At long last, the project is almost over. Less than two days away as of this writing. After delivering the final film a couple of weeks ago, I’ve spent my time relaxing, creating a short “making of” with the rest of Green Spill, writing stuff on this blog and a self assessment document. The self assessment document isn’t quite finished yet. I’ve written most of it in short form which I suspect only I would understand, so I have a feeling I should go back and do a rewrite or three. Also yet to be done is to update the DVD cover and label. We need one version for the “making of” we’re handing in on wednesday, and another version for the team: The version destined to collect dust on a shelf somewhere, but which will be taken out and looked at every few years. The very special Green Spill team member version. With any luck, I’ll be on that right after finishing this post, and the only thing I’ll have to worry about tomorrow is straightening out the self assessment document to something resembling the language of english.

This being the last post I write about the Student Film Project at Noroff, 2009 (at least I think it is), I guess the time has come for looking back and reflecting upon the last five months of work. Don’t worry, I’ll be quick. Or as quick as I can be. Which can be pretty slow sometimes, but I digress.

Looking back, it has certainly been an interesting five months. We’ve gone back and fourth on story, had our moments of inspiration and desperation, experienced conflict and unity and last, but not least created a film!

The film itself turned out OK, though I certainly think there is room for improvement. Story, continuity, animation, graphics, simulations, compositing and editing spring to mind as points where we could have improved given more time or by making better use of the time given. Having worked on the film for five months and knowing about every fault from the tiniest to the most humongous, I might just be extremely fed up though

On the whole, I’m one experience richer what film making is concerned, have learned a lot, both about team work, planning and skills, and though it has been trying at times, it’s an experience I wouldn’t be without. I think all there is left is to thank my team mates, Aleksander, Andreas and Jamie and wish them, my teacher, Paul, and the rest of 3D Film Production in Oslo a very happy holiday

Now onto those DVD-covers…

Having finished rendering and vfx shots, and with a little more than a week to deadline, compositing was next on the list. Beforehand, I had estimated compositing would take a day or two. I had already test comped nearly one third of the shots and thought I could use those as templates for the rest. The only thing I hadn’t done before in any shot was thinking about the suns position and the movement of the clouds.

When applying math however, it turned out I would have on average 11 minutes to complete a shot, rendering time included, if I were to do all shots in one day and have time to eat and sleep too. Considering I would have to do some rotoscoping on most shots, and the longer shots could take up to 12 minutes to render, I set my aim to finishing in four days in stead. This would give me approximately 45 minutes per shot.

The process went fine, though it was rather tedious and repetitive. While working on the first few shots, I realized the ground had a quite homogenous yellow colour that looked pretty boring. Seeking to resolve this, I thought I’d introduce cloud shadows on the ground to break things up a bit. Shadows moving across the landscape would also slightly liven up the background. I had seen Gareth Edwards do this on Attila the Hun and thought it had a nice effect. Unlike Edwards however, I didn’t have the render passes and with no time left for going back into 3ds max, I decided to fake some. My approach was to use the noise map in Nuke combined with a corner pin to make the far away shadows appear smaller than those closer to the camera. This worked well as long as everything stayed nice and flat, but the effect was ruined if something that wasn’t flat and level with the ground entered the frame. Such as a prop or a character. As a fix, I had paint out the noise map where it happened to intersect with a character or prop. I thought nothing of it for the first 10 shots or so, but then realized there were 54 more shots to rotoscope in the same way. Luckily, I soon discovered a better way that worked most of the time while watching Greg Astles talk about Nuke on fxguidetv #059. By using the ZBlur (Depth Of Field) tool in an unconventional way and leaving the Focus Plane feature on, I could zoom in on a particular “slice” of the z-depth map I had already rendered and get a decent matte from it. I later found the ZSlice tool which I guess does the same thing, only simpler to use.

I ended up compositing the film in four days, though I had one day off in between, and am reasonably happy with most of the shots. Some shots have a look that is a little too different from the rest, but I really didn’t have that much time to stop and reflect when compositing 16 shots a day.

With less than three weeks left of the project, animation was finished to a point where I could start adding fire and smoke to finished shots. Having used FumeFX in the past, it became the natural choice now.

I anticipated this to be a fairly simple task, but didn’t have to work long before it became clear that I had greatly overestimated the ability of 3ds max plugins to work properly together. Having successfully used FumeFX with V-Ray before, it never occurred to me that one tiny change would throw the whole thing off balance. It did though. As it turns out, FumeFX works perfectly with V-Ray as long as you don’t use the V-Ray daylight system. Light from the V-Ray daylight system is almost infinitely brighter than normal lighting in 3ds max, and the only thing keeping the images from turning out simply white is the VRayPhysicalCam which dials the brightness back down again. As to why the daylight system behaves in this peculiar way, I have no idea. The problem surfaces when you wish to put a flame from FumeFX in this environment. FumeFX uses normal brightness values for its flames, and when the VRayPhysicalCam reduces the brightness by a factor of a thousand or so, the FumeFX flame is simply too weak to register in comparison and ends up invisible. I spent a day or two, looking for a solution, but didn’t find one and was left with two choices: Getting rid of the daylight system, relight the scene and scrap 30-40 shots already rendered, or render the FumeFX elements alone and composite them over the rendered shots afterwards. Being pressed for time, the compositing route was the only option if we were to finish on time. There are a fair few advantages to this, such as being able to adjust the brightness and colour of the FumeFX elements without affecting the rest of the image and being able to adjust fire and smoke separately, but it also comes at a prize as you no longer get out of the box integrated smoke shadows. The case with the V-Ray daylight system this is particularly irksome as FumeFX doesn’t even see the sun as a light source for generating shadows. My solution was to create a Direct light in the same position as the sun and using that instead, but it didn’t always yield the best results.

Having decided on a workflow, I started work and the rest of the process was fortunately pretty straight forward. I finished the FumeFX shots in a little more than a week while rendering and compositing other shots at the same time. Having finished, it was time to proceed to the final compositing.

Well, technically it’s been finished for a week now, I’ve just been too fed up to blog about it until now. The past month has been incredibly busy and seeing as my field, post production, comes last (who would have thought?), I haven’t been sleeping that much lately. Lack of sleep coupled with missed deadlines and frustration levels through the roof generally meant that keeping the blog updated became one thing too many. Taking an hour or two out of the on average five hours of sleep I got every night to blog didn’t feel particularly inviting. And if I had taken the time to do it anyway, it would probably have made for rather unpleasant reading.

So I’m picking up the thread a week later, now having had a few nights normal sleep and some time to relax and think about things other than the film. I’ll be back with a few posts about the past month and reflections on the finished film in the next few days.

Everything that can go wrong will go wrong, right? Or so a guy called Murphy felt and it’s become uncomfortably true lately.

During rendering of the final movie we’ve had to re-render scenes due to lighting problems, texturing problems, last minute texture changes, render errors and plugin incompatibilities. In addition we still have issues with FumeFX and VRayPhysicalCamera which won’t get along. We might have to do the Fume stuff in Scanline and then composite it on top of the V-Ray render, but that again poses another problem as Scanline doesn’t play well with VRayPhysicalCamera either. Abandoning the VRayPhysicalCamera would of course fix the problem, but that would mean relighting the scene and render everything again which we really don’t have time for.

All in all it’s a bit frustrating at the moment with the deadline looming and problems turning up left, right and center, but that’s production for us I guess. After all, our pipe line isn’t really that tried and tested since we haven’t done many films yet and decided to try some new stuff in this one as well.

The good thing to take away from all this is of course increased knowledge of how to fix a fair few things and stuff not to do in the future. I’ll try and hang onto that when working until sunrise to get things fixed on time the coming weeks

So we’re finally at the animation stage. Or have been for the past few days. To get the most out of the remaining time, Andreas, Aleksander and Jamie are chipping away on the shots while I render them out and take them through compositing.

As I’m the last person to touch the footage before editing, I’ve spent the past few days trying out different “looks” for the final film, screened them for the rest of the team and adjusted things based on the feedback. We finally decided on the look in the video above. I then created a Nuke template that I can use to quickly apply the same look to the rest of the shots.

The only thing remaining for actually pushing out finished shots is to work out the wind direction and position of the sun for each clip so that the clouds move properly etc.

To stay sane, we’ve created an Excel document to keep track of what everyone is doing.

We’re also planning to have a bit more convincing smoke and fire effects this time around, so I will add smoke and fire to certain shots when they come in. For this reason, I’m currently spending my time learning the 3ds max plugin FumeFX so we’ll be able to produce convincing fireballs, smoke trails and explosions. Allan McKay has some good tutorials on the subject, so I’m looking through those. Here’s hoping V-Ray and FumeFX will play nice when it comes to render passes…

I know, I promised to post this more than a week ago, but it’s the holidays and found a few things I wanted to test before I started rendering the final shots. What happened was that I watched a most illuminating video lesson concerning motion blur and depth of field passes for Nuke made by the good guys over at fxphd and realized two things: I used a slightly wrong depth format when applying depth of field and there is an easy way to apply motion blur in post, given that you output an extra render pass. The video in question was concerned with Maya and Mental Ray however where as we’re using 3ds max and V-Ray. It therefore took me a few extra hours of research before everything was working correctly.

In addition, there weren’t time to research ways to set up a render queue before making the previz, which meant I had to start every render manually when the previous render finished. With no wish of repeating that experience for the final film, I did some quick tests and got a rendering queue set up using Backburner.

With that out of the way, I rendered out the rest of the new shots and put them into our most recent cut. As we’re mostly concerned with timing and shots at this point, we decided to manage without sound for the time being.

Oh, and I’ll quickly mention that I did some work on a little 3D + After Effects lesson I’m having in a week or two. I’ll try teaching the rest of the class how to create the little sequence above and might put the tutorial up on this site when finished.

As we’re refining the previz, the storyboard needs to reflect the changes and so we’ve come to draft 2. Jamie and Andreas drew the new frames and rearranged things based on class feedback yesterday and Aleksander and me digitized it today. The digital version can be downloaded below.

Download Fetch! Storyboard Draft 2 (796 KB)

As mentioned above, the previz is also being worked on and we’re close to finish draft 2. Most of the new shots are already created and rendered and we’ll probably finish the remaining shots tomorrow. The new finished shots are already in the cut and so we should probably have the draft 2 previz ready for your viewing pleasure tomorrow or friday. I’ll put it up here as soon as it is ready.

Meanwhile the easter holidays are coming up in a couple of days and we’ve decided to take a break from the project during that time. People are feeling a little worn out at the moment and I believe a break will do both the film and the team members some good. Personally, I might tinker a little with the environment, making sure it is ready for animation after the holidays. That shouldn’t take long though. At least not in theory.

While the rest of the team were engaged in previz work yesterday, I had some time to kill while waiting for files to render. As we haven’t yet finished all of our props, I thought I’d create a few.

I started off with the road sign seen above. Due to some discussion about the road in the movie, we decided to add a sign to give the characters a goal and make the audience aware that the characters are travellers and not merely going for a walk in the park. The sign needed to be old and battered to illustrate that the road was rarely used. Jamie told me the rest of the team wished for real-world names and a typical green American road sign. Having never been to the U.S. myself, I must admit I didn’t really know what these looked like, so I went to the big G for reference. Jamie also sent me this image. While searching I came across a website called Roadgeek Fonts which turned out to be a really great resource. In addition to having the correct fonts available for download, it also provided the actual colours for the signs. I learned that the green colour I was looking for was 0,110,85 in the RGB system. All set I went on to create the texture first. I started by creating a clean sign, white text and border on a green background, and then went on to beat it up the best I could.

To make the sign look older and more battered, I went through a collection of dirt maps I have lying around and added bits and pieces from different maps. The finished thing looks like this:

Consulting with Andreas, we found that the parts of the sign where the paint had peeled off didn’t look quite right. The solution was to create a bump map:

I then slapped the texture on a really simple 3D model I made, quickly lit the scene, rendered it and the result is the top image of this post.

The next thing on my list was to create a carrot, used for bunny bait. It so happens that I made a carrot a year ago, so all I had to do was to make the one I had look more cartoony and add the green stuff.

This was really quite simple. I removed or reduced some white and brown spots from the texture, used a taper modifier to give it the right shape and added an image of a green plant to a few planes to create the stalk. I then added a few bones and skinned the stalk to make it easier to animate. Maybe not a perfect model, but it’ll only be seen for a couple of seconds and I think It’ll hold up. The whole thing might be replaced by leaves anyway

After the carrot came a slingshot. This one is only viewed from a distance and so I really didn’t put that much effort into it.

A very simple model with TurboSmooth and a simple wood texture, not applied particularly well. You won’t notice though. This thing is clearly lacking an elastic band, but that’ll probably be put in when  creating the final shot.

Lastly, we needed to exchange Aleksanders temporary grass from the first previz with something else. Deciding a bush would take to long, I settled for an old log.

I think it turned out ok except from the ends which Andreas correctly pointed out to me look a bit odd. According to the current previz, the ends won’t be seen much, if at all though, so I’ll leave it like this for now. I can always fix it later if neccesary.

It’s been a hard week for the Green Spill team. Due to people shortage and some technical difficulties we hadn’t even started work on our previz when we arrived at school on Tuesday. As the previz is to be handed in tomorrow morning at nine, this left precious little time for animating, rendering, applying post and editing the thing. Add to that that most team members had other work during the few days we had, and you might understand why we were a tiny bit worried we wouldn’t finish on time.

We decided to give it a shot and quickly divided tasks between us: Jamie, Aleksander and Andreas would do the animation, producing a total of 67 shots. When they finished a shot, they would hand it off to me who would render it and take it through post. Lastly, Andreas and Alexander would do the editing and I would assemble the DVD needed for the deadline. To keep everyone sane, Andreas suggested that I’d make a list of all the shots in an Excel document where each person could add which shots they were working on and whether they were finished or not. By the end of Tuesday, the list was made, roughly 15 shots were finished, rendering was well under way and I had created a template in Nuke to speed up post-production.

The next three days were a blur where I’m concerned. I got up in the morning, started rendering incoming shots, did some post work, added more incoming shots for rendering, did even more post work and so on and so forth. I then went to bed, slept for an average of four hours, got up and repeated the process. I finished the last shot at 3 AM on Saturday. Three hours before I had to get up for work. During the night, I uploaded all the shots to our Dropbox so Alexander and Andreas could do the editing later that day.

And so we finished on time. The sounds and music are mostly temporary and some of the cuts aren’t quite tight enough yet, but it’s a draft 1 previz and we’ll get feedback on how to improve it tomorrow.  Today I’ve been assembling the DVD and designed a label for it for fun:

To create the label I had to do a high-res render. Thought I’d put it up here. Hope you like it Aleksander

Still reading? Then I’ll let you in on a tiny secret: The highest of our mountain peaks are 14 meters tall, only 8 times higher than our Luna. The render below is made from a camera angle that shows this quite clearly. My reason for using “miniatures” is to make the scene smaller and lighter to work with. To make them look taller and more distant I’m washing out the coulors a bit and applying some depth of field. Here’s hoping people won’t notice

Yes. I know, it is way, way too long since my last post. A new round with the flu and a death in the family slowed things down considerably for a while. I’m back now though and we have charged into the previz. A little late maybe as the deadline is on monday, but we’ve gotten a lot done the last couple of days and I believe we’ll be all right.

While Aleksander, Andreas and Jamie are all working hard, squeezing out shots, it is my job to render them, do some polishing in Nuke and have them ready for the edit on Friday (hoping we’ll be ready by Friday).

So in between receiving scenes and rendering them, I run the ones I have rendered through my Nuke pipeline. The process goes like this:

The 3D render is imported into Nuke.

As the render does not come with skies, I add those first. I found a nice image for this over at CGTextures. I add the sky separately, so that I can easily animate clouds, change sky colour etc.

To add the sky, I use a matte that comes with the 3D render. White determines what is visible, while black determines that which is invisible. By applying the matte to the render and positioning the sky image behind it, the sky gets added to the shot.

Next up is to add some depth to the scene using a depth map that also comes from the 3D render. A depth map determines the relative distance between different objects based on brightness values. Dark colours are far away while lighter colours are closer to the camera.

Based on the depth map, I am able to focus on one particular part of the scene. I then tell Nuke to keep this part in focus while gradually blurring the parts of the image that is further away. The result is depth of field, or DoF, that can be applied much faster than in 3D and can be adjusted after the 3D render. Definitely handy!

Finally, I add a sense of atmosphere by inverting the depth map so it looks like the one above, change the colour to light blue and add it to the render to wash out background colours. This is importaint to make the mountains look like they are further away. This is actually done before applying DoF, but needed to explain what a depth map is first.

When I’ve done everything above, I colour-correct the footage, blur it slightly, add some grain and render the result to Apple ProRes format, which we’ll use during the edit. The final Nuke script looks like this:

I repeat this process for each shot. For the most part I only need to replace the files from the 3D render and reposition the sky.

Today I started working on the flower appearing in the opening and end sequence of the movie. Starting out, I didn’t have much to go on, other than Andreas‘ description: Purple petals, orange in the middle. I also had a frame from the storyboard. However, I didn’t know whether the storyboard design was meant for use in the film as the petals were rather angular:

Based on the information I had, I then started modeling the flower which was very much straight forward. I basically made everything from the primitives plane, sphere, cone and cylinder and modified the different elements using cut, extrude, bevel and a lot of moving, rotating and scaling. The usual stuff. After a little while I achieved the basic shape:

Wondering if the petals were too edgy, I asked Jamie for his opinion, which ended in us agreeing that I should probably round the edges. Luckily, I only needed to remove some edges and it went fairly quickly:

Having finished modeling, except some leaves for the stalk, I proceeded to texturing. I didn’t have any I could use, so was it was pretty clear I had to paint my own. Trying to find the right look, I made a good old google image search and found  a ton of references. I will most certainly not list them here as this post is long enough as it is Based on said reference I noticed how most petals were lighter close to the center of the flower and darker close to the edge. I also found fine lines or veins flowing from the tip of the petal to the flower center. Possibly in the other direction. Can’t really tell which. Based on that I did a quick (emphasis on quick) texture for the petals:

I created a bump map from the same image. Back in max, I gave the flower a slight falloff and found that I got a better result, without increasing rendering time significantly, by using the bump map as a displace map instead of, well, a bump map:

By talking to Aleksander and Jamie, I decided the petals were a bit too bright, and darkened them a bit:

The stalk texture was made entirely from procedurals. Two falloffs, a splatter and a noise if I remember correctly. The orange center is nothing more than noise in the displacement slot and an orange colour with a yellow falloff. Then, having finished most of the texturing, I went on to create a few leaves for the stalk. I started with a plane, made the leaf shape using editable poly and used the shell and bend modifiers to give them their final shape:

These too needed a texture, though it is heavily based on the texture for the stalk. Only thing I really needed to add was a bump map, which I hastily created in Photoshop:

High quality texture in other words. I applied it to the leaves and found that though it doesn’t hold up that well on extreme close-ups, it’ll probably do for the camera angles we need:

Having finished modeling and texturing, and rigged the thing in a sensible way so we only have to use two basic controllers to animate it, I put the flower into the landscape in its current state:

All in all, I’m fairly satisfied with how the flower turned out. The things I still don’t quite like are that the petals might be a bit too big and that they look flat somehow. The textures I made aren’t precisely first class either. Another thing is that the only Green Spill team member who has yet to see the flower is Andreas who described to me how it should look. It’s the weekend and he hasn’t got much of an internet connection at home. So here’s hoping I didn’t butcher his vision too badly

Finally, I ran the scene through Nuke to apply some DoF and colour correction. I also tried to blend the skies and the mountains a little better. The result is in the top image of this post. As you might have noticed, that image is a bit pixelated and strange which comes from the DoF I applied. I’m not entirely sure what went wrong there and am too tired to investigate right now, so I’ll save it for later. I’ll mention the solution in a later post if I find one.

Started creating the environment for the new story. Still far from finished. In addition, the image above is way too dark. Looks like it’s under water somehow. References for the desert is mainly the environment from the trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2:

Clearly, I’m not there yet. I’ll cut down on the general blueness, make the sky brighter and add a trifle of green to it. I also need to tweak the ground texture, add the road and make the grass look better. The mountains need to be remade as well and Andreas is going to create a matte painting for the sky and hindmost mountain ranges.

The scene also calls for certain props, such as a dead tree, a camp site, a tent in various stages of shabbiness and a flower amongst other things. For the tree I found some nice reference images taken in the Namib desert. I then started modeling with a cylinder as the starting point and using basic techniques, such as extrusion and cuts to create the shape. The tree needs about a dozen more branches, but it’s late so I’ll finish tomorrow.

As you can see, I’m experimenting with the grass and ground texture here as well, as I consider the ground to be one of the hardest parts to get right. Getting a vast, flat plane to look like a desert that holds up well, both close to and far from the ground, requires very little modeling, but quite a bit of texturing. This last image didn’t turn out particularly well, but at least the WIP tree is in there

This sunday Andreas and I scanned in the new storyboard and started assembling it digitally as well as beginning work on the new animatic. We had to leave the building before five though and didn’t finish. Therefore the whole group spent today completing first drafts of both:

As 13 pages of storyboard would be a tiny bit extreme to fit inside a blog post, I made a PDF:

Download Fetch! Storyboard Draft 1 (640 KB)

The storyboard is a bit rushed at this time and we haven’t added much text. Might have missed some arrows as well and there are no transitions yet. Will be fixed in due course. The animatic is finished in the sense that we’ve timed all the shots, but we’re lacking a fair bit of sounds, mainly because there are many we haven’t found yet. I guess we’ll have to consider making our own sound effects.

For some reason we really ran into trouble when looking for music. We listened to a lot of tracks without finding anything we really liked. Then tried watching what music similar films used, like “In the Rough” for instance, and found that they didn’t use music that much, but had a lot of sound effects in stead. I honestly don’t know what we’ll end up with, but as of now the animatic needs more music.

Wasn’t I supposed to blog every day? Or at least every day I worked on the student film project? Shoot, I keep forgetting. Well, there are actually a reason or two for my absence this time. Firstly, I’ve been ill, still am after a manor of fashion. The same illness has been bothering most of the team by now. First Andreas, then Aleksander and now me. Jamie is the only one to have escaped it yet. Secondly, after a lot of discussion, we abandoned the Synergy story and wrote a new one, which in turn meant that we had to redo “a few” things. So amidst all the coughing and general confusion, blogging fell a few notches on the priority list, I must admit. Once again therefore, I’ll try and cram a weeks worth of work into a single, humongous blog post.

First things first. As we had a few problems getting the first story to work, we settled on a new one. The team gathered for a few hasty meetings and came up with a new story with the working title “Fetch!”. The most recent draft of the treatment, at least that I know of, goes like this:

Fetch!

(working title)

DESERT day. LOW ANGLE CAM. Small FLOWER in focus. Ground starts shaking as from giant footsteps. PULL-FOCUS to reveal WOMAN and ROBOT-DOG walking down straight, endless road. Woman reading manual “Travelers best friend”, Robot-dog pictured on cover. Woman starts playing fetch with Robot. Spots RABBIT. Woman’s stomach growling. Produces knife. Sneaks toward fluffy prey. Robot trails behind. Robot, desiring to help, overreacts by initializing destruction-mode, platforms large missiles, blows bunny to smithereens.

Montage begins. Rising action. Shot pace quickens:

CAGE TRAP. Robot holds rope, woman sets bait. Robot is distracted, drops cage over lady, rabbit jumps close, eat baits, continues jumping.

Commands Robot to set up TENT. Robot sets up upside-down.

Lady in foreground, flips manically through manual. Robot climbs in tree in background, like a monkey.

Woman tries to throw SPEAR at bunny. Robot thinks they play fetch, catches spear split-second before kill.

Lady in foreground, flips manically through manual. Robot chases rabbit like a bull, holding fingers like horns.

Woman tries to set up tent, robot mess up somehow. Tent collapses.

Lady in foreground, flips manically through manual. Robot dances ballet in background.

Woman lights match to make fire. Overenthusiastic Robot “helps” with FLAMETHROWER. Torches campsite. Including tent.

Montage ends.

Woman sits in foreground, manual lies on ground beside her. Robot prances in background. Flying sheep + kafooom. Jumps about again. Total CHAOS. Robot aware of depressed lady. Sudden SILENCE. Robot hand enters frame. Gives flower from opening shot to woman. They walk into sunset, playing fetch.

The girl and the robot will have the same basic designs as in the previous story, though we will change a few things to make them fit in a bit better. Having blocked out the new story, Andreas, Aleksander and Jamie have spent their remaining time knocking out the storyboard at school. For my part I’ve been taking it a little bit easy because of that illness thing, but have a few things to work on: Mainly environment concept art, brushing up on FumeFX, finding music/sounds for the new story and create a camera shutter for the robot’s “eye”:

This might be overkill for the actual film, but I got a bit carried away. Main thing is that I know how to make one I’ve been going through some sounds in my library as well and next I’ll tackle FumeFX and the environment.

Lastly, I upgraded the site to WordPress 2.7.1 and the latest build of K2 yesterday. The upgrade didn’t go as smoothly as usual, but I believe everything should be working properly now. If you spot some bug still present, leave me a comment somewhere on the site and I’ll look into it as soon as I can.

Today was a long day. When we arrived this morning, the storyboard wasn’t finished, the work on the animatic wasn’t even started, and there was a presentation to make. Add an ill team member and another that needed to leave early and you have the recipe for a long day at school. 

The day started by me separating the storyboard images we scanned the day before while Andreas and Jamie drew the last few frames. Then Jamie went on working on the animatic while Andreas and I started assembling the storyboard. After a while Andreas had to leave for work. Jamie continued working on the animatic with some help/input from me while I worked on the storyboard with some help/input from him. At long last we were both finished and we begun work on the Keynote presentation. Being rather tired, I just ripped off our previous presentation, replacing content and wrote nothing but headlines.

The whole process up to the concept art presentation has been rather tiresome for us as we’ve never been quite on schedule. This is in part because of holidays and illnesses as mentioned in the previous post, but I still feel we could have taken better advantage of the time we had. I don’t particularly like the feeling of being behind, so I think we should try to be more focused from now on.  

On another note, I worked some more on the temple exterior comp yesterday. Composited in the new temple, added some fire to the debris, adjusted the smoke opacity and made the fire cast light on its surroundings. Image in top of this post. I didn’t have my tablet (nope, not an affiliate link) when working though and for that reason I’m still not happy with the temple/debris edges. I think it’ll be good enough for concept art though

Tomorrow, the concept art presentation will be over, and maybe we’ll be able to relax a bit.

Today, we worked to finish the current storyboard draft for the upcoming presentation, but somehow we didn’t seem to get very far. We’ve estimated that we need about 70 frames for this draft and so far we’ve only just passed 20. This is partly caused by the untimely illness of one of our team members, but even so we should have gotten further. We’ll need to work harder and/or more focused tomorrow.

Apart from storyboarding, which isn’t really my area (I don’t draw as I’m terrible at drawing anything fast, but participate in discussions from time to time), I spent some time on the temple exterior as I got access to my files I left at school over the weekend. I added a platform for the temple to “sit” on, added some pillars that are supposed to surround it and started breaking parts of it to display some of the havoc called for in the treatment. I’ve thrown in a few renders in this post. Still need to add it to the environment posted yesterday.

I haven’t had time to write anything the last few days unfortunately, so I’ll try putting the essentials down in this post.

Andreas had a few suggestions about the temple exterior, so I made some changes to it at school on wednesday and thursday. I then put them on my memory stick so I could work some on it during the weekend and left school. Without the memory stick. No update on that front in other words. I’ll put it up in its current version at my earliest convenience. Whenever that may be.

Not being able to work more on the temple, I tried fitting it into some surroundings (I’ll replace the temple with the current version when I find my memory stick). As this is still the concept phase, 3D can take too long to do so I ended up finding images on the internet and mashed them together after a fashion in the top image of this post. The shadows aren’t right, but not too important in this case. I’ve made the temple, the road and the stars. The other components I’ve found. Landscapes were made by Ladyofspira. I don’t have anyones leave to use the images, but as it is only intended as a possible guideline for general looks and meant for the team only, I hope I won’t get too many lawyers banging on my door. If I’ve used your imagery and you want it removed, leave a comment here and I’ll take care of it at once.

On thursday, the group made radical changes to the story, for the better in my opinion. Jamie wrote the second draft of the story while the rest of the team was present. Andreas and I worked the story into a draft one treatment that afternoon:

Synergy

FLY-OVER CAM. Futuristic motorcycle driving high speed across desert landscape, suspicious DEVICE with timer countdown fastened to bike. Bike approaches destination, lights from fire in distance. Bike slows down, stops in front of entrance to HIGH-TECH TEMPLE, signs of recent destruction and mayhem. FEMALE dismounts bike, picks up device and moves into temple.

Female moves deeper into temple ruins. Inside temple enters LARGE CHAMBER showing recent signs of havoc and destruction.
Giant PILLAR thrown towards her. Barely dodges flying pillar but drops device. MALE in armour appears in end of room. Female spots giant ROBOT emerging behind him. Robot backhands Male out of the way, charges against her.

Female runs against charging robot, leaps to attack. Attack dodged, giant FIST punches her, throwing her across room.

Male’s attention drawn to device. Runs towards it but stopped by robot attacking him. He attacks back, misses, robot throws him across room, through BRICK WALL. Female lunges for device, stopped by robot grabbing her. Robot pins her to floor with foot, about to crush her with fist, but knocked back by flying AXE hitting its face, from Male emerging from rubble. Female free, grabs SWORD and thrusts it through robots head.

Robot shuts down, falls to ground. Heroes stand over destroyed, inactive robot. Long awkward SILENCE. Countdown reaches zero.

Device gives distinct BEEP, breaks silence.

Female: (Neutral tone) Your lunch is ready…

Male: (neutral tone) Thanks. (Pause) So what’s for dinner tonight honey?

Female: (in same tone) Leftovers…

Male: What?! You said you where making meatloaf!

Female: (Irritated) Yeah! And you said you would fix the sink! That was last week! And what about the dog?! He smells like week old crap!

Couple walks away, arguing like typical married couple.

Finally, since the arrival of the aforementioned device, we’ve been in need of a count down display. As compositing etc. is my area, I spent some hours this weekend trying to create such a count down in Nuke. I had to do some light programming, something I haven’t done in a long time. Luckily I got some help from the good guys over at fxphd and I got it working in the end. This is a temporary design and will probably change, but decided to put it up anyway:

Tomorrow we’ll work more on the storyboard for the presentation coming up this coming Thursday.

Today we worked some more on the storyboard, advanced the plot of the story and had some more concept art made. As concept art and story boards aren’t what I would call my area of expertise, I didn’t actually draw much, but participated in the discussions. To ease Andreas‘ pain just a trifle, I took one of his temple sketches and made it into a 3d image.

This happens to be the temple entrance only. The temple itself is underground. The proportions aren’t quite right in this image yet. The stair doesn’t have enough steps among other things. The building is also supposed to be damaged, debris are supposed to be everywhere and I think it’s supposed to be on fire. I’ll show Andreas how I’ve ruined his idea tomorrow and then he can correct me

My job during the weekend was to create a test for the opening credits/establishing shot which is a rip-off from The Day After Tomorrow. Normally, I would list what still needs to be done in the shot, but since this is such an early test, I’ll sum it up in one word: Everything! We’re not even sure we’ll use a shot like this and even if we do, none of what is shown above is likely to appear in the final shot any shape or form. I made it because we wanted reference for the storyboard and to find a good technique  for creating a similar shot during production.

On a different note, the cinematic logo is more or less finished and can be watched underneath. There are still issues with the paint behavior, shot layout and music, but if we don’t get time to revisit it, this might just be the final version:

Tomorrow, Jamie will return from his holiday and we’ll kick the concept art part in to high gear to finish characters, environments, storyboards and animatic on time.