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.