Thierry Guetta aka Mr Brainwash

I'm loving this art show currently showing over in LA by Thierry Guetta (Mr Brainwash)

 

 

 

Pixelation Experiment

I've been meaning to add this little project to my blog.

A few weeks ago a group of us were briefed to come up with an idea and immediately film it all within a couple of hours, this was the result, it was supposed to cut to a second scene but we ran out of time. All the same the combination of drawn animation and Callum's nutty pixelation technique produced something fun.

Since then I have just added a little soundtrack and looped it a few times just using it as an opportunity to experiment with some lighting effects in Final Cut pro.

Yeti Werp Invades Paris Exhibition

From thousands of entries world wide, Mr Yeti-Fraiser Werp was selected for the Yeti character wall. Somewhere on this wall of Yeti's at the Paris Gaite Lyrique Pictoplasma Exhibition you will find my Fraiser Werp Snow Yeti. 

can you spot him?

 

 

http://paris.pictoplasma.com/

PROBLEM SOLVED finally after 2 weeks of frustration!!!!!!!!

The got damn thing has been animated for the last 2 weeks and ready to set up the cameras and scenes but...

This problem has been driving me absolutely bonkers day after day for 2 weeks, wasting 2 weeks of time in which I could have finished this animation. I've searched blogs, asked advice, and clicked just about every conceivable tick box relating to lighting and textures receiving light that I could possibly find.

The issue occurred when I tried to light the inside of a cylinder, it's all fine with global illumination switched on with a sky object lighting the scene, UNTIL you want to add a light to create shadows, the result is a bunch of useless stripes along the inner surface of the cylinder. I can assure you I've tried every setting possible, setting up new documents and bringing in elements from scratch to eliminate the problem. There's always something that takes twice as long as you expect but this was ludicrous. 

I don't want pin stripe textures for the inside of a cup!!

I've solved it though. The torment is over! I thought  I had narrowed it down to the hyper-nurb setting on the cylinder as when I hit a screen render it looked fine...

No more idiot lines!!

 but then when rendering it out properly they were still there mystified I went round in circles a bit longer until I realised I needed to set the Subdivision Render settings higher as well as the Subdivision Editor setting for it to work. I boosted them both up to 4 and everything was looking sweet!

Increase the subdivisions if you don't want freaky lines!

I can't tell you how much relief I feel, I had visions of murdering santa as he popped down the chimney while I sat at my computer over xmas. I feel free to continue at last, and solve the next problem, (there's always a problem to solve) but this was a normal problem that you can solve in a half hour of tutorial searches.

The blob character needed to be lit independently of the surroundings as it is way too much in shadow, yet I didn't want to bleach out the floor texture and shadow it shed on the cylinder floor:

     

               Light bleaching out texture and shadows                            Spotlight excludes the cylinder object 

So I set up the spotlight to exclude the floor and shadows cast on that floor, this only worked if I applied it  to the Hyper-nurbs containing the cylinder!

My god it's starting to work, I just wish I was at this stage 2 weeks ago!

MTV Ident

A successful week with the progression our group MTV project briefed in last Friday. It's been a little tricky to plan things out from the beginning other than to get cutting out and animating asap so as to have enough time post production, but the way things have been panning out so far:

Monday

Mashed some ideas together and went with a crazy combination of cut-out/shadow puppetry style, frame by frame animation composited into live footage. Then we progressed with establishing the the look of the characters, which essentially Simon fell into the manic looking styling for us.

Simon's character scamps

Tuesday

Brought in materials to build our own MTV logo out of cardboard and sticky tape which I whacked together while Simon sketched out the characters (separate limbs of a cow, dog & crab) on black card for Linsey and Janey to cut out when they weren't looking for potential sound files.

 

cutting out the segmented characters from black card

 

creation of the MTV logo from card and insulation tape

In the afternoon we had a bit of fun producing a test animation on the light box with the crazy cow, using three of us to focus on and animate the front, middle or rear of the animal in a one second loop. This worked quite well due to the large amount of moving limbs to remember to move (in the right direction) each frame (bring on the crab).

The footage was then quickly dropped into After Effects and looped to produce a 10 second test/animatic to get an idea of the feel and pace and what we need to aim towards animating. It's helped a great deal and tomorrow should be easier to work out when we attempt the real things.

Things are also working out well because I am able to work on my Blob animation in the evening and the MTV animation during the day.

Wednesday

Today we produced quite a bit. Having established the timing for the cow version of the three idents, we set about animating the cutout/shadow style puppet character on the light box using Dragon to shoot the frames. We had an impressive work structure for animating each frame, to remember which way each of the many joints and parts were traveling Linsey animated the rear legs, Janey the udders and tail, me the head and front legs while Simon took the shots and gave us guidance from what was on the screen. This took a good part of the day, we then progressed to the second character, the small dog which was incredibly simple in comparison and only took two of us to animate (Janey & Linsey).

We're pretty happy we have everything we need and will be able to loop certain parts to create the finished animations. Tomorrow the crab character, then it is a case of cleaning things up and setting up the files in Cinema 4D placing on the film footage. (putting it simply). With most of the assets created this week it should be relatively simple to work on the production next week (although we have only until Wednesday!).

Thursday

Janey, Linsey and Simon all continued with the animation of the crab character, which took a couple of goes for us to get the walk cycle looking right, the legs looked best when they acted independently of each other in no noticeable pattern. I started work on creating a version of the MTV logo in Cinema 4D, so that it could be placed onto the characters later. This meant creating assets to use as textures on the sides of the three dimensional logo, I also embellished on the amount of paper/card textures originally used to build it using photoshop to layer up textures.

slightly funked up assets for the logo

By the end of the day we had all three character sequences completed and the logo assets done. 

Friday

This was the beginning of the technical stuff, Simon spent the morning cleaning up the rendered movie files from Dragon into After Effects, the file colour was inverted and the contrast boosted to bleed out most of the rubbish from the light box, the rest was masked out. The right hand crab legs were duplicated and placed on the left, only in a reversed sequence so the left legs pushed in the same way the right pulled, parts that were meant to be looped were duplicated and we ended up with 3 x 10 second sequences. 

I built up the 3D logo in Cinema 4D by importing an outline path of the logo from Illustrator and creating a spline with it in C4D from which the logo was extruded and bent around a little on the corners so it wasn't all perfectly neat looking. By setting selections of each face a texture could be applied to that specific section of the logo. It seemed to work quite well. We may simulate some tape fixing the logo to the animals at a later stage.

 MTV logo in C4D, made from 3 parts, M T V !!

logo tested in a similar environment to one of the intended Idents.

Over the weekend we hope to find a way to solve the issues we are having bringing the character animation footage into Cinema 4D and maybe a bump map for the logo. Then early next week we hope to have some environment footage to play with filmed by Simon's brother specially for us or we shall be sitting pretty and twiddling our thumbs!.

If I have time I might try to knock together some music over the weekend for it.

Even better render of scene 1

I lost the colours in the eyes for a while and it seem that it was due to lighting the scene with an image instead of actual lights, stick a light back in and it pulls the layers of colour back out of the eyes again. So I think I'm about ready to render scene one which I'll start tonight. There is so much global illumination and ambient occlusion in the shot that it takes about 12 minutes a frame so it will take a couple of nights rendering. I've had to forsake the depth of field in the camera as that would have simply taken for ever to render. Plus at the end of the day, this is supposed to be based on an old B-Movie so they wouldn't have had half the luxuries I've had.

Anyway looking forward to finishing this, I just need to know where we stand with the beginning of our group project tomorrow before I can plan out the next months work load, ideally I'd like to get the blob cracked by the end of the week but this week is more likely to be dedicated to the MTV Group project.

Composited Cricket

This simply needs sharing with the world, I'm not sure why a cricket has anything to do with it, but I found it during my MTV research and it does show an example of compositing a character into live footage.

The Fraiser Werp Storyboard

This is how my storyboard is looking for my main project this year, you may be a little confused about what's actually going on until the notes have been added, but it was presented and explained by myself last Monday with much success. 

It is all properly worked out though and I am happy that I know what needs to happen and where, the script is done, the story is set, and numerous ships in bottles keep appearing at my front door from ebay.

Le Blob Blog

Still progressing with my blob idea. I wanted to experiment with projecting a still image into a 3D environment and it seems to be going well so far.

I've basically I've been through these stages in the last week or so:

Taken a number of stills and movie footage of a coffee cup in the situation, I then broke this up into 4 parts, the cup, railing, foreground and background.

Added a few more buildings into the background and edited layers in photoshop so some of the background layers had the foreground elements removed to allow for perspective camera movement effects. Placed the main image into the background of C4D and recreated the scene using simple shapes.

Used Projectionman in C4D to lock off a camera looking at each element with psd file projected frontally of each bit. From this I was able to set up a short 2 second animated scene of the camera pulling backwards. The Blog will then be placed inside of the cup.

Finished off the tracking of the eyeballs to match the morphs of the blob stretching

Compete together a fake city from shots taken around Newcastle and Brisbane (beautiful combination).

Duplicated and created a file to use to light the scene in C4D by bringing this in as a sky object. I created a brighter area in one spot to project light from one direction.

Started to play with some colour in the background. I don't want the scene to look like a bit of news footage it needs to look dramatic with over exaggerated colours in the background that match the character, this has meant colouring some of the sky and buildings. I think it's getting somewhere near to where I want it to be. With global illumination switched on the character is lit by the sky and surrounding building create a great effect on the surface of the skin and eyes.

Basically looking good so far. Next I need to:

      A. Scene 2 - Set up the blob viewed inside the cup looking out and match the lighting effects

      B. Set up the blob in the cup I created at the beginning of this entry looking into the cup and match the lighting effects.

      C. Scene 3 - Match movie footage of the cup to all of the animation scenes.

      D. Create the sound

I'm going to struggle to give this a time plan because I'm about to get stuck into the MTV brief.