picture of an actual cupboard at home, then cloned and manipulated it to produce enough for the entire UV map.  Trying hard not to make it look blurry and repetitive.  I also added a bump map so the dints would have more relief. 

More layouts

Today, I've been working on more layouts, as I'm not content with what I've produced so far. 

I keep changing what I want to do, whether I'll have enough time to produce what I want to and how I'm going to do it.  At the moment I'm going to:  Model the bedroom in Maya and paint the walk-through environments, then put them together in After Effects.  I've spent the last week trying to do it in Maya, but have so far got pretty poor results and I don't like how it works.  For what I'm wanting to achieve, After Effects will suffice and save time.  When I was trying to do it in Maya, it never looked how I wanted it to and I've felt like I've wasted a week or two.  So I've gone back to concentrating on the visuals and worry about technical issues later on.       

Rough animatic...very rough

I'm doing a new one, because my idea has changed slightly.


Instead of the Astral Projection theme, it's now a Near Death Experience- it's clearer.

I've spent the last 4 weeks coming up with ideas and concepts for my 3rd year project and pretty much finished my animatic for showing this Thursday.  However, I changed my idea at around 3am this morning...

So now, instead of doing what I said I was going to do, I'm now having a small narrative, pretty much just to aid the flow of my work.  I found with my previous idea I wasn't feeling very inspired and something was missing in a way, so I feel much better with this new idea.  It hasnot changed entirely.  I'm still using the layouts I designed and plan on using the same walk-through.  The narrative is based on the idea of the phenomenon of Astral Projection.  The guy in the concept below,  falls asleep and goes into a projection/his astral body and in his first-person perspective, the audience is taken through a set of environments.  It's surreal and very eerie and I want there to be a lot echoey sounds to try and depict a different state of mind.  The journey ends when he is pulled back into his body and everything seemingly returns back to normal.  Although there's a character, I want this to be about the quality of the environments and not the story.     

The current situation with the storyboard is as follows, from left to right...

I changed my idea late last night, so there's quite a lot more needing to be done before the showing of the animatic on Thursday.  Plus the storyboard still isn't finished!!!




As I've created a new start to my environment short, I've had to come up with some new concepts...

I'm currently working on the "demonic" scene towards the end.  Will post when done, hopefully tomorrow.  I will also be posting some concepts for objects to model and I'm also still thinking about whether I should suggest a time period around the 1960s or 1970s to aid the theme I'm going with.  The popularity of the Ouija board.

Cave part two

Pre-Production and concepts

New project

For my 3rd year I'm working by myself on an environment animation.  I want to produce a prodominantly 2D short, around 30-40 seconds, starting in a cave and ending in a state of limbo.  My inspiration for this is mainly brought from horror and 'Lynchian' surrealism.  Although, I want to suggest an air of mystery rather than a scare.  

CaveConcept1

CaveConcept2

Other pencil concepts

concept ideas for 3rd year film

Earth Concept 1

Conclusion

Thoughts on the group and work as a whole

I have really enjoyed working on this project and it actually has turned around my perception on working in groups to a positive one!  Although the start was a little slow, I think it really picked up after Christmas, especially after we properly established each of our roles.  I feel we worked well together and we were able to adjust our art styles to  compliment each others work.  I don’t think there were many issues with communication, as we had created a group page on Facebook to post up our progress and Liam had found a website to enable us to upload raw files onto a virtual drive.   

Thoughts on my role

Before Christmas, I was struggling to visualise what we were trying to create, so I took an art style Hollie had found in a book and created the initial concept designs.  I didn’t actually like the style overly much, but I thought I’d explore options.  However, we all liked the scratchy style it had and it was also suggested at one point, that we should perhaps do the whole thing in a Steam Punk style.  Again, I wasn’t happy with the idea that we should make it all Steam Punk and thought we should may be use a few elements from the style to allow flexibility.  I found images of 1930 trains and decided to evolve my train concepts around the design of that and looked at Film Noir to help them develop.    

The rest of my work, I feel turned out well, but I think I need to spend more time on it overall.  I’m never happy and nothing is ever good enough!  But, I achieved what I set out to, especially the tone and colour of the backgrounds.  I love colour and I really wanted to create something that was bright and expressive.  I’m very pleased with the end result and enjoyed the challenge!

Migraine...

I've posted up the two animations on the virtual drive Liam set up on the internet.  I can't continue due to a persistent migraine so I've asked if someone can clean them up a bit.

Colouring Aaron's animations

I've just finished doing the basic block colours and shadowing.  Now it's the time to clean them up...

Updated cloud scene

This is my final layout for the Imp Express umbrella scene.  It was suggested by the group to make the clouds a little transparent and I also layered up the clouds to be able to had a nice effect in After Effects.

Toy Trains

Over the past week, I've been experimenting with the textures of the toy train that will feature in the final scene of 'The Imp Express'. 

Shader network of front carriage

Front toy train

The image above is a screen shot of the shader network I put together, with a custom wood texture that I added to the ambient colour attribute to give the illusion of the wood grain.  Then I wanted to add a bump map to create a realistic touch to it's surface.  Instead of just using a standard maya bump, I used the Mental Ray 'Mi_Bump_flakes' texture as I got a far more pleasing result with and also didn't add too much to the rendering time.  Then I created another texture, adding the detail pattern and writing on the side.  The result is above.


Then I did the other trains, just changing the colour.

Train Renders

I've been rendering these images of the main train and it's carriages.  Liam modelled the front train and I've done the carriages- now getting together the textures.  The textures are mainly custom shaders, which I will include in the images as a small breakdown.

 This is the first render, before I had added many of the textures.

Added some basic lighting and shadowing.  Plus placed some more textures on the carriages.



On the next few images I've yellowed the lighting to depict the sun and continued to add textures.