The conception of our Hayle animation.

Now that we have our group for our project we have started some lively debate on the whole feel of the project. The breif lends itself to a 'creature comforts' kind of humourous sketch but we have ended up going for a more realist, quite serious angle. We have taken what Winnie said about 'not falling out with anybody' and what she said about her relationship with her husband and put these into two brackets.
The first is:as she is refering to the fact that she does not intend to fall out with anyone in the future then we thought we would highlight the solitude that a lot of old people experience and have her sat in a room by herself. In this way we thought that we could offer a copy of the finished animation (or maybe an edit) to help the aged (a charity).
Secondly, as she is talking about her husband; a flashback into her younger life highlighting what a non confrontational person she was and also the love that was in her marrage. We feel it is important that we get this in as to not put across the wrong message.
The mediums we are going to be using are all digital, some 2d and some 3d, making use of the toon shader in maya.
One of our team is going to be in charge of all the shading so that the continuity is preserved.
So far so good.

New project issued.

We got a new breif this week and it is quite interesting. Animations can can exist for many a different reason and to forefil many a need. You may want it to be entertaining, informative or just to give some hint of an atmosphere like say with a peice of music and the accompanying video.
This is a similar task to that of a music video where you have the sound first and work the animation to the sound. The post syncrinisation of the animation will differ from that of a music video because it has a historical context to the brief. Also there is a very Cornish flavour to the project; and in the 60 years since the recordings were made the place has changed drasticly.
We are also being told that we are to work in small groups; this i am going to find hard as i have just finished working in a group and i have a feeling that maybe i have put my cards on the table too early.
Hopefully i can find a group who will allow me to take a backseat this time and not think i am shirking any responsability, as i would also like the chance to do something out of my comfort zone; maybe something more traditional like model making or drawing.
We have a meeting tomorrow and i am sure after that i will know a bit more.

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..

Another crack at lip syncing.

Thought i would try and record my own voice and do a short lip sync animation. I think its quite funny.

First go at lip syncing.

We had a go at lip-syncing in flash today, it was ok, but i can also see it can be very time consuming and also very rewarding at the same time. The planning side of this is very important as you have to make all the mouth shapes for the noises before you start; this enables you to have a clear run at your animating.

Our crack at live@5.

Today we were given the reigns of the graphics production for this weeks live@5 production. The day started with my train being half an hour late (which it has'nt been recently, typical), and then straight on with programming the sports chart. This was done with after effects-screenshots to follow- and all the team logos were provided and put in place.

I found that the use of straight cuts instead of dissolved cuts was not what i was used to as the footage sometimes has to be paused and if the pictures were opaque it could lead to a shot that was 'washed-out'.

The next thing that i got involved in was the weather symbols. We managed to make an animated rain symbol (the only symbol we needed-typical) using flash. This we saved as a quicktime movie and created a mask to alpha the white from the graphic. I am sure there is a way of exporting the work with an alpha level, but at the moment we are not sure how to do this. (It could be that we just have to save it as a .swf file and after-effects would recognise this?)

All in all as a team we worked quite well, we had a feel of the stress that the news team are under and the only thing that went wrong was the weather guy was filmed on the wrong side of the screen; so he was standing in front of our chart. This could have been remidied by a simple horizontal transform, but by the time we realised what had happened it was 16:30.

As this was not really our fault as the graphics had been done first, i think we can feel quite happy with ourselves.

A little bit more artwork

Just love this video and song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acay3S2PhSg Its a great piece of work, and a great collaboration between the musicians and the animators.
It also shows the workings of a simple stop frame animation which is very interesting indeed. I love it.