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.
This week was a stressful one. We have had a mad rush to get it finished. I had shot 22 to do and many more inbetweens and compositing parts.
As we got to the end, it was clear we weren't going to get our animation totally finished. We decided to scrap shot 22 since the two shots either side of it still communicated that the gnome was standing up and walking out of the box.
I really enjoyed the workflow of this final process however. When I would finish the inbetweens of a shot, I would upload it ready to be coloured. And I would often get messages from Alex as soon as another shot is coloured for me to then put it straight into the edit.
I have really enjoyed the compositing of this project. I find it really satisfying and it really does a lot to make the image pop. I really love the result of 5 because of the parallax and the lighting bouncing off the foreground trees. I feel that this really helps to enclose him inside these trees and adds him into the environment. Shot 6 was a complex one because of how it transitioned between places, but I'm so happy with the result. I used a mask to create the effect of the light passing around the foreground tree.
14 was the only one that I used after effects for because of the 3D camera shift parallax following the gnome through the canyon.
The extra effects where a water splash in the first shot, which was fun to animate because it was much more natural and easy compared to what I have been doing throughout the project. We decided to leave the fire out of the animation in the end. This was because I didn't have time to animate my own flames to use, and I couldn't find any free fire VFX assets online.
As we didn't manage to finished everything we'd hoped, we will do the last few things after submission just for ourselves.
I started off this week by compositing a few shots that were already coloured. I did this as a break from animating as it was getting rather tiring. I am using premiere to composite most shots, simply because most of them don't require much complex post work so it doesn't need after effects, (also, I am much quicker at working in premiere). Most are consisting of the background, a ground shadow, the character, the lantern glow and then a mask to follow that glow and create the effect that he is lighting up the areas around him and only those areas. This really helps to add the atmosphere of this spooky jungle.
Shot 23 was one that I started and finished much quicker than I expected. It does still need a few inbetweens, but this shouldn't take long. I then also started shot 24 and got to the point of doing linework for keyframes, but this still requires all of it's inbetweens.
I also did the inbetweens for shots 11 and most of 14 so that Alex could start colouring them.
As we start to approach the end of the project, I am getting a little worried and stressed if we will manage to get it finished in time. This coming 4 days will be tough to get it done, but I think we should be able to pull it off.
I rather enjoyed the lip sync task as it was a new way of doing it for me. In the past I have created all the phonemes I thought I would need, but I have never made a dope sheet or used the time remapping in After Effects to do it.
I found creating the dope sheet rather tedious and while filling it out, I just kept thinking I could be already doing it. When I actually started lip syncing, I honestly didn't find the dope sheet very useful at all, I much preferred just having the waveform under my keyframes and scrubbing the timeline. This made it so much quicker for me and made the dope sheet feel like a waste of time.
I feel that doing the dope sheet would be much more useful and necessary for stop motion or cutout animation, as when animating on a computer, you can always bring in a waveform of the audio and you have the freedom to just play around and experiment.
I am happy with the result and I am gutted that I didn't leave myself enough time to do more detailed and coloured mouth shapes.
This week I started off by finishing the linework of shot 12. I also did a couple of breakdown frames while I was at it, to save inbetweening time later on. This shot was trickier than I expected because I had to break away from the reference more than expected to make it work. I am happy with the result though, and think once it is inbetweened, it should look good.
I then worked on completing the inbetweens for shot 14. This took a while and I still struggled to draw him from this angle for some reason.
For the rest of the week, I worked on completing shot 19. With this being the longest and most complex shot in the entire animation, this again, look a long time. As I got closer to the end of inbetweening this shot, I got really excited because it was really starting to look how I imagined. Now I have finished this shot, I am really proud of it. I think once coloured and in context of the animation, it should really work as the climax it is designed to be.
Also this week, my friend who studies music, sent us the original track he had made for us. I had taken the animatic and given him lots of notes about the moods we wanted at certain times. I really like it and think it brings a lot of urgency and intensity to the animation.
Obviously I didn't get as much done since it was christmas week. I did however manage to take some time to get the sketches for shot 12 done.
I also did a few inbetweens on some shots to allow Alex to start colouring them. I went through shots 4, 7 and (started) 9, drawing all inbetweens that needed doing. I have uploaded these to the google drive for Alex to colour. Doing this worked well as it lets Alex keep up his schedule as much as possible while giving me a break from keyframing. I am still a week and a bit behind but I am still hopeful that we will manage it because we have already completed inbetweens for quite a few shots more than were scheduled for now.
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.
