LUDUS Stuff- one last time

Been tinkering away at the LUDUS project as well. I was asked to do some more shots of the robot from various sides and doing various things. The most key of which involved creating lasers (YAY!). The hardest part of this was taking the various concept art I had been given and trying the break it apart, fill in the gaps and making working models. While this would look very strange on human or animal characters, it lends itself very nicely to the blocky form of the robots and adds a sense of robotic-ness (its a real word!) to the movement. so after establishing whether alex wanted 'pew-pew' star wars lasers or particle heavy thunderbolt launchers I set to work (in case you cant tell, he asked for pew-pew) a quick word from alex asking for a colour correction then expanding on the motion then some side shots- this model I had to build almost from scratch 9and it shows) Here's one showing a bit of movement (sort of) And here is a lovely establishing shot of a robot about to power up Unfortunately, Alex lost most of his other animators and so decided to cut the project down from a full pilot episode, to a commercial. Though hopefully this means some of the shots I did can make it to the final product.

Red or Dead

So, it's that time of year again where i realise I have neglected my blog and must now rush to put all my lovely bits n bobs on display. This post will be a compilation of the Red or Dead branding project we did. Essentially the design label/ camden high st store Red or Dead sent a circular around several universities asking animation students to help create some advertisements between 30-60 secondsin length, selling their products by relating them to an old fable called 'The Enchanted Horse'. So essentially they were after a bit of free branding design. I signed up to a project early on when they gave their pitches as a post production animator. However there was some confusion as to which group I was in for several weeks (and the distraction of dissertation research). But I eventually found my group just as they were approaching a time when they wanted some post production. They asked me to get some key shots of a bike wheel that they needed to put in, nicely green screened. My initial attempts went well However it seemed that this project was not going to get finished on time (I'm honestly unsure as to what they were up to before I showed up besides knocking up a rough animatic and some character designs) and unfortunately the leader of our group decided to abandon ship and axe the whole project, so without much of a hoo ha heres the stuff I did while briefly working with this group. Here are some very dodgy gs removals I was working on. I was given some low rez jpegs, which i requested to re-shoot, unfortunately by then the project had been cancelled. as you can see- horrible.... Here, I was asked to create an effect of a constantly moving coat covered in a map image supplied by RoD Shame this never made it, i thought it worked quite well.... All was not completely lost however, as our group dissolved I looked around and found another group who were scrambling to get their stuff finished on time and gleefully threw a shot at me to work on. Their project was far more structured, if a lot more ambitious, trying to portray a manic episode. their pre-production work can be found here http://www.facebook.com/groups/311534978904369/ They asked me to do yet another rotoscope/ colour keying job involving a bicyle (hey, stick to what you know right?) Fortunately the footage they gave me was a bit better quality than the last image sequance id gotten. here's a straight key here I tinker with making the wheels look right Here i used a roto bruch first then did both a keylight and some colour correction, (the harsh edge would be taken out later) And there you go, Bit of a shambles this project, once again caused by the people in charge being too nice to order people about. But at least I got my name on a couple of projects...

ludus stuff + stupid stuff

did another thing fo rthe ludus guy, this one being part of the early scenes revealing the robot



.....and then i fell down my stairs, so while injured i decided to do a bit of silly stp-frame with a russian doll i stole

the ludus project

right so i have been slacking off from my blog majorly as I find it a bit of a pain, so there will be a few posts coming up from all the stuff i did last semester. For now I am posting up some work I am doing for a 3rd year media student, who is designing some kind of science-fiction epic. the pilot seems pretty cool, and though I am down as an animator/compositor, I have been showing my director lots of ways in which a bit of simple AE can work wonders. Mostly been playing with the concept art which can be found here

http://s9.photobucket.com/albums/a78/almundis/work/ludusstuff/


so heres some establishing shots I have done so far, pretty minimal, some minor set extansions etc, but the director seems really happy which is great

space entrance scenes



asked me to fit it more to concepts, wil;l remove some blur when i get the proper textures through



pretty happy with this shot



cityscape




and cityscape with some cutting (director very happy with this shot, though has asked for less sand)



and with less sand



more to come, very psyched up thgis term :)

IMax stuff

Unfortunately I have lost a lot of my rough cuts, somewhere within the 100 odd GB this project ate off of my computers HD. I have however found some of the key cuts, and of course the long awaited (or at least the long-hyped) final cuts complete with sound and all. I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project, from the late night re-edits to the early morning skype meetings with the art-director. Who to her credit is mad as hell but does know when things need a few frames shaved off for seemingly no reason. I found it very useful having meetings every other day and found that I was able to meet the demanding work shcedule, having only 10-14 days to actually work on this, including rendering, music sampling and arranging, particle creation, motion graphics and then doing half of it again in Russian. Overall I really learned a lot both about how much I can rely on myself to be able to do as well as the demands of the industry. It has done nothing but re-enforce my desire to work in th eindustry. Now enough blabbing on my end.

These first four videos are for the animatic, sorting out the timing and such, at this point nothing was under copyright, so the maimn issue was just to see how the text could look along with some particle experiments.







Finished animatic



Now unfortunately due to me foolishly saving multiple versions within thesame after effects file it has been almost impossible to track down the significant renders, however many of these would just be timing tweaks with little bits fitted on to the explosion.

So here's the final products, I would like to thankk all the guys at Fortune St. for having me work on this project and for being wonderful people to work with ( and thats not just cause im hoping they'll invite me to the grand iMax opening ).



and in russian

some more random stuff

been doing some more after effects tutorials trying to expand into the other elements of the trapcode package, mainly form and shine which can give some great results.

more vj stuff

not sure if it's a bit too busy now but im still quite happy with it, might try a new project with softer colours

more vj stuff

Been playing around with form after looking at some stuff on that there internet (they say it's gonna be huge)....




this was the first render which was looking pretty basic.




Heres the 8bpc render from the early stages. bit too much flare and definitely felt a bit static.



I'm pretty happy with this, there's definitely room for improvement, but i'm getting a nice feel for trapcode stuff which is always good....

finally got the slit-scan stuff on to youtube...

So after being homeless an internetless for about a month I have finally gotten my stuff on to youtube. In the same way as before, I tried to see how many varieties of image I could get from this effect combined with the overall blackness of the footage. I also did some experiments with some added filters and colour correction, to see what i could get. Overall I found this projecvt wholly enjoyable, though I can't help but feel that my final render is somewhat unfinished, but hey, it's always good to have somewhere to go, we'll see what I can get over the summer. so without further stalling:


















































And yae, the final render

Pitch project

This project was based around creating an animation bible for pitch to an actual person from industry. Unfortunately for me it clashed with some work that I was doing out of town, so I was forced to talk to my group and take a very back-seat role.

However they have all been working dilligantly at it and you can see the various fruits of their labours here

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_165569696838404¬if_t=group_activity

I was only able to render out a quick background and a couple of concept sketches, but my external HD is being a bitch so I will have to try and get them up in the near future...

more vfx

Found some more of the VFX stuff that was done for fortune st that was hidden away in my youtube uploads. Again im still not able to say whether any of this was used in the final renders....

the negotiated brief

For this brief I had to meet with my tutors several times and discuss an idea that I wanted to make into a brief. The idea could be anything essentially, so I decided to investigate a special type of effect known as 'slit-scan'.

Here's an example



and this is from 2001: a space odyssey the first major commercial use of the effect.



I decided to use a P2 camera to get my own footage. I decided to focus on fire spinning and circus skills. Partly because it's a hobby of mine that I have yet to incorporate somehow, but mostly because of the exaggerated movements within the body to create fluid manipulations of objects.
I shot the footage at 50fps for slow motion, knowing i can always speed it up again in post.

Also some videos tend to go out of focus and zoom erratically, this is because I wanted avriety in my footage so I could see how different film styles would work.

One of the key differences when working with this effect digitally is that the computer uses an alpha ramp as a means of working out how to distort the frames in either direction. With this in mind I also set about doing some experiments with various types of alpha channels including fractal noise to various degrees of distortion and trying to incorporate movement into the alpha as well.



















There's a lot more to come but I have to get away from the computer for a few days. Generally out of these first filming sessions i learned that there is a lot to be found in distorting the light sources such as the LED or the fire. My next shoot, I used a pitch black photography studio and the LED staff to produce some really cool movies for slit-scanning.

SOme vfx

Here's a couple of the VFX test files from my work with Fortune St,





not much i know, but im still not allowed to post anything until the project goes live

postpro stuffs

here's some of the bits offootage we filmed for this project. I wish we had done it at 50 fps instead of 25 to get rid of all the motion blur, but this was my first time working with footage so i guess we're supposed to make mistakes....







unfortunately the greenscreen was far too small for our needs....



This was my first attempt at removing my head, i was later to discover that I was working with the wrong bit of footage than everone else....



Here was the rotoscope for the right footage



I will try and get the final render up as soon as i can just waiting to hear wher my group uploaded it....

hey here's he final render

Overkill Low Resolution from George T on Vimeo.

erk....

So, i have very much been neglecting my blog this term. Very naughty i know but that is not to say I haven't been busy. I have been working with 'Fortune St' a London based Graphics company, working on a new iMax cinema project. However it's all very hush hush and i have been told I am not allowed to post up any of the work that I have done for them until the project goes public (patents,copyright and all that lovely tediousness).

On the other side I have been working on a couple of projects.

One is working with some 3rd years on one of their projects called beneath the boughs which you can follow on this link as well as my own blog: http://stephsanimation.blogspot.com/

I have been asked to do some foley artistry which I have been working on today. Need to touch up the sounds before i upload them on to here however. I am also supposed to be doing some 2d compositing but so far haven't been given any footage to work with that.

We wer also given a cinematography project to do with Frankie. I joined a group aiming to do a 1920's style silent comedy. For this project I was Ass. Cameraman and prop/costume designer. Providing the outfit for our damsel in distress, and creating a painting that could break apart without too much injury. The results were very good (if i do say so myself)



Finally, I have been working on a post production project with two other 2nd year students. So far we have gotten as far as shooting our footage which unfortunately is waaaay too big for me to easily upload. The next stage will be getting on to some rotoscoping and trying to create a realistic blood-spurt. Will hopefully have some more regular updates to show soon.

back in black

Well the chritmas cheer is over and the new years eve hangover has begun to subside and so it is back to work.

Our main project this term is to choose between a pre-production assignment in which we'd make an animation bible.

Or we have the option of doing a post-production assignment in which we will have to composite 30/40 seconds of animation and film.

I have chosen to go postal.

This is the first experiment I did using 'Composite'.



I own none of those images by the by, it was just an experiment to get to know the program. I found that the technology was a combionation of very intuitive and complete bast***. However it definitely seems like something I need to master (and thankfully is a lot friendlier than maya).

I think the next big step will be to try and composite something in this before taking it into after effects to really jazz it up.

Time to smash some tehnology..... Hard!

So, as per my last post I got tothe halfwaystage and things were looking good. Unfortunately as I woke up the next day and settleddown to resume work and then flash pops up a lovely error message saying that all my work is basically unreadable. After some cursing and panicking I was saved by my chum Brian, whom will receive a nice big wet kiss when I next see him, pointed out I could take one of my renders and break it back down into frames with Media Encoder, so while I lost my symbols etc. I was still able to get back on track. Unfortunately the only render I had still contained some of the weird poorly rendered stuff that my computer does. I had hoped to get this out by the end of the project, alas I ran out of time.

Anywho, here are some of the stage by stage videos.







Fortunately I was able to retrieve the fire symbol from another file, and I retrieved the Caddy by putting the print-screen i uploaded onto this blog into photoshop.

So here is the finished article unfortunately due to rendering issues i was unable to subimit it for the competition, but I intend to enter the december contest as well.


for some reason i couldnt get the sound to render in anything but an swf format which youtube doesn't seem to like.

Overall I am happy with the results. I would obviously have liked to fix the poorly rendered shots at the beginning but I ran out of time. There are some parts that still look a little soupy, in particular the shot that acompanies the line "why would I put it there". I did tinker with removing some of the in-between shots but I couldn't get it to look right so I left it as is. I would like to try using animate pro instead of flash having seen some of the other animations produced for this project. I am quite happy with my lip syncing on the taller character, it was particularly interesting to see how many different sounds I could produce with three or four different mouth designs.
As for things I would do differently, aside from giving myself at least an extra week to produce my animations I think it would be to produce a dope sheet. I did consider making one initially, but decided it was pointless as i was going to be working within Flash, and would have the soundwaves visible. However when my file died, and I was trying to reconstruct my film within After Effects I realised just how useful it would have been to have the entire thing mapped out on paper. I think the biggest lesson from all of this, which seems to have popped up within all the excercises this term, is that technology is oh so very useless. At least mine is, and I think in future I will have to work in the studio more than working from home. At least until I can upgrade my home system. Otherwise I am happy with the project overall, I think that my crude style managed to compensate for the lack of technical skill involved in my character design. I think for the next project i would like to take my characters and make them even more abstracted from the human form. Though I'm not sure how successful (within the context of competition) this would be as the 11 second club winners tend to either use maya or the 'classic' disney style, but as Lao Tsu once said, competition ruins the creativity of the soul. So instead I'm going to try and go in a more artistic direction with my future films.

Got to the halfway stage last night. Am pretty happy with results so far. It's very apparent that I won't place very highly in the actual contest but I am really getting a feel for how good this contest is for general practice. I am going to make a conscious effort to compete in the following months.

progress

the next shot is up and finished. Found the lip sync a bit more tricky on this one due to the limited movements of the small character's mouth. But so far this is going well. Hooray!

...And it only took 8 hours...

Graaaaaah!

Finally got the 1st section complete. only 5 more to go, though hopefully they won't require as much work as the establishing shot. so without further stalling for time:



and here it is with the lip-sync



Might miss my deadline but damned if im not pleased with myself...