Ok, I know I have been neglecting the blog as of late, so to make it up I have all of my animation from the past two weeks, of which there is a lot. I'm afraid its not in any particular order so don't worry about narrative, just flick through and I will provide commentary where appropriate.
There are lots of little changes I plan to make in the edit, such as holding the odd frame and cutting others out but hopefully the general gist of the movement is there.
Oooo, and just a note, these vids have all been pulled straight out of stop-motion pro so they are all stretched, not cropped right, in need of colour correction etc. and are just generally of crappy quality - enjoy!
Now, shot 25 (below) is an interesting shot, this is the one where the angry little creatures charge forward. It was unbelievably difficult and took me the best part of a day to figure out with the finished result being this funny little bounce they do. I'm in two minds as to whether or not I should go back and re-do this as it would be relativity easy to add a bit more movement and smooth it up a bit, but the jumpiness of it mimics the pipers movement quite nicely so I want to see how it looks edited together with footage of the piper. It might also look a bit different once the rigs are painted out.
I did this shot (below) today and I think its a bit iffy, the lighting is very ropey and the piper is completely cropped out in places so the tiny bit of movement you do see is very jumpy and not on screen long enough for the viewer to register. It might work in the final edit but I think I may have to re-shoot this one.
Well there you have it, all the plastercine animation, this week im on to 2D, Lee is coming onto the project to do some inking so hopefully I can get the bulk of it out of the way by Easter weekend, whack out a rough edit and work out what needs re-shooting. Yay!!!!!
Tuesday 30 March 2010
Sunday 14 March 2010
Video Tweaks and Things
I was going to post a video or two of some tweaked animation but I can not get Premiere to behave, so we shall have to make do with the clip from my last blog and a couple of stills instead.
What we have in the aforementioned clip is a very rough edit together of two shots where the creatures burst through the poster and jump out. To film the track-in, assisted by Georg, I had to rig up the camera on a dismantled rostrum, allowing me to move it backwards and forwards in small increments. On this set-up the camera could be treated as any other animated object would be. Originally I animated the track on twos but this looked awful so I did it on ones instead and it came out a lot smoother. I did manage to mess up the focus pull though so everything goes a bit out of focus half-way through but I quite like it and if I cut out the bit at the beginning where the poster is in focus it would look intentional.
During the course of animating I improvised the scene with the smaller creature pushing the fluff onto the larger one; the characters where starting to develop their own personalities as I worked so i just went with it,I think is works quite nicely. There are some bits which might benefit from an extra frame hold here and there, just to make it all a bit less rushed, which is easy enough to do. There are also a few bits and bobs which may want masking out and maybe a frame adding of the bigger creature leaping from the hole as at the moment it jumps a tad too quickly. All in all though, for my first attempt at stop-mo since last term I don't think it is too bad.
Now for the really techy stuff! In the clip in the last post what you are seeing is an image which has been stretched to fit the widescreen format, stop-motion pro seems to feel a need to do this which is a tad annoying, obviously this is not what I want the film to look like. To fix this I am going to have to take the RAW files from the SLR, which stop-motion pro doesn't touch, and crop them down to fit widescreen, This means that I am shooting a lot more stuff than is actually seen, and have to be careful that all the animation will fit and not get cropped out. Although the clip has been stretched I have cropped it down to try and simulate what the finished article will look like.
Originally I wanted to shoot the entire film so that everything was overexposed and glowing. This is still my intention but I am now going to apply this effect in post because it is easier to perform any digital fixes if the colors are not bleeding into each other.
For the time being I have just messed around with cropping, the exposure, contrast and saturation on some stills and I quite like the results but I might also have a play with filters to adjust the color temp, we shall see.
What we have in the aforementioned clip is a very rough edit together of two shots where the creatures burst through the poster and jump out. To film the track-in, assisted by Georg, I had to rig up the camera on a dismantled rostrum, allowing me to move it backwards and forwards in small increments. On this set-up the camera could be treated as any other animated object would be. Originally I animated the track on twos but this looked awful so I did it on ones instead and it came out a lot smoother. I did manage to mess up the focus pull though so everything goes a bit out of focus half-way through but I quite like it and if I cut out the bit at the beginning where the poster is in focus it would look intentional.
During the course of animating I improvised the scene with the smaller creature pushing the fluff onto the larger one; the characters where starting to develop their own personalities as I worked so i just went with it,I think is works quite nicely. There are some bits which might benefit from an extra frame hold here and there, just to make it all a bit less rushed, which is easy enough to do. There are also a few bits and bobs which may want masking out and maybe a frame adding of the bigger creature leaping from the hole as at the moment it jumps a tad too quickly. All in all though, for my first attempt at stop-mo since last term I don't think it is too bad.
Now for the really techy stuff! In the clip in the last post what you are seeing is an image which has been stretched to fit the widescreen format, stop-motion pro seems to feel a need to do this which is a tad annoying, obviously this is not what I want the film to look like. To fix this I am going to have to take the RAW files from the SLR, which stop-motion pro doesn't touch, and crop them down to fit widescreen, This means that I am shooting a lot more stuff than is actually seen, and have to be careful that all the animation will fit and not get cropped out. Although the clip has been stretched I have cropped it down to try and simulate what the finished article will look like.
Originally I wanted to shoot the entire film so that everything was overexposed and glowing. This is still my intention but I am now going to apply this effect in post because it is easier to perform any digital fixes if the colors are not bleeding into each other.
For the time being I have just messed around with cropping, the exposure, contrast and saturation on some stills and I quite like the results but I might also have a play with filters to adjust the color temp, we shall see.
Thursday 11 March 2010
Rough edit
Here we have a VERY ROUGH edit of some scenes I animated this week. It is all a bit fast and the video quality is a bit crap but hopefully it gives the gist of what I want to achieve. I also want to take the whole thing into photoshop and mess with the exposure etc. to make it look pretty, will do some tests with it this weekend.
Sunday 7 March 2010
Quick Update
Thought I would just write a quick little update to keep you all abreast of where I am at on my project and perhaps more importantly where I should be at. This week I have been busy building the two sets, they are both in the same setting, except one makes use of forced perspective and the other is specifically for a zoom shot on the poster. I will post some more detailed notes on this later in the week. There have been a few teething problems, such as the paper I was using to coat the entire thing not sticking properly, which has delayed things slightly. As a result of this the forced perspective set still needs some odds and ends finishing up on it but the set for the zoom is all done and ready.
Since I am scheduled to start shooting tomorrow I will crack on and do as much as I can with what I have got but I only have the stop-motion stage for the one day so it is going to be a long day. That said, there are only two shots that require the use of the zoom set, so fingers crossed I might be able to do that in a day.
The fact that I am unable to use the stage for the rest of the week is probably a blessing as I still need to finish off the second set. I am also hoping that Holly can get the statues finished off and done too...production of these has been a bit slow but there have been lots of stressed second years about lately so I have kept out of the way, the set is not yet ready for them anyway.
The 2D stuff will hopefully be done and dusted this week, I know I say this every week, Sara has had all the stuff that needs tweening for the best part of the week now, so hopefully I can get my hands on that this week and start inking and cutting out in the evenings, as I need it, allowing me to animate during the day - thats the plan anyway.
Since I am scheduled to start shooting tomorrow I will crack on and do as much as I can with what I have got but I only have the stop-motion stage for the one day so it is going to be a long day. That said, there are only two shots that require the use of the zoom set, so fingers crossed I might be able to do that in a day.
The fact that I am unable to use the stage for the rest of the week is probably a blessing as I still need to finish off the second set. I am also hoping that Holly can get the statues finished off and done too...production of these has been a bit slow but there have been lots of stressed second years about lately so I have kept out of the way, the set is not yet ready for them anyway.
The 2D stuff will hopefully be done and dusted this week, I know I say this every week, Sara has had all the stuff that needs tweening for the best part of the week now, so hopefully I can get my hands on that this week and start inking and cutting out in the evenings, as I need it, allowing me to animate during the day - thats the plan anyway.
Tuesday 2 March 2010
Development of the Piper Character
We have finally made it! Yes that’s right, I’m going to explain the development of the piper character, hard to believe it I know but I have actually managed to find time to talk about her.
She has been through three different stages of development:
As I have mentioned umpteen times my final project has its roots in a project which we where assigned in the first year. Back then she was completely different to how she is now and was a very Aardman inspired sort of character with a very caricatured sort of look. Here are some sketches of her which I did back in second year when the storey was still about a crazy old lady who threw puppies in a river. I’m quite found of this design and I think it would fit in well with the storey which I am now using but she would have been a pain to animate in 2D and near impossible for me to construct for stop-motion.
Over the summer the story changed quite drastically into a poncy arty thing and so did the piper. She became very scribbly and free flowing, allowing her to pull off quite a large range of poses. This new style emerged out of my default scribble drawings which I usually revert to when I’m messing about with an idea and a desire to keep things as simple as possible. I definitely knew that I wanted to do stop-motion but after the Robots project I was very wary of puppets and was instead aiming for something which I envisaged could just be maid out of a big blob of plastercine.
She was originally going to be really sinister and evil too, essentially the previous version of the character with all the funny removed.
After the summer the story was changed around quite a bit but the piper remained pretty much the same until the end of the last term. Visually she has not changed too much but the nature of the character has changed quite a lot. The storey has had a lot more humor injected back into it and the piper is a lot more like she was originally. She does have sinister motives but she is also funny, Visually, she still has a big blobby body which stretches about quite a lot but there has been the addition of a feathered hat, since that is the sort of thing a imagine a piper would ware and for comedy value she has a very well developed set of boobies, courtesy of Holly and Georg.
Note: Blogger doesn't want to behave this evening and is refusing to upload any more picture, hopefully it will decide to play tomorrow,
She has been through three different stages of development:
As I have mentioned umpteen times my final project has its roots in a project which we where assigned in the first year. Back then she was completely different to how she is now and was a very Aardman inspired sort of character with a very caricatured sort of look. Here are some sketches of her which I did back in second year when the storey was still about a crazy old lady who threw puppies in a river. I’m quite found of this design and I think it would fit in well with the storey which I am now using but she would have been a pain to animate in 2D and near impossible for me to construct for stop-motion.
Over the summer the story changed quite drastically into a poncy arty thing and so did the piper. She became very scribbly and free flowing, allowing her to pull off quite a large range of poses. This new style emerged out of my default scribble drawings which I usually revert to when I’m messing about with an idea and a desire to keep things as simple as possible. I definitely knew that I wanted to do stop-motion but after the Robots project I was very wary of puppets and was instead aiming for something which I envisaged could just be maid out of a big blob of plastercine. She was originally going to be really sinister and evil too, essentially the previous version of the character with all the funny removed.
After the summer the story was changed around quite a bit but the piper remained pretty much the same until the end of the last term. Visually she has not changed too much but the nature of the character has changed quite a lot. The storey has had a lot more humor injected back into it and the piper is a lot more like she was originally. She does have sinister motives but she is also funny, Visually, she still has a big blobby body which stretches about quite a lot but there has been the addition of a feathered hat, since that is the sort of thing a imagine a piper would ware and for comedy value she has a very well developed set of boobies, courtesy of Holly and Georg.
Note: Blogger doesn't want to behave this evening and is refusing to upload any more picture, hopefully it will decide to play tomorrow,
Monday 1 March 2010
Progress!
So much stuff has happened to my project in the past week I’m not really sure where to start, I guess a good place to start is the addition of some second years to my endeavor. I am very happy with my team, I must admit that I was slightly unprepared for the sheer amount of enthusiasm they have all displayed despite my rather useless attempt to explain what the project is about, it was a bit of a bumbled effort to brief them all but I am back in my comfort zone now that everyone seems to know what is going on. My second years are Sara, Holly and Jacob. Sara seems to be somehow deciphering the key frames I have produced for the 2D stuff and what I have seen looks very good and the bulk of it will hopefully be done by the end of the week, which by my standards is ridiculously fast. Holly is busy sculpting the erotic statues, which are going to be on the set which look suitably rude and make everyone giggle. Although she hates to admit it I think Holly is quite enjoying modeling engorged penises. Jacob is responsible for sorting out my sound and I have given him a big long wish list of Foley sounds I would like, so I will hopefully get some of those in couple of weeks.
With the second years doing all the important jobs I have gone out and bought a saw and some wood. Since I was feeling especially productive I have even cut up the wood and thrown a lot of nails and glue at it in an attempt to build the set. My GCSE in product design has obviously served me well, as despite the set being of a build quality which closely resembles Cherie Blair’s face the thing is yet to fall apart and that is an accomplishment in my book. There are still one or two issues with the paper covering on it not sticking properly but I will deal with that tomorrow by using more glue and a creative interpretation of the English language.
I have also tweaked the poster (in my post last week) slightly by moving the nasty creature a whole inch to the left. Before it was a bit floaty and the whole poster was a bit unbalanced, now I think it looks a bit better. My hope is that the red and black will stand out against the white set and really grab the viewers attention but we shall see.
The grand plan is to get most of the major parts of the set build done by tomorrow so that I can help Sara out with any tweaning on the 2D which remains and also make a start and the inking and then with any luck start churning out some animation next week – famous last words.
With the second years doing all the important jobs I have gone out and bought a saw and some wood. Since I was feeling especially productive I have even cut up the wood and thrown a lot of nails and glue at it in an attempt to build the set. My GCSE in product design has obviously served me well, as despite the set being of a build quality which closely resembles Cherie Blair’s face the thing is yet to fall apart and that is an accomplishment in my book. There are still one or two issues with the paper covering on it not sticking properly but I will deal with that tomorrow by using more glue and a creative interpretation of the English language.
I have also tweaked the poster (in my post last week) slightly by moving the nasty creature a whole inch to the left. Before it was a bit floaty and the whole poster was a bit unbalanced, now I think it looks a bit better. My hope is that the red and black will stand out against the white set and really grab the viewers attention but we shall see.
The grand plan is to get most of the major parts of the set build done by tomorrow so that I can help Sara out with any tweaning on the 2D which remains and also make a start and the inking and then with any luck start churning out some animation next week – famous last words.
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