Cinematography - The Hoovering - final film

This was a nice project to work on and I really enjoyed learning the technique of film making. Its a little dark (literally) so you may need to close the curtains and turn the lights off to watch it in its full glory!



Heres the documentary:



It was a good team to work with and I'm happy we saw this idea through from conception to completion. I have learned many skills from this which will come in useful for animation and film production. As a director, it was a bit tricky at first as there were a lot of people in our crew but I felt more comfortable in this role as the production went on. Good times!

Read More

Post Production - super bins - final piece

Ryan and I handed in our project last night a bit last minute :



I have to say that despite all our efforts - it is not of the standard I was hoping for. In the future we must be clear of when the deadline is early on and plan in contingency days. I think we could have used at least 2 - 3 extra days on this to overcome the following problems:

- The fire (which appears to look like a cloud following the bin.)

- The bin also appears to judder as its rising up - perhaps this could have been edited out or made smoother in Maya.

- Rotoscoping to loose the edges of the real bins that you can see come through our CG bins.

- A final bit of lighting correction would have been nice as well - as the edge of our virtual spotlight can be seen as the green bin rises up and out of the lit area.

Still, on a positive note, I have learned a lot from this project. Mainly the techniques behind integrating 3D animation with live action footage but also some more unusual things such as placing 2D animated textures on 3D surfaces.

Heres a breakdown of the work I contributed towards the project:-

Design and Animatic
Filming
Tracking and Stabilizing the footage
Matchmoving and placing the 3D bins in the scene
2D Animated textures and eyes
Lighting the scene
Painting/touching up the bin textures
Compositing and rotoscoping
Rendering

I am pleased with how real we have managed to make the bins look. I also like the little bits of animation we've added. It is a shame we couldn't finish it properly in time for the deadline. The best thing we can do now is learn from this and apply it to the next project.

Read More

Barista update

Alex has now got me earmarked for post production and handed me some footage of a nice and not nice latte being poured. My job is to make the background transparent so he can place a nice wooden texture underneath it. This has been made easier by the blue paper Alex layed down under the latte but still had some minor challenges. The blue reflected onto the mug so I couldn't key it out completely and ended up having to animate several garbage mattes to get rid of areas that still had unwanted greyness. It took me most of Sunday to do 150 frames. A lot of this time was spent learning how to use Composite for the task. Once I figured out a method I did it relatively quickly. Only 500 ish frames to go :)

Read More

The ship continues.. Projected history update

So the battle between Polys and Nurbs continues..(wow! a slightly geeky comment there.) I think as a result of my efforts today I have realised Nurbs are far more efficient for this ship in terms of speed of getting them made, and quality of the result.

So first, I completed the Polygon ship as much as possible. While it looks fairly good, I was sure that Nurbs would end up looking smoother. Pictured at the top here is my latest update on the Polygon ship. As you can see, I made several lines around the Polygon ship and the result at the bottom of the picture is what happened when I lofted the lines producing a Nurbs ship..



Yeah.. a bit of a monstrosity! I think its probably because a lot of my control vertex points on the curves are not consistant from curve to curve. Then, I was struck with a moment of inspiration. I had watched a tutorial on stitching Nurb surfaces earlier and produced a quick sketch of how I could make two different Nurb Patches - one for the beginning and one for the end of the ship, and then stitch them together.



As a result of this, I tried a quick test which took around 10-15 minutes and I was happy to see that it was possible to make a Nurbs ship using this method. Not only did I do it a hundred times faster then my Poly ship, it has come our looking much smoother :-)

Read More

Post progress

I have been working on this quite a bit over the last week. First, I looked at the animatic to figure out the timing of the actual shooting of the bins to allow for the animation that would take place. I drew this scene plan that helped when it came to filming - a birds eye view of the scene showing camera movement with the timing:



Then on a nice sunny morning, we got down to the bins for filming. There were a few minor issues - cloud cover that kept changing the lighting - we needed just one consistent lighting to keep things simple. Also people who kept coming along to put bottles in the bins. It was all good in the end, we had a few windows of opportunity that we jumped on and got several takes done. Ryan counted out seconds whilst I filmed the bins. Here is our chosen video that we are going to use:



Not bad but very wobbly as it was all hand held. As we're aiming to layer on both 2D and 3D animation I thought it would be best for the footage to be as smooth as possible to allow for a nice subtle coming-to-life transition of these bins. So I've spent a fun week tracking using Composite...

This was all fairly new to me so there was a learning curve involved and much of the work seemed to be setting up the folders properly to allow for a consistent workflow. In a nutshell it involved going through the footage 50 frames at a time in Composite, adding 2 tracking points using a tracker node, then using a 2D transform node to connect to the trackers and stabilize the footage. I also added another layer in the 2D transform node in order to animate the scale and positioning of the footage (to stop it going out of frame.) Then rendering it out and repeating the process. Though it has been a lengthy and slightly tedious process it has resulted in a smooth camera move and the footage is much nicer to watch:



The sudden acceleration is a bit weird at the end, but hey.. maybe we can make it work nicely with the bin doing a gradual lift off then a star wars like time warp into the distance!

Today, I used Matchmover to track the footage and translate it into a Maya scene. Looking forward to the moment of putting in Ryans 3D bin into the footage, things are getting exciting :)

14/3/2011 - Update

I have worked on a lot more stuff since the last posts above. These images show what my animated textures will look like on the bins.





Today has been fun because we have finally put together the CG bins with the footage into Maya.



Can you guess which one is real and which one is CG?...probably - but pretty good I think considering we havn't played around with the lighting and rendering. Still I'm quite happy with it. Ryan worked on the model and texturing - nice job mate! :-)

Read More