Read this Post! It's contains epic!

Okay, so you know how last time my blog was all like 'I've faaaaailed, ah well I don't care. I've FAAAILED! *sob* Nah life is fine', and stuff? Well turns out, life is okay. Not great, but okay. And by okay I mean I passed! And by not great I mean I passed crappily. I did have my talk with Dave over the holidays though and he basically said 'Get a distinction in the next three modules and you can get a distinction overall'. So that's the plan! It'll be easy, right?

...right?


...


Ah, dammit.

Quick, I need a dose of epic!

Ahaha! That's epic.













Anyway, I've promised to really kick myself up the arse and try to get into good habits with my work. So before breaking into the full-on animatic for my upcoming negotiation module presentation, I decided it was probably a good idea to iron out the setting for my animation which up until this point was sort of accurate... sort of... but it was time to really iron out the kinks. So I had a browse of some old books I had stashed and trawled google for a day or so and came out with about 30 pages of really nice environment images; photographs, a bit of video game concept art as well as one 3D scene from a video game, lots of Avatar screenshots and concepts (but I've not yet got the actual art book for the film from my dad who's lost it), pictures of weeping willows (awesome tree is awesome) and all that rubbish. Feeling my work would be well informed enough, I then set to work to create some concept pieces that in no way resembled anything I'd been looking at. Except for the colour scheme, I suppose.

Here's the first one:

Now, before I say anything else I should probably mention my problem concerning lighting. Simply put, do I do it or not? Here's the flat version without the lighting/shadows:

I like both versions for different reasons.  The version with lighting will probably give more atmosphere when characters are moving through it (some cell shading on my vector-silhouette characters could also look quite interesting, it could reveal more of their shape that the viewer doesn't get to see otherwise, and that could be very interesting for the final showdown.  Because no villain is a villain until he has evil villainous lighting!)

Unless he's a giant monkey, in which case he'll look villainous even without it.  DOSEOFEPIC!

Quick, give him a banana!




Ahem.






So, that's my issue.  I do like the plain version though, as the shapes of the trees are more clear.  Perhaps if I kept the colours for these areas darker and just added light (the light version actually has a dark haze over it)...

Second concept piece:

Similar issue here. I added a pink haze over the top version to try and show distance and give it a bit of atmosphere, but I'm unsure about whether to keep it or just go with the flat, more brightly coloured version.

I found a slightly better way to do these sorts of pictures, actually, without using the pen tool. As much as I've improved at the pen tool I'm still quite slow with it and I find the lines are a little TOO pristine. What I did with these was take a new layer and draw rough, simplistic line art using a hard brush. Then I added a new layer, selected chunks from the line art layer and filled them in with the fill tool on the top layer. That done, when the line art layer was removed I ended up with a rougher version of the 'vectors' which had white lines where the line art had originally been. I thought it added a bit more randomness when I was messing with the colours (look at the lines on concept 1).

*spends ages clicking around confusedly, because Mac mice are rubbish and tend to confuse a left-click for a right-click. And then get stuck right-clicking and try to copy everything. And yet when I MEAN to right-click nothing ever happens.*

Die, Majin Buu, die!












Ok so anyway. I do need to run this by Dave to be sure I'm not spoiling the vectoriness of it all, but I'm fairly happy. Target time.

Got my presentation on Friday, so here's my lineup:

Rest of Today: Finish written work
Weekend: Begin animatic, finish off presentation and proposal.
Monday-Tuesday: Finish animatic
Wednesday: add placeholder sound effects to animatic
Thursday: Make sure all odd ends are tied up and presentation is ready and organized. Probably panic profusely.
Friday: Presentation, write a boring blog post, plug pictures shamelessly, and write down more targets. Huzzah!


And now, my duckies, I'll leave you with something slightly cuter than giant angry monkeys and dying Majin Buus.

D'aaaw. Bless his face.

Life goes on... or DOES it?!

Nah I'm pretty sure it will go on. :P

Feeling a tad downtrodden after my handin... I've failed.  So bad.  Probably a combination of me being ditzy, slow, underprepared, lazy and/or clueless, and perhaps the fact that the handin was Friday the 13th.  *shakes fist at the dastardly fiend who decided the handin date*  But life goes on, and hopefully I'll be able to knock the work out reasonably quickly next time.  Meanwhile, I've got my main project to worry about.  And this one will be finished for the deadline if it kills me.

But here are the finished idents we produced:

Library:



I'm sure Ashleigh animated this one; it features her, Zoe and Lien's monster characters.

Park:



Urk it's meeeeee ;_; This one was animated by Lien and Zoe. Ashleigh drew the flower metamorphosis, and Emma coloured it.

Pixilation:



Zoe set up the composit for this one and I animated it and threw some crappy sound at it. Listening to it play over Youtube, it seems to be out of sync when the version on my computer sounds more in time... a wierd voodoo curse, or proof of Youtube's evil true nature?

And this dragon model I found in Cinema 4D and decided to play with. I know it's shoddy, but it only took me 10 minutes. Fantastic model though. :P



Some other random videos:

'The Illusionist' trailer

http://youtu.be/ZElAeVdDCDs

'The Old Lady and the Pigeons'



A clip from 'The Secret of Kells'



'The Triplets of Belleville' trailer



'Entrophy'



'Le Faim(Hunger)'



Also, our internet is 7 megs a second now! Whoopie, I don't have to wait hours between the time I start writing my blog, realise I forgot to upload my videos, start uploading them, and several hours later finally embed them. Oh wait... 91 minutes for upload. Well... it is a very high quality video. XD

If it gives you an idea, I started this blog post at about noon. The writing (save for this bit) was finished at about 1 o' clock. Now scroll down and look at when it was posted. Yaaay. XD

Today I'm going to finalise my shortened animation concept - ie. edited storyboards and a script. May take me tomorrow to, but if not:
Tomorrow I'm going to be checking paper work (it's not going to be left 'til last. Not this time XD ) and documentation
Come Monday I'm going to visit college and talk to Dave about my high fail levels and my shortened version of my animation.
Tuesday is paperwork that wasn't covered by Sunday
Wednesday through the following Sunday I'll be using my storyboard to prepare a final animatic and make suitable fixes to my presentation/proposal and treatment.

Just a few late things!

Scripts for anyone in my group who wants them. Remember to print them in Courier New :D

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MTV Idents

IDENT 1 - 'FLOWER'

EXT. PARK – DAY

A MONSTER enters the shot from the right on a lead; a person follows holding the lead but only their legs are visible. Monster 1 notices a flower and stops walking to sniff it.

The flower suddenly begins to change shape very rapidly. Monster 1 waves its arms in panic before losing its balance and falling over onto its back. The flower's petals rearrange into the MTV logo as it completes its transformation.

IDENT 2 - 'PIXILATION'

EXT. STREET – DAY

SCRAPING sounds can be heard initially. All 5 MONSTERS enter the shot from the right. They are in a line, all gripping the same lead, and are struggling to pull it. The monsters slowly disappear off screen to the left as they continue to pull the lead. The person appears being dragged on screen from the right with the lead tied onto them.

The person gets slowly dragged off screen to the left; they have another lead tied onto one of their legs. After the person has exited the shot to the right after the monsters, the MTV logo follows, being tied to the other end of the lead on the person's leg.

IDENT 3 – 'SING'

INT. MONSTER FLAT SITTING ROOM – EVENING

4 MONSTERS are sitting on the settee in a cosy flat whilst the 5th monster stands on the floor in front of them, performing a song. The monsters all seem happy and contented.

Their contentment doesn't last long when music from a neighbouring flat begins to boom through the wall, causing the entire flat to vibrate. The singing monster stops singing and all of them look visibly surprised and then irritated at the disturbance. The camera pans through the wall into the neighbouring flat.

INT. MTV FLAT BEDROOM – CONTINUOUS

The camera completes its pan through the wall. The MTV logo is sitting on a bed dancing to the music, facing a computer which is playing it. The MTV logo's flat is also vibrating with the sheer volume.

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PS.  I hate deadlines </3

Deadline for Da Groop

Hey, it's a blog post! And it's actually early, whey-ey!

So, me and my group have been working on our MTV idents and I think making good progress. Today Ashleigh helped me re-rig my character, and Dave helped to show me that IK-Splines aren't actually strange voodoo magic only practised by purple aliens in another galaxy. We humans can get them to work, too! Which I was quite chuffed about. Then later, once I'd gotten the hang of animating said IK-spline, Dave brought a friend in just as I was asking him why I had this odd... twisting problem with my character's IK-spline tail, which I'll show in a minute, and his friend, called M... M... Mr Awesome came and took about 2 minutes to do the dynamic motion thing I'd been trying for WEEKS to get right. Insane! He used Mocca IK I think, but it won't work on my computer and the tail of my character is as rigid as a plank o' wood again. Irony! Hopefully the copy Ashleigh has is still bendalicious.

So, here's the twisting problem I mentioned:



Yeah... that's odd. You'd think you could just rotate the mesh back to normal - trust me, I tried.

Oh and he's an animation of the MTV logo I made for one of the idents, where the monsters are disturbed by its loud music:



That's all I have to share for the moment... written work is calling me. Its call sounds like a highly unpleasant screech that makes my brain bleed but... the call must be answered! *epic exit*

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Jolly Doomsday!

Nah I'm just being pointlessly dramatic. Apart from my passport woes (trying to get this thing sorted out for our Berlin trip in April is an arse... I just hope it'll be ready soon) and trying to get back into the swing of things after an admittedly lazy Xbox-and-chocolate-fuelled Christmas holiday. Also, Woodlands Hall is doing its King Arthur Pantomime and I'm working a spotlight, so that's been eating up my time. And burning my fingers. Those spotlights get hot. D:

So much that needs doing... first things first. Our group project (the three MTV idents) is coming along fairly well. My little character's tail is still not the way I wanted it, but at this point it's probably better to cut my losses and just rig it normally so I can at least move it. Since he's not going to be onscreen for a long time it should be alright, but I'd still like to learn how to get the dynamic... tail... wiggle thing to work. I also asked if I could animate the MTV logo that is listening to music in one of the last idents, so that needs to be done by Monday.

For my personal project, I've been chopping down the story mercilessly. My last review made it quite clear that I was getting too ambitious again. Aaaand considering that, since I started, I've not finished a single animation for its deadline... bad habits are bad. So an overview of the changes I've made:

-There is no introduction to the villain, Varquer'eel, entering the forest or establishing his control over the cats
-Because of this lack of explanation, I've also cut out Varquer'eel's assassins (who would originally be shown chasing him into the forest)
-Okri does not meet Taln during the course of the animation
-Instead, she, Taln and Ralla'ool are shown to be traveling together
-I may include subtitles 'translating' the character's meows/squawks as was originally intended in earlier drafts

And as a rough outline, those are the changes. Okri, Taln and Ralla'ool would set up camp close to the forest where Varquer'eel is controlling his cats - they set their eyes on Ralla'ool while she sleeps, and though Okri chases them off and tries to lead the group on their way, a hungry Taln and Ralla'ool ignore her warnings and end up chasing a mouse into the forest and having to find their way back out again. On the way, Ralla'ool is finally captured, and the rest of the story remains fairly close to my earlier draft.

Today: Finish MTV Logo animation and UCAS stuff
Tomorrow: Watch the pantomime multiple times, burn myself on the spotlight, finish my character rig
Sunday: Finish up any outstanding areas of the MTV project/character, finalize a final final reviewed script for my main project.
Monday: Start compositing the MTV idents together