Steam Power, It's the future!

I thought I might post a gadget I've invented for the Fraiser Werp animation, that being one of those state of the art steam powered TVsystems.

you'll all be using them this time next year for sure., but be careful, some models are known to take your face right off!

Brain

I thought it you might like to see the interesting progression of my brain.

I was looking for something that might have a cross section similar to a chocolate Aero bar and saw some bread and thought that might make an interesting bone like cross section texture for the outer layer of my brain, next thing you know the inner workings of my brain looks like this>>>>>......

BRAIN

BREAD

Not to be confused with one another.

And we haven't even got on to the inner workings of the Fraiser Werp yet!

The Fraiser Werp Production Tasks

I have dissected every part of my Fraiser Werp animation now that VERSION 11 (!!) of the script has been finalised and forwarded to the splendid fellow offering to be the voice of the narrator throughout the animation. This led me to not only produce a production plan but firstly a means of visualising the production tasks associated with the animation so that they can then be planned.!

It makes things clear to myself as to where the time will be spent, singling out the 3D, 2D and stop motion elements and the all important allowance for the planning of the 3D character rig and animation scenes, the compositing and editing.

It was written to be approximately 4:30 minutes long but in analysis I have selected the parts grayed out on the plan as areas the story will still very much work without. What with time being of the essence they will be left until last to allow focus elsewhere, it brings it down to about 3 minutes so it will make a big difference to my stress levels if nothing else!

Quality rather than quantity as they say after all.

And here's my production time table. I've actually definitely decided to scrap scene's 5 & 6 and the first part of scene 7, and I'm happier for it. It's going to be quite as slog as it is and I haven't even textured my character in Cinema 4D yet, but I've allowed time for it.

You'll notice the grayed out areas, these are potential work placement days, I've allowed for working over them in part because a good part of my work gets done in the evenings (yes I work all evening as well as all day!), but I've stretched projects over and past them knowing this.

God forbid I have any kind of life in the next 3 months, but this is what it's all about for me at the moment. Gain as much experience and knowledge in a very short period of time as possible and the potential to produce an original piece of work that I wouldn't otherwise have have produced. Then to use this to get a job in the same field.

Camera Mapping and Metaballs

Today we went through a little exercise which involved using a 2D flat photograph of an alleyway and transforming this into a 3D environment by mapping it onto objects. A bit like i did with my blob cup to begin with, only this worked a bit better, maybe because I wasn't too fussy about how it looked and what else I wanted to comp into it.

I think the key factor is to actually match the same aperture setting of the camera that took the shot with the camera settings in C4D, otherwise the perspective will never match.

Then funking things up using Metaball and MoSpline to make a globule of liquid-like stuff flow along a spline towards and past the camera.

It's all good fun.

Interestingly I was messing around with Metaballs yesterday in one of my diagrammatic scenes from my Fraiser Werp animation. This illustrates the inner workings of the brain as it struggles to visually interpret a Fraiser Werp....

That's 10 seconds done anyhow.

It's so sad!

I absolutely love this simple bit of motion tracked animation

Showreel

Due to potential work placement prospects I've felt it wise to bash together an up to date showreel featuring current and past work...

LE BLOB TERRIFIANT

Well, here it is, finally my final render of the story of Le Blob.

It's a tiny story about a tiny blob with big ideas. The idea was to experiment with scale and perception and have some fun, although the hours put into this may not exactly be classed as fun as such. But now it's over it can be looked on with a certain amount of satisfaction.

It may not be perfect but every late night of animation gets me closer, I can now turn off my poor macbook from it's eternal rendering (for a moment).

Another Weird MTV Experiment

This was put together over Xmas while trying to get my head around PFHoe tracking before I bought my SLR. It doesn't exactly make any sense but I thought it was amusing any how and it got me better at tracking!

City Balls - for no real reason really

I had a bit of cast off footage from the MTV project, I'd already motion tracked nicely and had tested it with a non animated dog and so I thought I'd look into some dynamics within Cinema 4D. It's an area that I haven't touched upon yet but have been itching to do something with, the problem being that none of my ideas actually needed it yet despite how useful I'm sure it will be to learn about.

So here you have it, some balls filling a larger invisible spinning ball. All went quite well except a few balls seemed to want to pop out of the larger ball which had to be masked out in After Effects, but you'd never know! A few lighting effects/colours were added and tweaked in AE and a lens distortion placed in Final Cut.

Due to some monstrous rendering (40 hours +) in Cinema 4D today, today has been After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Sound, Lighting and loose end editing and posting day.