An evaluation of a pipeline coming through some dodgey terrain.

Hi all, sorry its been a while since my last post, but i have been busy with this Chew tv ident project, and instead of coming home and tapping my findings from the day into my blog i have had to take the brunt of the pressure created by this project, and by the lack of communication and commitment shown by other team members. Sorry boys; thats how it was and thats how i feel. If it was decided at the start that pre-production was going to be done by one person, post by another and everything inbetween by another i think we would have been a lot clearer.


On the upside all was completed on time and the brief was satisfied. I feel that the quality of the final piece was compromised by the last-minute attitude of our group (we could have done with at least another render), but the pre-production sketches provided by James offered a good start for our design bible and basis for our research (think Mega city one/Metropolis).


This was all put together by Gabe, who also done most of the post-production work.





The purpose of this 'block-through' is to show which bits of the production have to be detailed or even built at all.

As it happened, we could have got away with a lot more as we had to make compromises on the lighting for the rendering time and so we could meet our deadline. In the end to meet it we had four machines going for hours at a time and had to hope that the final result was right and all the render settings were the same on all the machines. As it was this was the case.

After realising that the lenght of time actually spent in the city was less than 2 seconds, the aim of this part of the animation was to portray that there is a lot going on within Chew, and not to show a highly detailed lot of buildings but just the idea of this. The nature of the shot; the way it pulls back at speed bombards the senses and before you know it you are looking at the chew logo. This gave us a get-out clause on a lot of the detail.

As it was the biggest problem (besides the lack of light, which actually worked in our favour) was when the camera went up in the cloud (Fluid container, actually like cloudy water) the light from the ground started to act really weird. The blue lights just set the sky 'on fire', this i feel must have been part of the fluid set-up, but as this was the only render we had time for we had to find a quick fix. We ended up putting a pure white scene in between the transfer from maya to after-effects. this gave us the desired white-out and got us out of trouble. If i had time i would have un-associated the clouds from any lights and this would have also spead up the render time.

Going completely off on a tangent this has led me to start thinking about the way that light acts in fluid containers andthe ways in which this could be used in abstract animation. This is an area which i am keen to research and maybe find a way of expressing a narrative through this. The use of the 3-d space created by the cloud give instant perspective and the way that certain lights in maya work could have some really impressive results.

As for now, this is our finished ident, sorry if it lags a bit, you might have more joy downloading it and then viewing. Bye for now..