Meeting with Sound Designer and more animation

This week I continued work on Sequence 5, getting into one of my most difficult shots in the film: the green monster transformation. Its not done, but I took a picture of my progress so you can see it. I'm doing the majority of it on ones because it works better with a moving camera. Both transformation shots are really challenging for me because I am trying to mimic the kind of transformations in the blockhead music video. It's hard to manage all the swirly things and make it look like they are actually moving. I think I'm starting to get it a little bit. My plan tonight is to finish as much of that shot and pull together an animatic for tomorrow's presentation.

 I was surprised that the other shots took very little time to do, like 2-4 hours. I still remember some of the simplest shots in the beginning took me the whole day when I was starting out. I'm really happy I'm doing this project because now I can confidently say that I can do hand drawn animation.

I also met with a sound designer recently. Her name is Jean Tsai. We plan to start working on sound design early next semester.

same old, same old

Worked on more animation this week, getting into sequence 5, which is the hardest sequence because it is the most actiony. I think my most difficult problem right now is rendering stuff/uploading stuff, which is why I don't post much of my animation. It seems that vimeo and youtube don't take swfs?

Anyways, you can check out my most current animatic below. I have a bunch more animation and revisions not included, but you will have a sense of where I am at.

I met with Darren Kiner again today, and we figured out how to get the animation into the 3D scene! yayyyy.

newest animatic

http://vimeo.com/30766615

First time working in Toonboom!

The workshop this weekend was really helpful, I got a lot of notes and now I'm super pumped to do my cleanup and color in toonboom animate pro. I'm currently working on a simple shot that I can use in to test the comping in maya.

http://vimeo.com/30707133

this is a shot from sequence 2, where the toy shelf is first revealed
I also finished Sequence 4! The last two scenes were particularly difficult because they were of Ray transforming into a monster. I had no idea how I was going to do it, and ended up trying to be a little experimental. I wanted to based the transformation off of the animation in this music video.

I'll try to render and post it later tonight.

Finally got my animatic rendered!

After much hassle, I realized with the help of Matt Sheehan that I had been using the wrong pixel aspect ratio for everything in my film. I also figured out how to render my film without coming into a memory problem. I divided my large Aftereffects file into 5 different aftereffects files based on sequence number. I created a master aftereffects file to compile all of the mov files of the different sequences.

This week, I worked on shots 6, 7, and 8 of sequence 4 and 9, 5 of sequence 6. I was going to do 9 and 10 of sequence 4, but those are especially difficult scenes so I'm working on them separately next week.

I'm really afraid I'm going to come into a lot of problems in the comping stage, so I think next week I will be cleaning up and coloring one character for a shot moving 3D space as a test.

I'm still working on the shots, so I'm going to finish that up and post my animatic in this post then.

EDIT: apparently my animatic is too large to handle. So you will have to see it tomorrow.

Finished Sequence 3!

DUE TOMORROW:
Seq6 Layouts
Animation:
Seq3: 10, and 21
Seq4: 1, 12, 3, 4
Revise Seq3_sc8

I'm having rendering issues in aftereffects right now, so I won't be able to post a new animatic. I DID post one last week though, so hopefully that is enough? This week, I finished the last two shots of Sequence 3 animation! I need to go back and make some revisions on a couple of the shots that don't make any sense, namely the one with the shadow and the one after it.

I talked to my composer today, and I think its official that he will be joining me on this project. His name is Harrison Lee, a student of SMPTV. He does really awesome synth work, and has his own electronica duo back in Canada. He's excited by the project as much as I am! Here is a link to his SMPTV page and his soundlcoud:

http://soundcloud.com/secretsquares
http://www.smptv.net/student.php?id=77

As for the backgrounds, I've been meeting with Dom once a week on Sundays so that he can work on it at my cubicle. This week he worked on lighting the scene. It's coming together rather nicely, but we both think the store looks rather neat. We tried pushing polygons around to make the lines of the shelves not so straight, and it actually looks a lot better, more organic. It still definitely needs work. I'm glad we started the bgs way ahead of time.

next week the plan is to finish Sequence 4. This includes everything from the part where Ray grabs Helen to the part where Ray turns into a monster. The last two scenes are definitely going to be tricky because I want to make the transformation really cool. We'll see how it goes.

Need to start thinking about sound design....

DUE NEXT WEEK:
Sequence 4 Animation: 6, 7, 8, 9, 10