Dragon Bait and Animate

On Monday we had a chat with Mark Grindle again, having met him first in October. We all went through out projects and he helped focus our ideas before we begin final production. Cure has been a little stagnant since we started the Going Live projects but it has always been in the back of my mind. I've looked into scene set up and even mocked up a rough poster. However, after running through the idea with Mark I think it's clear that I need to strip it back even further. I want to keep the core of the story and the themes of mental health and depression. Mark seemed to really like the idea of a fragmented world and the idea of shifting from chaos through to order so I want to take that idea further.  Our character should begin in a fragmented world, chaotic and in constant motion but when she finds her 'cure' the world stops and settles but nothing changes: She has still lost parts of herself (I might remove the piles of dead polygons) and the world is still ...

So far the Beano Project seems to be going quite well. We've set up a little production line where Anna would do the sketches for Ping and Noodle, Tao would line them and separate their layers and I would colour and export as transparent PNG files. This way we can layer up the images in Adobe After Effects and animate each layer individually if we need to. This is how I've set myself up in Photoshop to colour the images: I had also done a couple of little experiments in After Effects to see how Noodle might animate but since then Anna has done some nicer animations! I also messed with the colour in the kitchen scene and so I'm going to spend some time tomorrow trying to tidy it up for the background renders.

I realise I've been pretty quiet on here but I have been working away at the 3D kitchen scene for Ping and Noodle over the last week. There still needs to be some colour tweaks because the character won't quite fit in with it just yet but I think it's mostly pulling down the saturation. Right now I have 3 light sources in the scene for the 2 windows and the door but I might swap a window out and add in a light at the microwave or the oven as a colour light but we'll see how it all comes together. At least now, if we're unhappy with something we don't completely have to re-draw it, we can just make a few tweaks and re-render.  In other news I looked at pulling a sketch Anna had done of Noodle into Photoshop and tidying it up. Then I took it into After Effects and tried out the Puppet Warp tool to animate it a little. It took longer than I thought but most of it was a learning experience more than anything. If we have the right character art we...

We started work on our storyboards sometime last week and after the Beano's feedback we had another meeting and discussed how we could incorporate their feedback. We had a lot of back and forth and eventually managed to tighten up our ending and keep our pacing and momentum throughout the short. Anna and Tao created the storyboards, basing everything on Anna's art and I pulled together the animatic and adjusted the timings. We also added a little music to keep some interest. And here are a couple of my favourite storyboards from Anna and Tao.

I spent a little while working on setting up a basic scene in Maya and found a lot of inspiration the the PS4 game 'Bound'.  I love the way they do the far away scenery and I like the idea of the world cracking and moving around my character so I tried to incorporate this into the test scene I was building.  There's a lot that still needs to be worked on, especially the far away background but I'm happy with how it's slowly coming together. I also spent a bit more time playing about with lighting in Maya and trying to get it to look a bit more like I wanted it to look originally and the idea that the face is projecting it's own light and coming to life. Again, there's lots more to work on but I feel like I'm getting somewhere.

I spent yesterday and today finishing up my model and putting some colour on it. I've since added more detail to the paint as well as posing the character and adding in some lights. I just need to tidy it up and render tomorrow.

I'm very nearly finished my sculpt, just need to add my skirt and tidy up a few things before I paint and pose. I was really unsure to begin with how I would make my braid for the hair but I found a video on YouTube that really helped: So I used this as a basis to build my braid before adding a sphere for the rest of the hair and sculpting it until I was happy. With the hair finished I tidied up some things on the body before adding in some clothing. I built the bracelets in Maya using a torus and pushing the inner ring further into the centre to create a more concave shape. I also built the basis of the gauntlet in Maya using primitives of boxes and deformers to build the basic shape before importing the individual pieces into ZBrush to build the whole gauntlet. I then used masking and the extract tool to pull out the base clothing before going in and adding in bandage-like details. I'm really happy with what I've been able to achieve so...

I've spent this week working on a set of storyboards for my final Master's Film as well as putting them together in a rough animatic. This really helped nail down some of the story and how the film might look when it's finally put together. It was a lot more work than I initially expected as I kept thinking of new storyboards that would be needed. I'm not an amazing rough artist, but I feel these boards get the story across. (Some of them are out of order here).

The biggest concern for me with my masters project is not having a story that will entice an audience, despite the fact that to me, the story is not the most important part of the project. I want to focus on style and using the 3D software to make the world look sharp and 3-Dimensional. However, I have spent the last week or so trying to develop something more solid as a story - as well as simplifying what I have. Our character is first seen walking through rows of medical tents. She is losing polygons that fall to the ground to leave a trail of pulsing red shards. As she continues, we see that she is following a beep on her wrist monitor until she pulls back a tent flap and finds what she was looking for. This is something that can cure her, a USB stick or an SD card, something that she slots into the wrist monitor (That is possibly a part of her) cures her. The pulsing red trail of polygons stops and fades and she lets out a sigh of relief. But everywhere she looks there are piles ...

After changing my idea (and with the possibility that it might change further), I looked at roughing out a character that I could use as my protagonist. I started off with an inspiration board using images I'd been collecting for the past few weeks. This included a little of the environment, but mostly of the character, focusing on the character's role and outfit. From here, I sketched up some designs just using pencil and paper to see what kind of route I wanted to go down. At this stage I wanted to just keep the body shape semi-realistic without pushing the forms too much but as I keep developing the character, I'd like to see what I can do with shapes and silhouettes. In hindsight, I don't like the protagonist carrying a gun of any description as I think this takes away from the idea of her being a helper and trying to find the 'cure'.  I tidied up the lines a little in Photoshop before adding some rough colour to help work out where I wanted ...