Dragon Bait and Animate

I think I've said this before, but the Unity Timeline is fantastic! (Despite not playing sound). It works very similarly to Premiere Pro, a software I'm familiar with enough to transfer the skills over to Unity. For my final film, I imported my animation one file at a time and made sure they were set up correctly in the timeline before moving onto the next import. As I'm using alembic cache, I have to have a new model for each animation so after speaking to my classmate Diebrig, she told me that I can use an activation track to switch the geometry off and on which is much easier than animating it off and on. So my general timeline for 1 shot looks something like this: Now, in this first shot, the character loses two polygons which are separate cached objects meaning they need their own tracks. The first green track is an activation track for the duration that this walk cycle animation is running. The next track is the alembic cache of the walk cycle animation. The wh...

I spent some time pulling together a rough pre-visualisation. This took a lot longer than I expected as I was learning how to use Cinemachine and setting up each Virtual Camera. This was a bit of a learning curve but it should save me time in the long run as all of the cameras are already set up.   Each half cog/half camera is a Virtual Camera linked in Cinemachine. These are very light and don't slow down the whole process as they only use 1 main camera. Some of the cameras are attached to the character and 'Look At' certain parts of her, her eyes, the device, her wrist etc. Once she's animated and walking the cameras should bounce along with her.    The whole scene has been updated in Unity so that each camera angle has a full background rather than too much white space. I have also downloaded and imported Unity's Post-Processing Stack. This helps change the look of the film into something closer to what could be achieved in Maya and Premiere Pro...

After our presentations last Wednesday, I got a lot of feedback about how my project was going to look, something I have been trying to build on for months. I've finally decided that I want to take the project into Unity to be able to use real time rendering and add that as something I can do. However, as for the actual look of the project, it needs revisited. Initially, I had planned to do everything in shades of grey, with a few colour exceptions here and there but after some feedback, it's obvious that just using grey makes the project look unfinished and as if it has just been pulled straight out of Maya. TRON was mentioned during the feedback so I looked into how both the original and modern TRON rendered a computer world.     I particularly like how the accents of light and the layers of the costumes are build around the form of the actor. As such I'd like to try and take this idea into my character, using the topology of the model as ...

Earlier in the week I went to see A Quiet Place and as someone that doesn't watch a lot of horror films, it was not what I expected. The premise of A Quiet Place is pretty simple: There are monster out there and if you make a sound, they'll come for you and it's safe to say that I have never felt more tense in a cinema (And on a side note, that was the quietest cinema I have every been in). The film's main dialogue comes from sign language with a few rare vocalised sentences. This means, for the most part, that we're focused on how the characters move, how they act rather than what they say and I was shocked at how quickly I felt attached to the characters: I didn't want them to be in this situation, I wanted them to be safe but, shockingly, they weren't. The pace of the film is just enough to make you think that there's a safe respite ahead and there are gaps in the chaos before a sound crashes through the screen snapping you awake. There are m...

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...

The focus for my research topic has shifted this semester and it's something I find very interesting and I think effects a large portion of the audience that might see my film. I'm looking into Mental Health in film; how it is portrayed and how it is received by audiences. For this I conducted an interview with a profession in psychology with an interest in mental health in film. I already had my own opinions about how mental health is portrayed in films but listening to her helped broaden my understanding and knowledge of what we see as mental health and what films are showing it. Yes, there are lots of films that show mental health in a negative light, but there are so many more that I hadn't even thought about that show the even though people may suffer from mental health, they are still people: They still have their own goals and personalities. They are not defined by their illness. This topic is massive and I have barely scratched the surface but by creating my pres...

So I spent a few days updating my storyboards to make the timings a bit better and the story more clear. I then did the usual and put these all together in an animatic. (With some cheesy music...)

For my character assignment, I've been working on some storyboards for a while now. They are very rough and very basic so I want to go back and re-do them with a little more focus on movement and also have the ratio correct (16:9) or at least as close to that as I can. The story revolves around the Dragon Walker summoning a dragon from the fire outside her tent. Ideally, I think I'll add in an audience or the rest of the tribe watching her summon this as if it's a massive event that people come from all over to witness. Last week I also worked in ZBrush. Outside of class, this is the first thing I've created and I wanted to start with something a little smaller but still with a lot of detail so I decided to make the skull from the Dragon Walker concept art. It's still a really low resolution so I'll add detail later and increase the resolution to get a good final product. 

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).

So after a long week, our 48 Hour Film is finally complete! We finished it up yesterday afternoon and showed it off today along with everyone else's work in class. I'm really proud of how everything came together and how everyone's ideas were listened to and incorporated into the final piece. We had loads of fun shooting it and got to play around loads in Premiere Pro with special effects and bringing the whole edit together which turned into a big collaboration! I have to say as well, Daphne made an excellent "comic addict"! In terms of dialogue we were really unhappy with how a lot of it had come out once we were editing the footage. Much of the dialogue hadn't been captured or was far too quiet to be of any use so I suggested a small voice over of Daphne telling us what she was going through a-la Blade Runner . I don't think the group was up for the idea to begin with but after convincing them I think it worked out really well and added an ext...

Today we pulled together all of the footage we've shot so far for the 48 Hour Film Project and whilst there are a few gaps, we've definitely made a huge dent in the workload. So we brought all of that footage down to the Edit Suite where we get to play with the entire Adobe Suite! So far it's going quite well (as in there aren't many arguments... yet), here's hoping that mood keeps up! We've divided some of the work load so there's some editing going on in one corner whilst someone else looks up the visual effects we're going to implement as well as someone else searching for some music we can use (Me). I really like the concept of our project and it's put my geekery to good use as I have a pile of comics from home that are now getting their moment of fame in the film. We're really playing this quite tongue-and-cheek with a film that's trying to be serious but definitely isn't and is also skirting the 'drugs territory'... I...

Yesterday we started our "48 Hour Film Project"... granted we have a little more than 48 hours to complete it but it's still on a tight schedule. Yesterday we worked through a bunch of different ideas that would incorporate both the prop and line of dialogue we were given which in our case was a comic and "Don't ask me about my business". We drafted up some rough storyboards and planned out the next few days for what we would have to shoot. Today we started filming the last scenes which are easier to film at university. It's been a lot of fun so far, our group is mostly working well together, passing back and forth ideas as well as everyone pitching in with acting and scripting. Hopefully this should all come together quite nicely!

I was thinking today about what inspires me most and I will always come back to music as being my main inspiration wherever I go. Music's fantastic, if you hear a song from your childhood again I guarantee it'll bring back memories of when you first heard it, or where you were when it came on the radio. I want my work to reflect that, I want the animations I create to have a strong relationship to the music that inspired them. One of my favourite music artists is Lindsey Stirling, she's a self described "Dub-Step Violinist" and her music is just awesome! In particular this piece of music has been with me for years since I first heard it. Every time it plays I have to stop because I have a whole scene in my head that plays to this music. Speaking of a scene playing to music, I recently saw Baby Driver which is an entire film set to music. I absolutely loved it, the pacing, the music, the characters, it all worked for me. Granted, there's always going t...