Update: Reference and pose-sheets

Long overdue update. Things ae moving forwards on the MA-project and a lot of work has been one over the past few weeks. We have had two additional reference-shoots and divided our shots between us. I made a assembled reference video for my shots and you can have a look at that here: Based on the reference I have made pose-sheets for my scenes, they are rough, but they get te point thorugh. I guess the most important thing is that I understand the myself.. Hehe. Here you go:

The final scene is ready and I'm now moving on to setting up my shots. Soon I'll finally get to do some key-poses too. - Can't wait!

Video-reference

Reference shoot in Albert Park June 11th 2012: This is the reference shoot for two of the film scenes ("The entrance" and "getting icecream"): (Taken from Em's youtube channel)

Work in progress for "Balloon Animals"

So the "blogging" might be reduced a bit now that we're starting the final year project begins "for real" and the blog isn't mandatory anymore.. I will try my best to post every other day though, I will gain from this too so.. Since my last post I have been working on the final version of the scene and I did a couple versions with the same base: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ But after a trip to Albert Park to do reference we found a location that fitted our story and staging perfectly, so based on that location we decided to change the scene again. I have been working one four different enviroment layouts for us to chose from. They have the same base, but different asset placements. First a few reference shots and then my new designs: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Have also been working on a few model references for bushes to help us figure out how to model them in Maya and hopefully make them look close to the bushes in the scene:

End of Project Research and Pre-Production module

So that's it for this module then.. These weeks have gone by really fast, there has been loads and loads of work to do so I haven't really had the time to sit down and think about all the things we have gone through. But now that we had the hand in and printed that enormous Development pack (Think we ended up close to a 100 pages of work) I can really see why time has passed by so fast. We had the pitch today and I think it went quite well, we handed out our pitch document to Chris, Ellie and Penny and they all got a free "balloon animal" that was attached on the front page. (the pitch-document is the one with a condom attached...) We all had our individual parts to talk about in the pitch, but with 5 minutes to present where half of the time was the animatic we really didn't say more than we needed to "sell our idea". The tutors seemed pleased afterwards and at the end the tutors told us that the quality of this years pitches was very high and they all seemed very happy with our efforts. I took a mental note of this and I know that it's going to be important to keep comments like these in mind for later, I know it's going to be a lot of hard work and very long days so if you have a few of these comments to remind yourself of, it encourages you to keep working when times get tough. My overall thoughts about the module are very positive, I think I've learned a lot from the feedback we have gotten and without this and the encouragement to keep developing and pushing our idea we would have never come up with Balloon animals. So both me personally and EKSpro have the rest of the MA Course, the tutors and to a certain degree, Ed Hooks to thank for the story that we have today. So next for us is finishing the scene, the models and assets in Maya and then it's acting time with the voice-actors. Me and Scott have already had the opportunity to tell the story to James (the male actor for Nick's voice) and he seemed excited by the idea, so I can't wait to hear him read the lines in studio. After that we're pretty much animating for the rest of the summer, which I look forward to the most. So it's fingers crossed for bad weather so we don't feel like going outside this summer..! Hehe.. Oh, and as I promised yesterday I will share the powerpoint presentation I made for our pitch:

Balloon animals pitch

View more PowerPoint from hobbs87

Finally a 3D pose

As the title says I go the oppurtunity to do a pose in 3D, it's been a long time since I've messed about with a rig now so it was really enjoyable to sit down and do some posing again. The character I got to pose was Nicholas, the pose was for our pitch-document and for the powerpoint that we are showing tomorrow in class. I am quite happy with the way it turned out, it was important to keep his personality in mind since this pose is representing him as a character. I went for a "cool" and relaxed pose, but tried to show that he is a nice guy and maybe a bit unsecure in this pose - It's not how he normally behaves, he just acts cool: (First image is some early versions that I tried and the last one is the final pose that went into the pitch-document) Other than that I have spent all day preparing or tomorrows hand in and presentations. I did my video-diary last night and have spent most of today doing the powerpoint for our presentation. Em's been assembling all the work for the group hand in and Scott has been working on videos for the 3D models and rigs so I said that I could do the powerpoint. It's been a lot of work getting this thing to look right, I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to stuff like this, but I think it turned out quite good. I enjoy assembling and doing the final look on stuff like this so overall the day has been quite enjoyable. In addition to my own illustrations and images I got a lot of photoshop files and images from Em, so I got to cut and edit bits and pieces together to make the final presentation look visually pleasing and interesting. I'll try and remember to post it on here tomorrow after hand in, I won't do it now just in case some of the classmates are visiting the blog during the day, wouldn't want to spoil anything.. Hehe. Otherwise I am quite excited about tomorrow, we got a "few tricks up our sleeve" so I think it could be fun. I'm going to leave the laptop and go through my lines for tomorrow a last few times now and then hit the bed early so I get a good nights rest. The last couple of days have been crazy hectic in order to get everything sorted for the hand in so I think I need to try and catch up on some sleep.

Logo adjustment, some writing for pitch document and modelling

After feedback from Chris on the logo I've changed the position of the "®" too make it as a registered product would normally be branded. Think that made the whole thing funnier too, so that was a good suggestion.

During the weekend Em has been working hard on our pitch document and the layout so me and Scott met up in the labs to try and work out the text for the pages in the document. We have pages for all our characters, the team and a short summary of the story. After writing this I sent it to Em so she could proof-read, and add some slang to make it sound a bit more fitting to the kind of film we're making. (I'm not really the best person for that job..) Here's the 1st draft of the text that will be included in the pitch-document:

I have also been doing some modelling this weekend! I must admit that's been a challenge technically speaking.. The fact that I've been doing modelling for a few years now and should be able to do such simple and stylized models fairly easy makes it even more annoying when I run into problems.. I know what I want to do, I know how to do it, but I can't for the life of me figure out where the tools are located and what they are called in Maya. But after a while I found some logic in the "mess" and actually managed to model the watch:

(First image is the base model - Second is the modified version I made using lattices, which is a way to easily change a base 3D mesh by adding points which you can move to deform an object). Other than that I am currently trying to prepare for Wednesdays pitch and hand in. I have been arranging my work for the video-diary and also been doing a schedule for the project to give an idea on how we think the work will be divided throughout the weeks. Tomorrow we're meeting up to assemble all our work for the final hand in and hopefully we'll get that printed by the end of the day.

Icecream and logo/design exploration

Most of the design work is done and I think it looks quite promising for our little film. All the work we do we post on the groups facebook-page so we can get instant feedback on it, which has been VERY useful to us. I have been doing the last bits of drawing/design work now and will most likely move on to modelling. It will be interestng to see how that works ous since I have been using 3dsMax for the last four years. I have only been using Maya for the past two months - and not done any modelling in it at all so this means a bunch of tutorials and a lot of "newbie questions" to Scott, who so far have been tackling all the 3D stuff. Scott asked me to do another reference image for the icecream - since we decided to go for separate models for the various stages of the icecream instead of one with blend shapes. (The result was not as good as we hoped. and the ice-cream won't actually be melting as it is shown in the shots either so it wasn't really needed. Here is how that looks:

As mentioned in a previous post the design is now sorted and we have gone for a swirl top and a waffle-cone for the icecream. The last bit of design work I've been working on has been the condom packaging. Firstly we needed to sort out the colour:

We landed on pink and blue and I started working on a logo - We thought this would be a great opportunity for us to try and work in another gag, by being a bit clever with the logo on the condom pack.

After a chat with the group the two favourite ones where the rocket and bone®, so I went back to the drawing board to make some decent versions of them:

After a second round of feedback and a quick re-design we landed on this version:

It's a very innocent joke in my opinion, and you would have to be of a certain age to even get the point of the joke. And hopefully we'll get a laugh out of it. I must admit I had a laugh working on these!

Scene design

These are images to show how our scene will look. I did a front 3/4 perspective that shows the hilltop that Nick will be come running down and in front of the image the bench where they are meeting. The staging will probably be changed according to what we find most efficient when we start working - usually you have to modify it a bit to make it work in 3D, especially when it comes to making room for animation. (This has already been done for the bench for instance; The model needed to be stretched in order to make room for the characters and the planned animation). The front-view is also our main stage - where the audience will be looking in most of the shots so the focus in that is the bench. The last image is the hilltop where Nick will be in the opening shot - How much of it we actually will see is yet to be decided, but we need it for reference for the modelling non the less.

More assets: Icecreams, bushes and trees

As the headline says, I've been doing more asset-design. I have done several different designs to give us more too chose from when we start modelling the assets for the film. The more we have to chose from the better, and if I didn't hit it spot on with these there is always an option to "steal" a bit from one and merging with another. This has already been suggested for the icecream:

As it is now we are thinking the top from 2 and the cone from 5. So will need to do a final version of this for model-reference. I have also done designs for different bushes & trees.

My personal favourites at the moment is 8-9-10 of the bushes, but the last two might be a bit hard to model so time will show what we end up with. For the trees I like 5, mostly because of the texture/colour on the bark and have already gotten positive comments on that design from the group so hopefully we'll be able to recreate a similar look in 3D.

Assets: Flowers & Bench

Been drawing the assets this weekend. Did a really rough design for the flowers just to get the "go ahead" on the look.

I then started working on "roughing" them up a bit. So here are some variations of how they might look:

The initial idea was to go for the yellow flowers, but after a look at these designs we seem to have landed on the white ones. We want the bouquet to look really pathetic and show that Nick didn't pay much attention to it:

The design I tried to do for the bench is inspired by a style you see in cartoons such as "The Flintstones" & "The Ricky Gervais Show". It's a very simple and clean style, but with some bent, crooked and exaggerated parts so that it looks a bit more stylized. I made a model-sheet that Scott could use for reference:

And here is the 3D model:

(Image taken from Scott - posted in our group's facebook-page)

Character profiles

Me and Scott met up at uni on Friday to figure out the character profiles for the characters in the short. Em had already done a rough outline of them so we used that as the foundation and started "building" from that. The biggest change was that we decided to change the characters from American to English, because of previous experience with the voice-actors. James (the voice actor) did a pretty good American accent for our mime-animation, but it put some restrictions on the actual performance non the less, I guess the fact that he needed to keep the accent consistent took it's toll on the delivery of the lines. So we'd rather have a good performance, since the location doesn't matter to the story itself. After Scott and I had done notes on each character I went home an did the in-depth profiles for our main characters and two simpler ones for the kids. (Figure we only need to know how the main characters behave in the different situations since the kids are more "supporting acts" and only needs a brief description). Here are the profiles for our characters: