Finals Finals Finals

Oh my god finals are due next week and I am going out of my mind trying to juggle work, finals, and Christmas shopping before I leave for India.
The thesis paper is also coming along and we submit our first draft tomorrow. This paper feels like it is never ending, there is so much to write and yet so much to exclude. I have never ever written a thesis paper in the MLA format before and this is going to be a task.
So far we have close to 70 pages but this includes our visual script and additional images.

Lighting and Rendering Final

Working with mental ray is not turning out as easy as I thought it would the shading networks are pretty complicated and there are 10 different ways to do things that will optimize the scene and the render times.
Working on this final has made me realize even more that I would surely use Mental Ray as a renderer, most of my shading networks will be created using Maya's shading network. I plan to do a lot more research into mental Ray for Maya over the Winter Break, and depending on that I will decide on the amount of my usage of Mental Ray for the thesis.
The shot I was using for this classes final involves the amulet and the sword, so I have built both of them and the models are looking pretty good. Here is a occlusion render of the amulet. This same design will also be on the sword.

Dynamics and Particles

For my dynamics and particles class I wanted to create the BAMF kind of feel of particles that shadow the Jabberwocky's wings.
I have not been very successful with this as yet but i am still working on the kind of an effect that I would like to create. My main challenge is that in the Original BAMF effect it worked really well as they used millions and millions of particle instances, which is not something that i could replicate due to the time and also my machine constraints. I found that multi streaks are giving me a nice effect, similar to awarm of flies around the jabberwocky. Adding some cloud particles or even some fluids with that I could possibly generate a nice effect.

Here is my first test for that. I am using a model created by Adrian for another thesis student.

Since our last industry critique, I have not had much time to work on the thesis paper or start the 3D animatic as I have been pretty busy with classes and finals coming up in three weeks.
For my lighting and rendering 2 class I am using one of our scenes to test out and render with Mental Ray. This has been quite a task. I used Mental Ray's physical sun and sky for our Dan project to render the Donkey in its various surroundings. i want to use the same for lighting the scene for the L&R 2 class. Mental Ray shader networks are fairly complex and require a lot of R&D. I will be combining this with Maya's shading networks too.

Here is an example of lighting a scene using Mental Rays physical sun and sky

Industry Critique

We had our Industry critique today with Andrew Schneider, FX TD, Bluesky
Brien Hindman, Senior Modeler, Blue Sky and along with Myles Tanaka as the moderator.
Being the first to present, we jumped right into introductions and what our thesis was all about. After showing them some of the concept tests, our color palettes, and reference images we put the animatic on.
It looked good on the screen and the sound was really great. Once we were done with showing all that we had to it was time to face the music...
Their first suggestion was that we should break the thesis down into a schedule and then stick to that. After watching the animatic, they wondered if maybe it was too long but at the same time they felt that it may not be very ambitious (which I completely disagree to). They also felt that it did not come across so much as a trailer as much, and it felt more like the first half of a short. After watchign the trailer in class again, and speeding it up almost 3 times its speed we did decide to speed up the shots and cut down the length to almost half.

Trailer (faster)


They had some really good suggestions regarding the jabberwocky character and how we should rig it, as have different rigs depending on the shot and the framing of the shot. One of their ideas was to show off the jabberwocky more and actually see the fight between William and the Jabberwocky, which Adrian and I are considering.
Some of their other suggestions were regarding the camera and framing and this would help a great deal in heightening the tension.
As for the sound they felt it worked, and suggested that we do put in more sound FX.
One of their worries were the wings of the Jabberwocky and the idea that we were planning to use cloth for it, as suggested by them we are thinking about considering using a blend shape to have them open up.

Animatic Round 3

So we finally have a kinda finished animatic. This is what we shall be presenting tomorrow to the previz industry panel.
We are using a logo that I created for my class to start it off, and may change this later. Turn your speakers up

Jabberwocky Videos on Google

I was checking on google video if my animatic would pop up when I typed Jabberwocky Animatic (title of my animatic), and I got a whole page of videos for Jabberwocky.
Here is one I would like to share......its hilarious

Design Production_01

Got some images together for our color palette, and made a collage out of it. I also looked into Tyquane's suggestion of the website www.colourlovers.com. Its a cool site, and very helpful. Then I researched some different sites for the meanings etc of color, and unfortunately I cannot reference wikipedia, but I got a lot of information regarding the same.

We also spoke to Christian Meija, who is now going to develop our color story boards for us. His skills at photoshop are amazing and i am really looking forward to the results. Most of our pre-production work is working out really well thanks to all the help from our classmates and friends. I have to say, we have some of the most amazing people at CADA. I hope that I am able to return the favor.

Adrian suggested the website www.colorblender.com for the color palette, and it is an amazing website, very interactive, allows you to save your color palette, and also download it as color swatches.

Following are the color palettes for William, Jabberwocky, the forest and the vorpal sword

William

Jabberwocky

Sword

Forest

Design Production

Our assignment this week is to get into the color, composition, design elements, and to create a style frame. Unfortunately I have not had time to do much except look at some images with regard to the colors of our thesis.

I also need to create a style frame with colors. Time is flying really fast and its getting more difficult to keep up with the pere-production as well as the 3 other classes. Fortunately we can use our thesis as finals for our classes. So for my lighting and rendering final assignment I will create the scene where William is holding the sword and the emblem that he has in his hand. It may not be the final sword that we go for, but as long as I get the look right I will have achieved a lot.

I sent across our animatic to Alistair Farrant, he is doing the graphics communication course at SCPS and sound is his hobby. He will be creating the music as well as doing the voice over and all the sound effects for our project. Co-ordinating is a little difficult but I am sure once everything starts rolling it will become easier.

To top it all, being the artist in the family I was emotionally blackmailed into creating a family tree for my Uncles 60th birthday, if it was not for Junie I would have probably have spent atleast 2-3 days on creating it. Thank you junie.....feel free to grab me for any kind of help you ever need.

Panel Critique

We had a panel critique today with 3 professors, Michael Hosenfeld (NYU SCPS), Mike Cushny (NYU SCPS) and Brendon from SVA.
We were the first to go from our class, we got some great feed back and some tips from all of them regarding resources and tricks that we could use for our thesis. Unfortunately we did not have any sound and that was the main negative comment that they had to make. The camera and the composition is going to play a very important role in this trailer, which is something they stressed upon. Basically they got the thesis, they understood what we were trying to do and portray.

The most important thing to do now is to try and get a scratch sound going so that when we have the industry panel on the 14-15-16th of Nov we have no comments regarding that. One of the suggestions was to get this storyboard to a more finished level, with color, proper camera angles, and composition. We roped in christian to help us to make our story boards more finalised. Cidalia is going to help Adrian to define the characters and create the sketches for them as well as the props that will be shown in the trailer.

Animatic Round 2

Since our story board creation we have had a lot of input regarding our shots for the animatic an we have already gone through 2-3 versions of our animatic. Creating the animatic has given us a better insight into how we want to portray certain things, such as the tempo of the piece, the transitions we want to incorporate and ofcourse the fact that we will definitely need to have our music composed.

We don't, want the music to drive our piece it should be the other way round. The line of action is coming across wrong in some of the shots, but we will figure it out. Shooting the action will be a very crucial addition, and will allow us to understand better what we want to portray.

This is our "second" attempt at the final animatic. I'm sure we are going to change it around and make some more editing changes as we go down the way. We have some great story boards to work with and to finally see something as whole as the animatic is very exciting.

To put this together we had to dive into FCP (not one of my favourite programs). Being a PC person I struggle a little with Macs, but since the programs are the same I always manage to work around the Mac. FCP was a whole different ball game. knowing very little about FCP and how it works, it was a real task to get the animatic done exactly how we wanted to.

The result was great, and looking at all the frames together like this gave us an opportunity to understand better the timing of our whole piece. We already cut out a few shots and made them optional, and changed around the timing for some of the shots.

So here goes, see the first round of our animatic (more like 5-6th...ha).

Jabberwocky

BAMF effect

Spoke to Adam burr again regarding another effect that we are planning. The effect was used in Xmen2 for the night crawler called the "BAMF" effect. It is a wispy smoky effect that will be a hovering cloud around the Jabberwocky. Our assignment for class today was to create a fluid animation flowing along a path and it is something that I could use for this effect. When he saw the reference Adam said that there are times when physically creating the effect in the real world is better and more realistic. Since we want this effect to almost shadow the Jabberwocky we will need to create it within Maya or contract a really skilled compositor.

For the Dynamics final I will probably re-create this effect so that I get an idea of how difficult it is an also get an idea of render times.

I went searching online for some information on this effect and discovered that you tube was full of videos of people who had already attempted this. Some good and some.......hmmmm. Some created with 3d and some used after effects and compositing to get their results.

The way I am looking to recreate this is a little differently. It is not going to be used to make a character disappear but rather it will be like a hovering effect, like a shadow, around the Jabberwocky's wings.

To understand the effect better please visit the following links, there were many but I am just posting the original and one done by someone else

XMen2 Nightcrawler


YouTube

Animatic Round 1

Got together with Adrian and was putting the final touches on our animatic, we don't have a sound yet but we have a sample of the kind of music that we are looking at.
On Friday, 20th OCT we met Alistair, he is the person who did the sound for Donkey Xote, and when he spoke with his English accent I could not resist asking him if he would like to do our voice over for us. He not only agreed but wants to also do our sound effects, and probably compose an original piece of celtic music for the trailer.
This is absolutely great.....once we have our animatic finished with the logos etc we can pass it on to him for the sound.

Dynamics, Lighting and Rendering

I found a couple of really great websites that have a lot of information regarding mental ray, I am still pretty shaky with mental ray and need to really develop my skills in it.
Spoke to Adam Burr the dynamics prof, and he too was in agreement with the fact that I should just create my fog effect with a z-depth pass and mainly create it through compositing. For the effect of mist around the trees and hugging the ground. though I might still need to do a fluids pass to create some interaction when William, the boy runs through the forest. We would also like to re-create a similar effect to that of the night crawler in X-Men 2. The wispy smoky effect which will be around the Jabberwocky at all times.

Donkey Xote

Donkey Xote is almost done......WOW its been a while. Donkey Xote is a 3D short created by the Digital Arts Network (DAN) spear headed by Omri Navot. And its been a while since we started this but it is a short and we are students with lots of classes. So it has taken this long. But it is looking good if I may say so, all that work paid off.
I've learned a lot on this project especially about working with large teams, since we will not be working in isolation in the real world, it is very important to understand that the group dynamics can make or break the project.
But the learning curve on such a project is amazing, since learning as you do was the criteria.

Life goes on......

My uncle passed away and unfortunately I have not been able to give as much of my time and energy to my classes. But I will catch up.....
Death is an eventuality of life but one is never prepared for it.

Lighting and Rendering advice

I spoke to Boaz Livny, My lighting and rendering professor about using one of the shots from my storyboard as my final project for his class and he had many suggestions about my thesis in general.
First of all the shot that I had chosen to do as a lighting and rendering final piece was the first opening shot with the God Rays and the fog and the humongous trees. The first bit of feed back was to do the God rays and fog as a composite and not generate it in 3D. I got the same feed back from Adam Burr (Dynamics and Particles professor). This is great coz now I can concentrate on the other effects and Mental Ray.

Switching Classes

We did decide to attend each others class and it seemed to be working out, but unfortunately neither of us can do this, it takes away from us those extra 3 hours that we could spend researching, referencing etc.
To clarify, after discussing it with Myles, I have decided to move into Patricia's class. We have a rough animatic and it is looking good, of course the sound effects and music track will bring it alive.

For the music we are planning to use celtic music, but it would really work if we could get someone to compose the track and sound effects for us.

StoryBoards

So after Cidalia graciously created our storyboards for us, it felt like this story had come alive. I was putting the script break down together with the story boards and for the first time did I get overwhelmed with the whole idea.
Here is our first draft of the story board.

Sword References

Then I looked for references for swords, here are the images I found on Google Images. I found some really awesome ones, not sure how much we are really going to concentrate on this model but it is an essential part of the story.

BBC Motion Gallery

I was looking for some references online yesterday and I went to this site recommended by Koichi, (Thank you) the BBC motion Gallery. It had references for almost anything and everything.
Here are some of the quick time references from the BBC Motion Gallery.

Attempting to Sketch

I started to sketch out my story boards over the weekend, and I found that I had great difficulty in sketching the angles. I began my career in this field with 3D and my 2D skills have not developed to the extent that I would like.
In any case, one of our classmates, Cidalia, helped us out on the story boards, and we put them together as a rough animatic. This rough animatic has given me new perspective into line of action, camera, and even shots that I could probably cut out. The timing when put together with the transitions is making the length of my trailer too long, and this is without the logos etc of the production houses. Which means that I will need to edit this further so that I am still telling part of the story and yet keeping the length to 60 seconds.
I need to start my research on fluids for the mist and the trees shattering as if being torn apart. That is going to be a challenge, but hopefully the particles class will give me some new ideas as to how I should approach it. I know what I want I just need to figure out how I'm going to translate that into 3D.

Which Previz Class?????

For now we have decided to attended each others previz class.My thesis previz adviser is Myles and Adrian's is Patricia. Yesterday, I attended Adrian's class and they were looking at visual scripts. One thing that I learned is that a picture does not speak a thousand words. Unless of course your picture or sketch is so detailed that it will do just that.
Initially I was thinking about just creating thumbnails, rough sketches to convey the gist of the trailer, using them mainly to describe the camera action. But, our visual script will have to be as descriptive as possible to convey the action correctly.
Once we break it down into the visual script based on our script break down, is when we will see some of the problems we would run into.
Over this weekend I plan to put pencil to paper and attempt to sketch this out myself. If i do not succeed I will have to revert to doing it digitally.

Thesis Statement 1st draft

"JABBERWOCKY"

Adrian De La Mora & Mehma Sachdeva

Thesis Statement:

Jabberwocky is a theatrical trailer of a fictional movie which incorporates visual effects and 3D elements. Motivated by the need to know the truth about his father, a young boy proves his self worth by embarking on an epic quest to slay a monster, deep within an ancient forest. There he discovers a parallel mythical world, full of strange and fantastical creatures.

Concept:

Based on the poem "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carrol, this trailer will mesmerize the audience making them wonder about the fine line between fantasy and reality. The technical focus of this piece will on visual effects and lighting and rendering. The goal is to achieve a good level of realism while displaying visual effects.

Target Audience:

The main target audiences are teenagers and young adults aged 12 to 20. However, because of current trends and the nature of the piece, families and "young-at-heart" adults can be a secondary target audience.

Backstory:

In some small towns of the early 1400's, mythical creatures were often told of in local urban legends. One such legend was that of the "Jabberwocky". It is said that the Jabberwocky lived in an old dense forest in England, near the now [ruined] village of Jabber. It is in this village that our story is set.

William, a young and scrawny boy of nine, has grown up in loneliness. It is told that his father had passed away when he was just two. As the legend goes, William’s father had ventured into the ancient forest to face a ravenous monster that attacked the villagers' livestock and destroyed their crops. He never returned. William’s mother told him many bed time stories of his father’s valiant adventures in the dark and magical forest. She told William how much he was like his father, but the truth was far from that.

William was often made fun of and called a coward by the children of the village. They poked fun at him for the stories about his father, and they called him a liar. They did not believe his stories about his father going off to find the Jabberwocky and said that he had left his wife and child for a life away from the village. They called his father a coward.

One day the taunts and name calling pushed the boy over the limit, daring William to accept the challenge of going into the ancient forest of the Jabberwocky, alone for a whole day and night. The next morning William wakes up before sunrise, packs himself a meal, kisses his sleeping mother and sets off for an adventure.

Synopsis:

William enters the ancient forest not expecting to find anything exciting. He secretly starts to believe that the old stories were merely that, nothing but fictional legends. But as he wanders further into the forest he discovers another world. Deep inside the heart of the ancient forest lies a world of mythical creatures, a world where the entire forest is alive.

While lost and running through the forest, William reaches a very dense area of the forest. The boy stumbles upon the overgrown remains of a fallen warrior, where he discovers a magical and legendary Vorpal Sword. After donning the old armor and unsheathing his new weapon, the blade begins to glow with a cool flame. In the distance, a large, shadowy figure takes notice of the light and, with a ferocious roar, charges towards the boy, leaving a path of destruction in its wake. However, William is now emboldened by this sword as he tightens his armor straps and begins to run towards his enemy. As the two meet, the trailer ends with the boy standing ready to fight the Jabberwocky towering high above his head.

Decisions Decisions

So after much debate I have decided to go for a joint thesis with a class mate of mine Adrian De La Mora. The basic idea is to create a 45-60 second theatrical trailer which will encompass VFX and 3D for a fictional movie.

So far we have a story going and still have some plans that we need to work out. Once we have ironed out all the details we can pitch this to the university and get their approval for the first ever joint thesis at NYU CADA.

Thats all for now, will write more tomorrow once Adrian and I have had our big meeting.