Applied Animation: Competition: Week Two: 19th - 25th February 2018

This week as LiamS worked on storyboard and animatic, I did a bit more work on VFX testing.

The first one I did this week was a paint effect trailing from a hand. I did this using a mask in after effects and keyframed it to reveal as the hand moved across screen.
I like the effect that this gives because it is something quite surreal as the colour changes after it has been painted.
For the actual effect, we would be filming against a greenscreen so the hand will be sharper, as for this I simply keyed it out from a white backdrop. 

The next test I did was in maya. At the end of our video, the character will build buildings around him by just raising his hands. To do this from all angles needed, I will be making a model in maya and then we will draw sketched construction lines over it as if they are leading the build before the model fills it.

For this, I created a city scape to surround the character which rise out of the ground as the camera moves across the screen. I animated some with details of the buildings only appearing once the building was at it's max height. This is the principle I will be working from for the final thing, since we are going to be doing him inside one big building now (something like a cathedral).

Liam showed us the animatic he had put together and it was really good and well considered. He had included many of the ideas we had previously discussed while also adding some new stuff too. From this, we made a shot list and I can flesh this out into a bit of a shooting script to make filming more organised next week. 

Applied Animation: Competition: Week One 9th - 18th February 2018

I grouped up with Liam S and Chloe for this project. We decided on doing the Mircosoft Surface brief because of the freedom in creativity and allowed us to make an animated solution. I suggested that we combine live action footage with animation to save time and also show the idea of how the person using surface can be creative.

I researched into the way that Microsoft create their promotional videos and took notes on the kinds of themes they go with;

Clean, sharp visuals. Cinematic. Smooth camera movements. Often showing real world equivalents of the things the surface can do (essentially trying to take away the aspect of technology and make it tactile and natural). Optimistic music which the visuals are cut to. 

We decided on roles. LiamS will be doing storyboards, animation and music. Chloe will be doing concept art and animation. I will be doing a little animation and all post production. This will include editing and chroma keying the footage, compositing all elements in, and animating/masking elements into the scenes.

We drew lots of thumbnail ideas and wrote out many keywords of the things we wanted to evoke.



As LiamS storyboards, I have started a few VFX tests for some ideas we have had. The ones I've done this week are echo trails left behind by the moving hand.



These tests are a simple idea of part of the visuals we are wanting to make. They show the weird, flowing and creative world in a slightly psychedelic way that once refined within our final product, should really help to get across the creativity.
When we come to do this kind of effect in the final video, I will work to make sure the specific shots that contain this effect are much more refined and appealing.

We have a good solid idea on what we are going to create. The brief asks for 1-8 videos that come to between 1 and 2 minutes. So we are making one main version that will aim to be just over one minute, and then from that we can edit multiple short version using the various sections within the creative world.