I wanted the title to reflect the sci-fi and western themes of the film. My plan is to make the logo in 3D to give some cool animation and lighting. I have never been confident with typography, so I asked Andy to be my ideas man. I gave him a brief of keeping the text in a modern vain but with slight hints of western inspirations too. I didn't know how to go about this so I left him to play with it because I trusted his ability to make some cool ideas.
This sheet was really cool with many different takes on the ideas for the logo. The version I liked the most was the upper right title but in the long version rather than stacked. I really like the unique silhouette of this design. The notes I gave to Andy was just to develop that path further and bring some more western ideas into it. He came back with these ideas...
I really liked the way this develops, my favourite being the very bottom version. But I had concerns with the legibility of it. The 'i' and 't' look identical in the way they join together.
So when I came to make the title in Maya, I experimented with the position of these gaps in order to make the top line of the 'T' more identifiable as a 'T'. The modelling is going well, and faster than expected.
I feel this works very nicely. Once I have finished modelling the logo, I intend to animate the letters flying into place and play around with some cool looking lighting for a nice title screen at the end of the film and branding for the film.
After the city was finished I quickly got to work on completing all of the laser shots. I had done one shot of the laser effect over a month ago, but I went back to that and refined it a bit more. I am using particle world to create the main stream, then distorting that with vector blur to create the strange fractal look. I have been adding lots of glow and flares to these blasts because I really want them to feel intense and powerful.
This is a fairly easy process for all shots, the main variable is changing the delay of the trail behind the main laser bolt. I'm pretty happy with the laser blasts, I think the lens flares really add a lot to it.
The last two shots I had to complete for the ROAM film needed muzzle flashes from another artist first. So once they had arrived, I got to work on adding the blood. These two shots required some rotoscoping first since there were other characters going in front. This could be a pretty rough mask since the shots are so quick and the flashes distract.
I used the same technique to create the blood as the other shots. Combining VFX assets and particle simulator. This create a realistic dynamic to the blood. The second shot got approved first time, but the second one has been asked to be made more gory, to make the blood spread much further.
I'll be doing this in the coming weeks along with other shots since I have been asked to take on more shots with blood effects because they like what I've done so far so that is nice to hear, and should be good experience.
With only a week until the deadline, I've accepted that I won't be able to finish my film for the deadline. This really upsets me, but I know that it's just not realistic anymore. I am still very confident to get it finished for the end of year show.
I have been consistently a week behind schedule for nearly 2 months since waiting for the final drone and textures from Dan. While he was behind schedule too, I could definitely have been doing more in this time. I initially had 7 weeks of drone animation on my schedule, which was more time than I needed. When I did receive the final drones, I was 4 weeks behind, with only 3 weeks left dedicated to drone animation, which I then completed in 4 weeks.
But in the weeks waiting for the final drones, I could have been doing more to get ahead with other types of shots. My mentality at the time was that I didn't want to get caught up doing lots of other types of shots then having to go back to drone animation, I wanted to do every kind of effect in it's own chunk. This inability to be flexible has ultimately caused the main delay and resulted in the film being unfinished.
I have been very organised other than this main setback, prioritising shots in order of how important they are to telling the story. My priority between now and hand in is to make sure the film makes as much sense as it can, I hope I can still get a lot done, however I know that it will not be properly finished.
