I think I'm seeing a trend....

 

derp derp derp

Background almost complete....

This week I worked on trying to finalize the background design. I'm feeling relatively pleased with it, although it was not quite what I had initially envisioned. The lighting still needs a ton of work, which I plan on fixing up with Eric Hanson. There are also a few problems I want to work out, for example the posters and the windowpane. I'm also not quite sure about how to deal with the toy shelf, which is just a plane in space. Still, it is close enough. check out some maya software renderings here:

 

I rendered out a shot to see how it looks with a character. I think it looks pretty cool, but at the same time I have an itchy, uncomfortable feeling about it....my aesthetic senses are tingling with discomfort! There is something wrong with it, but I can't quite point it out. perhaps it is too detailed, but at the same time, I  like the detail. In this shot, I desaturated the background, which helped a bit. It think it has something to do with the composition of this shot itself. The vertical datum is right in the center. Well, this shot isn't quite complete still--I don't have a background for the outside street view.

EDIT: I just played around with the composition. I think its starting to work better. Check it out:

Also, I'm not sure if I mentioned in the last post, but I finished all of the Sequence 2 cu/color animation revisions, so I'm relatively back on schedule. hoooray!

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.

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.