Today I have blasted through another freakish 5 second scene using my stop motion/green screen skills, these scenes are supposed to be along the same lines and pace as the Pic Pic Andre style animations i researched last year, although with just a fraction on the time spent on the characters as I'm simply using what I've sourced over the last few months. This weekend is when all that planning and ordering of pirates and ships in bottles from Ebay several months ago all comes together.

The British Navy on a peaceful day out

the original green screen pre-magic

I may still add in and indicate some rigging and masts as the camera spins around.

Tomorrow it's the Combined Spanish/French fleet's turn. I've been drawing faces on the crew's models today especially.

Progress

I have chosen to turn this week just passed and next week on it's head. I've spent most of this week rendering, editing and tweaking scene done so far rather than the stop motion I had pencilled in to my plan. Which will leave next week free from all that editing and tweaking.

The logic being, it would give me a better sense of what might need changing tweaking, adding and developing timing wise and help me delegate the right amount of time to what else needs doing. The logic has worked quite well and given me better time to condense and prepare what is needed in the final set of stop motion scenes after which everything will be complete!

It has also given me an opportunity to re-evaluate the way the ending is visualised and I've ended the animation by combining a couple of new ideas which work better over the narration (considering I don't have a multi-million dollar corporation working behind me to visualise my originally intended scenes!.

I cant's stress enough that Rebusfarm.com is an absolute life saver with regards to time spent rendering. I just uploaded the very last scene today, 155 frames (the very last scene in the animation not the last bit of work to do) and it was rendered and downloaded back on my mac again within 10 minutes. It takes me at least 7 minutes to render these particular frames on my mac!

So today I've been editing and tweaking in After Effects but here's some other stuff going on:

I worked very hard trying to de-tune a digital TV to get some wavy lines and film them, in these current digital days the TV normally goes blue instantly so I had to comp the three seconds together in after effects from about 20 separate frame sequences.

Proud of this scene, finally getting back to my routes by animating some graphics!

 And this little scene featuring Werpy's Column (watch the animation and you'll understand)

Crows Nest Scene and the magic of Green Screen

Today I worked on my mini green screen studio. I downloaded Dragonframe a few months ago specially for this part of the animation although waited until now to install it as it's only a months free trial (tho you annoyingly only get to animate 50 frames in project so have to set up new projects every 2 seconds)

I've hardly got a professional set up other than the digital SLR and so cobbled things together with a gorilla camera tripod on a pile of books with three dining room chairs, 3 house hold lamps and a broomstick.

The results of my first stop motion scene are satisfying enough though.

Shot in-front of green screen

Green keyed out in After Effects, background added and lighting/colouring of the scene tweaked.

There will be more to come over the next week.

The boat scene:

I think I'm now happy with the introduction of the Battle of trafalgar scene, I've added the sky, switched off the books on the table as the camera spins, added some collapsing masts, whacked in some cannon fire smoke and funked up the wood textures for the ships. Don't get me wrong, I've spent a lot of time on it but not as much as it probably looks, the wood texture looks so great but it's simply the panels of my dining table coloured up dark or light depending on whether the ships are the goodies or the baddies. They're not supposed to look like real ships, just a freaky map scene where little wooden sailing ships mimmic the battle (very briefly) Chuffed with the outcome though.

The render has been set up with various ships spread out over 5 different buffers so I'll have alphas to play with and add some more smoke in after effects later.

Today has really been a tidying up loose ends day, I've really worked on tidying up the narration, chopping it into bits, and sorting the levels, compression, clipping the ends of each part so they don't pop and fitting it nicely to the animation I've put together so far.


Oh as another recent development I was looking to add a little reflection into the sea/map and have found this cool water effect...

The reflection will be key-framed so it increases from zero as the camera comes down to sea level.

Who needs fancy green screens?

I set up my own little green screen at home, you don't need to go out and buy an extremely pricey £100 green screen when you can order a large sheet of green fabric from the internet for about £5.

The sheet is much bigger than is shown, so it should be fine for what I need. I've just started working out the movements and filmed myself going through the movements to get a sense of timing, will start animating this proper tomorrow.

Cute Monsters T-Shirt Competition

I don't think I mentioned this, I entered this dude into a Cute Monsters T-Shirt competition through Deviant Art a month or so ago. Don't think I've won though, a bit weird for them maybe. Got some appreciative comments though.

Well, I'd wear it.

Erm, the Charles Darwin Scene

Yes I know, if you were expecting me to have produced something similar to the Charles Darwin from the new Pirates animation by Aardman, then you should also question how I developed a script involving sailing ships, things stored in beards and Charles Darwin while sitting in the sunshine last summer only to find Aardman have developed something entirely different at exactly the same time.

My Charles Darwin:

Aardman's Charles Darwin

Now it's obvious who portrays the more realistic representation of the character! I'm sure.

Another Scene completed.

Another Scene Cracked

This 2D malarky is a piece of piddle,  If I'd chosen this route throughout the animation would have been finished a couple of weeks ago and I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere instead, or something.

A frame from the Sun Eating scene. (doesn't look very interesting but I don't want to give the game away).

Meet Professor Armitage Shanks

Some days a one day scene takes two days but today I'm pleased to experience a two day scene taking one day. Professor Armitage Shanks is in the bag.

Now to tackle a scene I hadn't planned on, a scene where a tree eats the sun, of course. There also may be cause to film the front of a fire station.

That's the interesting thing about what I'm doing, as I'm going along, I'm re-interpreting the animation. This also resulted in asking the guy who did the narration to add three more bits a couple of weeks ago, this in return then highlights other possibilities when it's all put together.

Basically as I go along and produce a test render for each scene, I then drop it into (or over) the relevant part in the Animatic in a very crude form without effects, transitions or cropping shots. What this has done is to allow me to see the overall picture and feel of the animation, a bit like being handed a bunch of rushes I guess. It's also inspired me into thinking about the sound track which, for the first time, until now I couldn't get into my head and I've prepped an old band member with ideas with which we'll deal with at the end of the month.

Prof. Shanks exits his laboratory to spell things out to you

It's coming together, but only if I don't stop.

Fraiser Werp Spotted in Eldon Square...

Mere Mortals

For the last four weeks I've been popping into Mere Mortals a couple of days a week, just as an update here's a few screen shots of some of the 3D modeling I've been doing for them. It's a great friendly post production and animation studio to have been hanging around in although it's probably not the best time for me to be dedicating time to a placement at such a crucial point in the course.

Yes it's not the most creative of work but technically it's been at least challenging and helping me to become more proficient in finding efficient ways to construct shapes within Cinema 4D. The files will ultimately be exported as FBX files from C4D to be opened in 3D Studio Max for some kind of alarm system installation animation sequence.

And it's not over yet!

Other than this I began the first week or so rotoscoping around a passenger on an inflight Emirates Airline safety movie (or an Emirates sister airline, no entirely sure to be honest). Basically cutting out the deep shadowy parts that can't be automatically cut out from green screen movie footage. This was done in Mocha so was a new experience and linked through After Effects. No screen grabs of this as of yet.

Update over. Bed time.

Freaky Fraiser Werp Rotoscope Sequence

I've created a bunch of these, what are these? Well this is one of many matts I've had to draw out in order to mask out bits of camera tracking I don't want tracked by PFHoe (I've actually spent 12 hours today without successfully tracking this particular shot so far, it doesn't like it, but I have high hopes before midnight).

I'm posting this because I think I might end up using some of this for my Fraiser werp credit sequence. It's cool stuff, a very simplified rotoscoped busy high street. Just needs a simplified Fraiser Werp and some text.

I know it doesn't look like much at the moment but believe me it's the best thing I've produced in the last 48 hours.

FW on the Metro

Here's a test render from one of the camera tracked scenes for the Fraiser werp animation. Still needs the shadows, and motion tweaking slightly but looking good otherwise