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.