So Project Chip beginith

First coarse of action was to bang a story board together.
My group met up the next day to discuss it. It remained more or lest the same as my original idea but Elisabeth came up with the great idea that the third gull should actually be a pigeon.
So here is the revised version.

A chip lands with a sticky thud. Camera zooms out away and there are two seagulls stood equidistant, silent, either side. Camera snaps to their eyes ablaze with the same malevolent intent. Gong chimes. Suddenly they each let out a marshal arts style cry. They fly at each other. Each is convinced the chip shall be theirs! They clash. Then flail like cowardly school girls, both with heads back and eyes closed too afraid to get hurt. Suddenly. "Croooh" The gulls freeze. A pigeon pops up between them with the chip in his beek.. They all stare at one another. A wide angle shot. "Cooh!" The pigeon shoots off in a flail of loose feathers and chip grease. The gulls are still frozen. End.

We had also all made an attempt at character designs too. As the short is only 15 seconds long and the comedy is slap stick I went with a simple thematic and in the end my designs were chosen. They were originally just ideas I doodled in a note book but they stuck.

 

 





 



 

 

With character designs and storyboard out the way Elisabeth went off to make the animatic and returned with two on Friday for me to look at! I love this group!

 

Anyway we have chosen an animatic, chosen character designs and now I'm just doing some animation tests.





Directing again?

Mid week we were set our next assignment. We had to create a 15 second short from scratch. By time the lecture was over I had an idea. It involved three seagulls and a chip, probably influenced by the fact that I live right by the sea.
It went like this.

A chip lands with a sticky thud. Camera zooms out away and there are two seagulls stood equidistant, silent, either side. Camera snaps to their eyes ablaze with the same malevolent intent. Suddenly they each let out a marshal arts style cry. They fly at each other. Each is convinced the chip shall be theirs! They clash. Then flail like cowardly school girls, both with heads back and eyes closed too afraid to get hurt. Over the top (preferably the music from psycho) can be heard playing over the top. A third seagull ducks in, yoinking the chip from beneath their feet. The gulls all freeze and look at one another. A wide angle shot. The third peeps and shoots off in a flail of loose feathers and chip grease. End.

I grabbed  Elisabeth and Dani, both hard working and enthusiastic, and proposed my idea which involved me acting it out a bit and they loved it. After some general discussion it was decided that Elisabeth, who has a great understanding for film language, would be head of story boarding, she, Dani and I would work on character design and I would do the animation with Dani providing the colour.

Yes...it appears I'm directing again....
...I still really like it...

Proof...sort of...

Ok so I said I was catching up on work....

...so I'll need to blog about it ...

Well I suppose to start I'll talk about the stuff I didn't loose in the first place and then the things I'm in the proses of completing.
The post production work has forced me to use Nuke and actually I'm rather glad for it. I discovered I really like it. It's intuitive, logical, adaptive...basically it's damn nice. In the past I wouldn't have said the program was badly designed or that I didn't like it. I simply didn't put my self in a scenario where I would have to interact with it. I was an idiot for doing so.

Anyway the two pieces I didn't loose were a colour correction job and a rotoscope piece. The colour correction I found simple as it is just a case of placing all the relevant nodes in the right order to get a desired outcome. Logic and problem solving.



Errr..these noes aren't in the right order...or even quite right...bad example...but you now know that Nuke looks pretty...

 

 

Then there was the roto job. I was given a live action shot of a penguin and I had to rotoscope over his tummy. Again I had to set it up using the nodes, placing them in the right order and so forth, but the important bit is what I learnt from my interaction with it.

 

 

Awesome little dude.

 

I am a perfectionist, when I want to do well, and rotoscoping demands this. You have to be acutely observant so you are able to rotoscope an item perfectly from edge to edge and your final outcome must be highly convincing. (People should not be able to see that you have rotoscoped at all.) At this point, determined to stay atop of work and generally eager to do well I was a perfectionist. I started by key framing  main points of deformation and then tweaked it by adding tweens and over time gradually applied more to streamline it.

The roto node on this program allows you to soften the edges. I decided, owing to the fact his stumpy legs and butt are darkened due to shadow, I would extend the edging that covered his lower regions more than I had the top and side edges with the intention to make the bottom fade into the natural shadow. I'm happy with it over all. It moves fluently and I think relatively convincingly but I think I will need to refine my technique regarding his lower half.

 

I'm pleased I've finally got to grips with this program. I want to be an animator, both traditionally and digitally, and I'm particularly interested in merging animation with live action. This a form of VFX. If I want to be employed and want to be good at this the more I know about post production within VFX and the more skills I have to apply the better.

 

 





Pfffftt!

So yeah...a couple of weeks back I was on top of my work.
I had thee assignments to fulfil. The first was a 2500 word essay, complete with presentation. The second was a piece of flash animation with for some reason a long 1500 word evaluation to go with it. The last was a VFX show real.
A lot to do but not difficult and manageable. Days before the big essay hand in I'd completed it and its presentation, so I handed it in. The flash animation was simple and some how I managed to force a large evaluation out of something with so limited a process and despite levels of over ambition, which resulted in me going into uni for several consecutive days, all early mornings to late evenings, I finished my show real. Oh and I was very ill too.

Huzzah.

Then night before hand in my memory stick drowned in my laundry. I thought I'd backed everything up. Nope.
Here is what remains.

My essay
My flash animation
Half my show real

Now I have to recreate my evaluation and the second half of my show real. Ok I'm in the proses of redoing the last half of my show real and I can do this essay of an evaluation. Can't I? Right?

....