Full Film

Behind the Scenes

Trails

Waaaahh I forgot to post this fun picture. It's every frame of my dissipating smoke cloud displayed at once. A happy accident.

Stills

The Journey Ends

Well, that's my film officially finished and submitted. I'm calling it complete. As usual there are a few things I would like to go back and work on, but you have to call it quits somewhere. I feel the film works and serves its purpose for me. The things I'd like to do I probably wouldn't do even if I did have more time. It has been a bit of a rush scramble to get done in time, but I feel I don't feel the work has suffered as a result - I instead sacrificed socialising, meals and sleep… not something I would have done if I wasn't so passionate about the project I suspect.

I think what really made things tight was the compositing. Having backgrounds all filmed and ready for me a little over confident with my schedule, and I failed to anticipate how long some scenes would take to put together - not from a lack of planning, but from finding more and more ways to integrate the animated characters into the scene - and of course the odd bit of motion tracking that didn't work or an object that had to be tracked manually due to parallax issues.

Having a team of volunteer undergraduates certainly made this possible. Although I animated all but five shots the proved invaluable when it came down to cleaning up (inking) the frames and colouring them. Having those jobs outsourced allowed me to focus most of my efforts on the composite. The top priority, if I couldn't have it all, was to make sure the FX side of the project was as good as it could be rather than focusing too much on producing my best character animation (however the film does contain some of my best stuff yet).

Over all I think the project has been a success. I've learned a lot and achieved a lot with little-to-no experience on what I sought to do, as well a learning the limitations and pit-falls that come with this technique which I know to be aware of in future projects.

Finale

This scene took longer than any other to render.

Floor

Elwood's Entrance

Work in progress.

Alpha Channel

Another Shadow

This scene is a work in progress, with another animated shadow to help tie the animation into the scene. This looked good in After Effects but when compressed the shadow gets a little lost. I don't know if I should make it more intense or not. Choose '480' quality below to reduce some of the blurring on the surface of the desk for a better idea of how the shadow looks.

Fun Freeze Frames

(Not the real background)

Colour

RE: the last post.

Cleanup

For digital cleanup I put every frame of the scene into a Photoshop file as layers and ink over each one. This allows me to use the previous frames as reference to reduce line boil, and sometimes I can even copy and paste certain elements that don't change between frames rather than drawing them over and over - for example, Trooper's hands on the floor. It didn't seem worth dividing just those onto a layer of their own while animating when I can keep it simple and only ink it once on the computer. Here's what you see if you look at all the inked layers at once.

Shot 14

Using shadows to help integrate the characters into the scene.

Completed Shots

Well shot 32 (the "money shot") is finished and rendered - but I'm not going to post that here, I want to save that puppy for the screening, so instead I'll show you shot 19, which rivals shot 32 in terms of how much rotoscoping was involved. That's about it though, the animation was pretty minimal in this one.

If I have time I'm going to animate his eyes, but not until the rest of the scenes are finished.

Sh19 in Progress

This scene is the last of the pain-in-the-arse rotoscoping. Transparencies and extreme motion blurs to deal with.

Shot 32 in Progress IV

Some more work in progress from the hardest shot in the film. I hope to get this one finished tomorrow at the latest.