You're Final World in a Room Progress Post

So yesterday was my stop motion day! Woohoo stop motion! As we were working on a really tight time scale I couldn't have the 3D suite space for longer than a day, which I thought was going to be really stressful. So yesterday morning I got up very early (like half 6, but only because my bandage fell off during the night and i had to get up and replace it before my wound got infected. Was a brilliant start to my morning) and I was in the department working by half 8. Then blah blah blah, millions of problems, lots of stress. Then bam! done at half 4. I was very confused by this point because I was expecting it to take all day and be 50 times more stressful than it was. So lucky me.

I can't show you anything because blogger uploads to youtube and I would have to share rights with them so I only ever put up my really basic tests and at this point a good few things are finished. I'm so nearly done.

Still left to do are the final renders of the maya half of the film. Which will undoubtedly throw up lighting issues as my character will just end up a black blob half the time. So there's that and then the final edit and render plus sound. Most of which I've already sourced. Just two more sounds to find/record myself. Which I guess I'd better think about some time soon...

Sorry for the lack of pictures. Some really cool stuff coming I promise! 

The End of Tropism

On Monday I finished a collaboration with the jewellery department at the college. We were to create optical toys. I currently have no pictures of these optical toys however I will be filming them and taking pictures very soon. So I'll update this post later with those. I have described bellow what we were making so have a look at that in the mean time.

I didn't just make this post to bore you with stuff you already know though I made it so I could show our phonotropes. I am so proud of my group for these. They are fabulous.

So they are both circus themed and cyclic, as is the nature of a phono trope. It's like creating a physical GIF... No seriously it is.  Basically phonotropes are pure magic. Well ok phonotropes are pure maths but that maths makes magic! Here's the tech. You get a cd player and get that playing at 45 rps (rotations per second) Then you get a disc shaped piece of card and divide it into 33 slices. This is where you will put your animation. One cell per section, however you have to make sure your beginning and your end are the same (cyclic remember). Now I know exactly what your thinking, this is not a zoetrope so when you put your disc onto the CD player you will not see any animation. You require something to break up the disc in order to see the animation. Which is why with a zoetrope you look through slits in the frame to see the animation and not at the images itself. It is also possible to make phonotropes with the use of strobe lighting to the same effect. The way we do it is by setting up a camera and putting the feed through a computer. The thing that makes this work is the camera will be seeing translating the phono trope disc into the computer at 24 fps (frames per second) that magic animation speed. This is what allows you to see the animation happening. It really is magic!

Ok so the best thing for animators about these phonotropes is that they get is really quick results and they produce stunning movement. But for the more ambitious of us we can create some really magical things with ours. We didn't get a single complaint about ours. Other than my seal confused Jared because until he saw the physical disc he couldn't tell if it was 2D or 3D but I personally take that as a compliment.

https://vimeo.com/110772100 - This on here was made by my the rest of my team. The jewellers made the hoops and added the flames while the other animator added the lions. She also added the big top which was added after the filming of the trope. I myself contributed nothing more than my support, advice and general direction. It turned out awesome.

https://vimeo.com/110772099 - This one was entirely me. I have made a decent amount of phonotropes before, enough to know what I wanted to mess about with this time around. A part of me is interested in the way the eye interprets the entire phonotrope rather than just the section where you focus to watch the animation. I had tried it out before to minimum effect. I was also interested in messing around with the colours of the circus and all those eye sore effects that come from the circus. So this was my end creation. I really want a physically beautiful phonotrope that's magic came from its movement and it's static appearance.

world in a room update - secondary animatics

This project has turned out to be very enjoyable. I very much assumed I would hate this project as I assumed I would have a lot to catch up on after my holiday. However I have taken to Maya very quickly and now have many of my scenes done. I still need a little help from my technician about certain things, however I am as finished as I can be cg wise without his help.

 This weekend I have dedicated some time to editing. I have been checking my pacing and timings all weekend. To start off with I have adapted my animatic with some of my play blasted footage from Maya to see what it looked like and to see if my timings were still correct. I had taken my animatic with me to the P7 studio in order to be able to tell the timing but I thought I would just check. As it turned out one of my timings was wrong. But I will edit it in post production (I hope, I'm pretty sure I can in one of the softwares) so here's that.

Now bear in mind that because it's made up from screen blasts the quality is not amazing. Like really bad.

Alright so where to start with this... I believe I've realised some timing issues. He's pacing far to quickly and I need him to hold his head a little longer when he moves it up or to the side or something. However the strangest thing about this animatic is it now appears jumpier and faster than the original animatic and I think that's because you're brain is trying to adapt between the drawing and the CG.

The next thing I did this evening was cut the two storyboards together to get an understanding of where I would like to go with the edit. I had done a lot of work before, at storyboard level, to develop two separate stories that would combine together. However my original idea was to have them begin to parallel each other towards the end of the film so that the viewer could begin to see that they are the same character in different places - such as the brief states. However I also wrote the storyboards to make it appear as if they were feeding off each other. Which meant I had left myself obvious markers for weaving the story together. I was actually pretty relieved that they cut together well because after making the animatic above I was worried this was going to turn out completely crap. My relief when this ran together very well.

Now there are still timings here that I would like to fix however because I decided to cut up the animatics instead of using the individual cells I am unable to extend things further than the length of that particular part in the animatic. So there are parts of this, specifically in the middle, where I would like things to run for slightly longer but this is the pretty much the pacing and plot that I want for this.

World in a room - animatics

For some reason I thought I hadn't finished both my animatics for world in a room. But I have and before you see them I would like to point out that I have actually tweaked the ideas just a little bit. The part in each of these animatics where there are shadow effects on the walls, I am changing. I am still going to use the shadows as a device to show the reason they decide to forgive each other, but I'm not going to make it to hard for myself by actually using people or objects. I am just going to change the dynamics of the lights to create emotion and hopefully those will be emotions of forgiveness. 

I googled examples but if there's one thing I'm learning from being at university it's that the internet is completely useless and only idiots post things on it. I did find on decent site that I refer to for several film things. Might check it later as I have a lighting idea where the room gets brighter from in front of the character and the camera views the character from a 3/4 view so we can see the light hit them like a metaphor for coming to a realisation type thing.

Anyway bear that in mind when you watch these animatics. I could probably change them but at this stage the timings are pretty much worked out and if I know what I'm doing here so I can't really be bothered changing it now. 

So this is the animatic for the stop motion half of the film. This half (just incase you haven't read any of my posts below, shame on you btw) is about the character who is left upset by the argument. 

Ok so there it is. I'm still not 100% on some of the end pacing where the character looks up and then to the door but I am now running around 5 seconds over so I really can't push this any further. I believe changing the shadow scene a bit may rectify this. This one is paced slower by the use of longer scenes with fewer cuts. In total there are only a few takes and I may still see if I can run some takes together as the less takes there are the slower the pacing feels. 

Now onto the second animatic. This one has lots of cuts as it is a faster paced piece with lots of close ups, as close ups are the perfect angle for displaying character emotions. I would like to get started with this as soon as possible but I have so many questions to ask my technician first. However this is the priority as I don't have the 3D printed head for my stop motion character. I am getting a bit off topic now. Here is the anger animatic.

The same thing applies to this one, the shadow part - that's the bit with the people on the wall- is coming out in favour of the scenario described above. Have you already seen this? I can't honestly remember. Anyway I can't type tonight so I'm off before you can no longer read this.

Might be a while before you get your next update as I have a lot of animation to get my teeth into before the end of the month. But on the bright side after that you get to see the finished film! hooray right? yeah. Ok bye