I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's done. No more Pedro. The games up. Hand over the DVD. I feel a little bit sad actually. You wait all term for the finish line, and can't wait to see the final product and have a long deserved month off, but when it comes - ohhh man, what now?!
I can honestly say, hand on heart, this has been the funniest 9 weeks ever. I have cried with laughter almost everyday! I have absolutely loved working on this project, but the laughs and jokes that came with it made it. Most memories have been caught on cam for the extras on the DVD, but to name a few that didn't - wheeling Alec down the corridor, the rock photoshop file I messed up, the hare and the tortoise, crack a bottle, Tex's urghhhs, Argghhh tom, and soooo many more!
TOM
It was my first time working with you Tom, and what can I say..... "TOMMMMMMM, WHAT HAVE YOU DONEEEEEE!" Well you done alot! You were at times difficult, very defensive which we have discussed in your theropy sessions, but also incredibly helpful and dedicated to the project. You made me compramise with you ludacris suggestions on occasions lol, and doubt my own logic in cussing matches many a time, which is a verbal skill I grant you. You had to put up with alot from Alec, not so much me. We couldn't have done the project to the standard we did without you. You were also the equipment guru, Cameras, leads, USB's, backups, you sorted us out! Especially when we lost all our recordings - well played there mate. I was really impresseed with your modelling skills, and endless concept designs. You were a massive asset to the team, so well done man.
ALEC
you were alright.
As for the film itself, well......
ALEC
Nah I'm joking I've gotta do Alec aswell, although that would have been great. This term we bonded, whether he wants to admit it or not, our mums would. His maya knowledge I have to say is imense in places, I turned to him whenever I got stuck and he answered everytime, usually with the press of a button! He also has this knack of handing over the mouse to me to continue a task he has been working on, I touch it, and everything goes mental!! I have been able to do things you can't even try to do with the touch of the mouse this term! He was the brains behind the humour, in that our film included alot of wierd noises and grunts, aswell as screams - an Alec trait. I'm still not sure whether the audience will get it, but we do which is all that matters! lol. A negative - brought in roller tycoon to play in the last week of the project, the most important week! WHAT! but he got the work done so I can't complain. I have to say he's awful at cussing matches, I won everytime.
ME
As for myself, I feel I have improved alot this term. I would say I learnt more last time however because it was all new to me, whereas now, second time round I have just been slowly expanding my basic knowledge in areas. One thing I have learnt alot more about is After Effects, layers, and compositing. Maybe thats because of Gareths project asell, but mostly because our whole film had to be composited over live action footage I had to repeat process' over and over. Motion tracking, occlusion layers, time remapping, blending modes, etc. etc. I feel alot more confident in the program now. I also learnt a fair bit about rigging from the infamous Dave Ross, aswell as how bump maps, layered textures nodes actually work.
FINAL FILM
PRO's
I really really like the final outcome. I am most pleased with my animation. Especially the scene where he jumps off the rock and bounces backwards during the escape. The fact we made the characters look like they are actually on the set with the use of occlusion layers and shadows was another positive for me. I also like the fingerprints moving when the character is in motion and how they stop when they are stationary. The character designs worked well, and I feel we did capture the claymation style 80% of the time.
CON'S
I do however have quite a few negatives, which i hate to say, but I have to be honest. I don't like the way the final film lost quality. We tried rendering it as avi., mov, quicktime, mpeg, the lot, but every version seemed to loose the quality and sharpness of our fingerprint textures and make everything slightly blurry. Kind of defeated the object of why we spent all that time getting them on there. Secondly the storyline. The film has a few big errors in consistancy. The characters move from shot to shot slightly, and in one Cornelius is in a completely different pose to the previous shot! We also didn't hold for the establishing shot for long enough. Also as much as I love the humour of our film, i do not think outisde of college viewers will understand the funny noises and outburts we included such as Mcglones grunt, and Cornelius' sudden impatient outburst. He goes from calm to mad instantly. Finally the pan down from the gorilla sign to the cage in the bush was terrible, we could not figure out why the footage lagged but it did no matter what we tried. It has a nasty hand held amatuer effect which we didnt want. Ideally we would have used a tripod, but for obvious reasons this wasn't possible in the zoo. Plus the volume messes up big time on the DVD, all our audio and dialogue goes really really quiet :( Theres more negatives but I dont want to carry on lol
END
So there you have it, with another 2 weeks I think the final outcome would have been 10x better, i think we could have got it to industry standard. It's a close call between MTV cribs and "If I were a Gorilla". I'd say the gorilla project was technically better, but MTV cribs had a better narrative and flow to it. Either way I love both. Jared said it was a good thing that I had negative points about our film, it shows I always want to improve, and a good animator is never happy with their work! I can't wait for next term, Bare Bear WILL be industry standard - 3rd time lucky!
Wednesday 18 March 2009
Hand-in Day Antics
Monday came and the pressure to get the film finished for 5.00pm was high, it almost felt like we were on a task on the Apprentice lol. We were at a fairly comfortable stage Monday morning actually, we just needed to edit the final premier file, add sounds, touch things up, credits, and finally create our beloved DVD. We also had high hopes for an extras section on the DVD which would contain alot of funny footage shot by ourselves over the last 9 weeks, call it "the making of", if you will!
So the day begun by me sorting out Alecs mess of the "why are you just sitting there" scene. I then helped him with countless other errors he hade made before we all began editing the final premier film, with all scenes imported. We rented out the sound hard drive from the college shop, and used it for one sound! lol A broom sweeping sound for Mcglone. Once we were happy with the film and all the audio, we switched the default frame blend off in premier, as it was ruining our stop mo frame by frame animation.
We then set out to do something we've been waiting all term to do - destroy the cage! It was a symbol that the project was complete! It was a really nice day so Tom filmed us on his camera mucking about outside, we did several funny takes of destroying the cage, the funniet being Alec setting it up as if we were about to shoot our live action footage when I trip and crush it on film lol after which alot of swearing follows. We had a real laugh doing the extras and it felt good to have the weight of the project almost off our shoulders.
We then imorted all of Toms extras footage off his camera and made ashort montage of extras for the DVD. exported that as an mov. and that was ready to go.
Time was running out now, by this time it was like 4.00pm and we were sorting out our concept work slideshows for the DVD. Alec had brought in his laptop with Adobe Encore software to create the "DVD of our dreams". I have to say the software is awesome, and was recommended by Dan Dali. Apparently we will use it in the 3rd term to make our showreels so we now have some basic knowledge of how to use it.
Finally after all the menu's were sorted out, and every page linked back to the previous, with all buttons working - we burned the DVDs (5.45pm). Handed them into Jared (6.00pm) and that was that! FINISHED! Just on time. ahhhhhhhhhhh what a relief. Then me Alec, Grigsby, Yaniv and Stewart went for a well deserved pint and a curry!
So the day begun by me sorting out Alecs mess of the "why are you just sitting there" scene. I then helped him with countless other errors he hade made before we all began editing the final premier film, with all scenes imported. We rented out the sound hard drive from the college shop, and used it for one sound! lol A broom sweeping sound for Mcglone. Once we were happy with the film and all the audio, we switched the default frame blend off in premier, as it was ruining our stop mo frame by frame animation.
We then set out to do something we've been waiting all term to do - destroy the cage! It was a symbol that the project was complete! It was a really nice day so Tom filmed us on his camera mucking about outside, we did several funny takes of destroying the cage, the funniet being Alec setting it up as if we were about to shoot our live action footage when I trip and crush it on film lol after which alot of swearing follows. We had a real laugh doing the extras and it felt good to have the weight of the project almost off our shoulders.
We then imorted all of Toms extras footage off his camera and made ashort montage of extras for the DVD. exported that as an mov. and that was ready to go.
Time was running out now, by this time it was like 4.00pm and we were sorting out our concept work slideshows for the DVD. Alec had brought in his laptop with Adobe Encore software to create the "DVD of our dreams". I have to say the software is awesome, and was recommended by Dan Dali. Apparently we will use it in the 3rd term to make our showreels so we now have some basic knowledge of how to use it.
Finally after all the menu's were sorted out, and every page linked back to the previous, with all buttons working - we burned the DVDs (5.45pm). Handed them into Jared (6.00pm) and that was that! FINISHED! Just on time. ahhhhhhhhhhh what a relief. Then me Alec, Grigsby, Yaniv and Stewart went for a well deserved pint and a curry!
Thursday 12 March 2009
Finally a Productive Day
Yesterday was pants in the fact that I got actually NOTHING done. We had PPD for most of the day which was a really good session but it couldn't of come at a worse time because we have so much to do! lol.
So today I had to make up for it. I started the day by rendering the beautiful ladies speech scene which Alec had so kindly tidied up for me last night. Once that was done, I composited it, edited and exported as AVI.
Next up I went through all of the dialogue recordings Dave did for us to find the ones we had lost on Alecs HD. We were lucky because Tom had backed them up unexpectadly shortly before the disaster happened. I re edited the sounds and matched them up with the characters lip syncs.
I then photoshopped the final scenes stop mo photos only to find it hadn't been lost on the hard drive so that was a waste of time.
I then animated the final scene in which Cornelius jumps with glee because he's free, then he huffs as the cage comes down trapping him with sweeping Mcglone. I rendered this as it was at the end of the day to see how it was looking and to judge the animation as maya was lagging big time. I was 70% happy with it. I am going to touch it up more and make the fall of the jump not so quick and jerked.
Then me and Alec finalised the design for the DVD menu which was grand.
A very productive day. Unfortunately Gareths project has taken the backseat bigtime lately because I love this one so much. The deadline for his is tommorow and I have a fairly final edit with sound ready. I want to edit it slightly and add a couple of titles tommorow before I hand it in. Other than that I did my best with it. I found it hard to juggle both projects, especially when your really passionate about one and you know it will eventually appear on your show reel. I have enjoyed Gareths alot, I just wish I had more time for it, as I know I could have done better.
DVD Menu - SORTED
As you probably gathered from the title of this post - the DVD menu design is complete. Me and Alec spent a good couple of hours yesterday trying out different possible layouts/designs and got nowhere. We didn't like anything we came up with, and somehow ended up with a shitty twig boarder thing - It was AWFUL! I'm not even going to post up the previous designs as they're THAT bad, plus we didn't save them, because, they were THAT bad.
So today I scanned in my concept work for the 2D section of our DVD, as I had previously taken photo's and the quality was terrible. We soon noticed the difference and decided to have another go at the menu today, this time sticking with our original sketch idea. We bunged our favourite concept sketch of William on the canvas and knew straight away it was going to work. I wanted to have a sketchy font style off the net and Alec agreed but added the finishing touch by doubling up the text layers, changing them to the light blue pencil coulour I had used for my construction lines on William, lower the opacity, angle them, and add a awind filter to get the grainy crayon effect. It looks AWESOME. Simple is always best. We accomplished this is about 20 mins apposed to the 2 hours yesterday! Now to actually make the DVD!....
So today I scanned in my concept work for the 2D section of our DVD, as I had previously taken photo's and the quality was terrible. We soon noticed the difference and decided to have another go at the menu today, this time sticking with our original sketch idea. We bunged our favourite concept sketch of William on the canvas and knew straight away it was going to work. I wanted to have a sketchy font style off the net and Alec agreed but added the finishing touch by doubling up the text layers, changing them to the light blue pencil coulour I had used for my construction lines on William, lower the opacity, angle them, and add a awind filter to get the grainy crayon effect. It looks AWESOME. Simple is always best. We accomplished this is about 20 mins apposed to the 2 hours yesterday! Now to actually make the DVD!....
Note: the quality and colour has been lost on this blog upload, however the actual Menu is much better.
Monday 9 March 2009
Long Bod Post
The time has come - final hand in week. I feel unusually ok about this, simply because of the amount of work achieved by Team Pedro during these past 2 months. At present we have enough scenes animated to compile a short incoherent film, however to achieve THE short movie we are aiming for, and that makes sense, we need this last week.
What I thought was minor bad news last week when Alec dropped his hard drive actually turned out to be slightly worse than I thought. I was hoping the files could be salvaged over the weekend or somehow repaired however this is not the case - it's f***** as Alec would say so loudly. We have a few old backups and the remaining days to get back on track it just means later nights this week than intended.
So what to do? Well first priority is to finish animating the last remaining scenes, render them and composite. I think we only have 2 and a half left now - so definately possible. Next priority is editing, getting the shots in order in premier and matching them up with the audio. After this it will be a case of making a short montage of our gorilla zoo footage leading up to our gorilla cage pan down shot. This is the most important shot as it illustrates that our little animated clay gorillas are in actual fact in London Zoo, in a bush, next to the gorilla sign, getting on with their er, day to day life I guess. This idea was inspired by the creature comforts locations, and adds a nice little pun/irony/ i don't know the word/ to the story. Similarly with the Zoo magazine joke.
Next whack in the amazing gorilla song. Tidy, touch up etc. THEN, we could just slap it on a disc as a quicktime file - but thats just LAZY. So we have decided to produce a well preseneted DVD, with a nice menu etc. to display our concept work and extras. We will produce 3 identical discs, one for each of us to hand in, and clearly label on our own copiues the 2 specialist areas we have focused on. That is the plan. It will not fail.
Today saw me animate the rest of the escape scene, which I am fairly pleased with actually. I managed to conquer the backwards hunched over gorilla hop I had so eagerly wanted to achieve. Alec kindly offered to lip sync this scene for me as I was sick of this task, plus he needs the practice :o Ohhhh no I didn't! So yeah we swapped and I worked on William which was a refreshing change. We lost the updated William rig due to the hard drive accident so I had to work on the one which needed "SORTING OUT!". So I sorted out his dirty finger rig which was messing up, and the lack of eyebrow within the scene. I also textured the chest plate, and animated the wave deformer and textures. I left mine to render for tomz.
Tommorow I think I will have to resort to finishing a scene I hate involving Cornelius spouting off about beautiful young ladies. It's gotta be done. Everythings coming together now though and I reckon we will be editing and doing all the fun stuff by thursday! I'm off now to watch the Usual Suspects......
"SORT IT OUTTTTTTTTTTTT!" Alec Smith 2009
" So crack a bottle let your body wobble!" - Class of 09
What I thought was minor bad news last week when Alec dropped his hard drive actually turned out to be slightly worse than I thought. I was hoping the files could be salvaged over the weekend or somehow repaired however this is not the case - it's f***** as Alec would say so loudly. We have a few old backups and the remaining days to get back on track it just means later nights this week than intended.
So what to do? Well first priority is to finish animating the last remaining scenes, render them and composite. I think we only have 2 and a half left now - so definately possible. Next priority is editing, getting the shots in order in premier and matching them up with the audio. After this it will be a case of making a short montage of our gorilla zoo footage leading up to our gorilla cage pan down shot. This is the most important shot as it illustrates that our little animated clay gorillas are in actual fact in London Zoo, in a bush, next to the gorilla sign, getting on with their er, day to day life I guess. This idea was inspired by the creature comforts locations, and adds a nice little pun/irony/ i don't know the word/ to the story. Similarly with the Zoo magazine joke.
Next whack in the amazing gorilla song. Tidy, touch up etc. THEN, we could just slap it on a disc as a quicktime file - but thats just LAZY. So we have decided to produce a well preseneted DVD, with a nice menu etc. to display our concept work and extras. We will produce 3 identical discs, one for each of us to hand in, and clearly label on our own copiues the 2 specialist areas we have focused on. That is the plan. It will not fail.
Today saw me animate the rest of the escape scene, which I am fairly pleased with actually. I managed to conquer the backwards hunched over gorilla hop I had so eagerly wanted to achieve. Alec kindly offered to lip sync this scene for me as I was sick of this task, plus he needs the practice :o Ohhhh no I didn't! So yeah we swapped and I worked on William which was a refreshing change. We lost the updated William rig due to the hard drive accident so I had to work on the one which needed "SORTING OUT!". So I sorted out his dirty finger rig which was messing up, and the lack of eyebrow within the scene. I also textured the chest plate, and animated the wave deformer and textures. I left mine to render for tomz.
Tommorow I think I will have to resort to finishing a scene I hate involving Cornelius spouting off about beautiful young ladies. It's gotta be done. Everythings coming together now though and I reckon we will be editing and doing all the fun stuff by thursday! I'm off now to watch the Usual Suspects......
"SORT IT OUTTTTTTTTTTTT!" Alec Smith 2009
" So crack a bottle let your body wobble!" - Class of 09
Friday 6 March 2009
Cage escape so far...
Good/Bad Day:
Erm Alecs hard drive broke, we lost our backups and some important files, going to set us back a good couple of days to re edit sound and live action footage. Plus side, I animated a whole 9 seconds of the escape scene, and I' m really happy with it so far!
INTRO MUSIC IS SORTED!!!!
Me and Tom found the perfect childish/gorilla mentioning/xylaphone played song today to use as our intro theme - it's sooooooooo good. We searched for on youtube for some gorilla songs and went through some terrible possibilities such as banana splits, marilla gorilla, gorillaz etc. But the answer was there all along, 2nd result on "gorilla song" search is PERFECT. Its been saved and is ready for use...... note: only forst 30secs will be used, and faded out at the la la la la when the camera zooms into the cage in the bush.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC2rIo59JLs
"if I were a gorilla, la la la la la, I would eat a big banana la la la la"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC2rIo59JLs
"if I were a gorilla, la la la la la, I would eat a big banana la la la la"
Thursday 5 March 2009
Animation Progress...
Completed Shots
1) Establishing Shot
2) Cornelius establish shot
3) McGlone establish shot
4) William establish shot
5) Ahhh establish shot
7) William slapped
8) Cornelius screaming
9) Cornelius 'sick of this'
10) McGlone hit by mag
11) Cage Shot - 3 Seconds
13) Cage Shot - will going mental
12) William alerted
14) Cornelius thinking
Shots To Do
6) Cornelius beautiful ladies reading - Nearly Complete
15) Cage lifted up
16) "We're free"
17) Cages comes down
1) Establishing Shot
2) Cornelius establish shot
3) McGlone establish shot
4) William establish shot
5) Ahhh establish shot
7) William slapped
8) Cornelius screaming
9) Cornelius 'sick of this'
10) McGlone hit by mag
11) Cage Shot - 3 Seconds
13) Cage Shot - will going mental
12) William alerted
14) Cornelius thinking
Shots To Do
6) Cornelius beautiful ladies reading - Nearly Complete
15) Cage lifted up
16) "We're free"
17) Cages comes down
Tuesday 3 March 2009
Hmmm - needs work
The hardest scene so far - the attractive ladies speech. I am happy with all my animated scenes so far, just not for this one. Its very hard to animate the mouth blenshapes because the only way to set a key is through the attribute editor or slider bars, thus meaning you cant see the keys you've set for each expression unless you go into the line graph:
It makes changing durations of keys, deleting them and re timing them v. hard. I have struggled big time with the lip sync in particular. I hate to say it because of time restrictions and I know Alec will go mad, but, I think Im going to re animate the mouth AGAIN.
As for the movements and gestures he is making whilst talking - they are getting there. Today I made progress in having him gesture towards william with his right hand, scan up and down the page, and re grab the mag:
It makes changing durations of keys, deleting them and re timing them v. hard. I have struggled big time with the lip sync in particular. I hate to say it because of time restrictions and I know Alec will go mad, but, I think Im going to re animate the mouth AGAIN.
As for the movements and gestures he is making whilst talking - they are getting there. Today I made progress in having him gesture towards william with his right hand, scan up and down the page, and re grab the mag:
It was tough to mathc the speech with the right movements. I feel it needs slightly more punch - a bit faster, and jitterierrr - if thats a word. I hope to have this scene finished by tommorow eve - rendered. We are on schedule so i can afford to put the extra time into this one, and use thurs, fri and mon to animate the final scene. Alec rendered some good astablishing shots of the the 3 characters today and Tom rendered Mcglone sweeping and being wacked with the mag. Slowly getting there.....
Monday 2 March 2009
A quick update
To be honest theres not alot to update on a day to day basis as animation is in full swing. Myself Alec and tom are all animating each of our characters and trying our very best to make them look like stop motion. I have more shots/scenes than the other guys due to storyline however if work load gets too much I will pass on small sections.
I have found lip syncing to be the most time consuming process so far - Cornelius is the only talking character you see. I had a really bad day the other day as I spent a whole day animating the blendshapes and listening to Dave Ross' voice over and over and when I finally came to animate the actual body after finishing lip sync - the teeth and tongue compleelty messed up and flew everywhere in the scene - I was gutted to say the least and left for home disheartened at the waste of a day.
Friday was better as I produced the short but important blarghh scene. Alec helped me accomplish the exact confused facial expression pulled by Cornelius after William has just slapped himself. Its basically the point Cornelius looses his temper with the Will. that went well and I managed to animate more jerky and stop mo like. I found the key is to animate with less key frames, sharp sudden movements combined with a few subtle ones achieve the nice effect.
I thought I should post Team Pedro's 7 golden rules on how to accomplish the stop mo look after millions of tests:
1. A wave deformer. set to wobble only when the character is in motion. Stops when character is staionary. This effect ahieves the really nice look that the model is being prodded and squashed by the animators fingerprints each frame.
2.Animated bump texture. Again set only to translate when character is in motion. When done right - looks awesomeeee. The finger prionts go all over the shop and add to the stop mo amateur affect.
3.Sharp, stepped, minimally keyed animation. Results a very jittery linear style of animation. Perfecor stop mo even if it is hard to pull yourself away from the nice arcs and perfectly smooth animation you so desire.
4. RAM render at 25fps BUT skip 1 frame per sec in After Effects. Causes the animation to look even more jittery and stop mo like.
5. Occlusion is Vital.
6. Motion track the character and occlusion layer to match the moving camera background - prevents the layer sitting still.
7. Design style. Wallace and Gromit style mouth. Instantly looks like plastacine!
I dont really want to post any of the finished movie scenes so far as it will ruin the final film suprise :s Im currently rendering my new scene so gtg....
I have found lip syncing to be the most time consuming process so far - Cornelius is the only talking character you see. I had a really bad day the other day as I spent a whole day animating the blendshapes and listening to Dave Ross' voice over and over and when I finally came to animate the actual body after finishing lip sync - the teeth and tongue compleelty messed up and flew everywhere in the scene - I was gutted to say the least and left for home disheartened at the waste of a day.
Friday was better as I produced the short but important blarghh scene. Alec helped me accomplish the exact confused facial expression pulled by Cornelius after William has just slapped himself. Its basically the point Cornelius looses his temper with the Will. that went well and I managed to animate more jerky and stop mo like. I found the key is to animate with less key frames, sharp sudden movements combined with a few subtle ones achieve the nice effect.
I thought I should post Team Pedro's 7 golden rules on how to accomplish the stop mo look after millions of tests:
1. A wave deformer. set to wobble only when the character is in motion. Stops when character is staionary. This effect ahieves the really nice look that the model is being prodded and squashed by the animators fingerprints each frame.
2.Animated bump texture. Again set only to translate when character is in motion. When done right - looks awesomeeee. The finger prionts go all over the shop and add to the stop mo amateur affect.
3.Sharp, stepped, minimally keyed animation. Results a very jittery linear style of animation. Perfecor stop mo even if it is hard to pull yourself away from the nice arcs and perfectly smooth animation you so desire.
4. RAM render at 25fps BUT skip 1 frame per sec in After Effects. Causes the animation to look even more jittery and stop mo like.
5. Occlusion is Vital.
6. Motion track the character and occlusion layer to match the moving camera background - prevents the layer sitting still.
7. Design style. Wallace and Gromit style mouth. Instantly looks like plastacine!
I dont really want to post any of the finished movie scenes so far as it will ruin the final film suprise :s Im currently rendering my new scene so gtg....
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