Dragon Bait and Animate

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...

The last couple of weeks have been a bit weird, I've been trying out lots of different things both in 3D modelling for my character as well as in Unity to see how the film may look. I've also looked back on my storyboards and know where I need to tweak things to make the film work. I wasn't entirely happy with the character design and as Sang said, it needs to have good topology, especially in the face, as everything will be visible in the low poly style. So I took a head I had sculpted and retopoed in 3D Coat as a base: I also changed the body to make it simpler as well as changing the device on her arm to be more fragmented. At the same time I was doing regular testing in Unity to see how the character is going to work in real time as well as how certain parts of the animation was going to look. I wanted to have a play about with how the character might look, knowing that I have a fractured and abstract environment, I feel like there is a lot of room to ...

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.

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...)

I've updated the final animatic for my Master's Project 'Cure'. I changed the timings, increasing most of them to give the audience more time to assess what's happening. I also added in some sound to help the story.

I re-did my storyboards for my Dragon Walker character assignment and I'm much happier with these boards than my previous attempts. I like the flow of the story better and it was easier to find timings through these boards when building the animatic. Music is important to this animatic so I added in some sound as best I could but I think I want to extend the drum beat until the dragon actually appears from the fire.

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).