Behind the Scenes

Finale

This scene took longer than any other to render.

Floor

Elwood's Entrance

Work in progress.

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.

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.

Progress Update

Today was my first proper test of the production pipeline. I cleaned up (inked) a scene on paper and then scanned it and coloured in in Photoshop. I developed a complicated set of actions to make it a semi-automated process which lets me clean and colour the scanned drawings incredibly fast, and also prepare them for compositing. I then started a composite to test the cleaned animation and camera tracking, although didn't have time to finish it before the college closed. So far the process seems to work without any problems and is a lot faster than I had hoped, which bodes well for the deadline.

Elwood in the Foyer

Another test of matching 2D with live action. I got a bit more advanced with shadow/reflection than the previous test and added some masks to have the 2D elements behind practical ones. The match moving is still a little off, but I think this could be fixed with clear tracking markers and steadier footage. I don't intend to have such wobbly hand-held shots in the film.

With the assessment date rapidly approaching and two other projects on the go I didn't have time to do any animation specifically for this, so I borrowed this walk cycle from a cartoon I did years ago. So don't judge it harshly. The feet don't make good contact with the ground and it could do with being on 1s instead of 2s to better mix with the live action, but it served the purposes of this experiment.

First Compositing Test

I haven't spoken a whole lot yet about what my project is on this here blog yet, but I shall be talking about that in my next post. For now I'll just give the basics needed to set up this video. I am planning a short film that will integrate 2D characters into live action footage. This is my very first test of integrating the two together. I shot this with my compact camera, so it's grainy and compressed. This also means the tracking points aren't as accurate as I'd like, resulting in the 2D element floating a little. I'll be borrowing a nicer camera from the University for subsequent experiments. There's also very little animation to speak of, but that wasn't necessary at this point for reasons I'll go into.

The aim of this was to test two specific things:

1. Tracking - how simple is it to track camera movements and apply them to the animated element?
   
   
2. Environment - how well can the animation be integrated?

I'm keen to keep the 2D elements as flat and cartoony as I'd draw them in their own context (i.e. comics & animation - more on this on the next post) but I want them to affect the environment. So I did some pretty simple (or down-right crude) effects in the composite to achieve this.

Click read more below to learn more about the various elements I experimented with in the compositing...

Test

I shall hopefully populate this blog with more stuff soon, but for now here's a quick proof of concept video I did for my project:

No Entry from Mark Haldane on Vimeo.