Branch development

Very nearly finished with the branch now! Here it is so far!

All that needs to be done now is for it to be UV Mapped by Marios, textured by myself and it'll be good to go!

Shot 39 Spline

I've been splining shot 39 and I believe it's "finished" but I'll be coming back to this along with all of the other shots to properly polish off in the near future.



The timing seems to be fine, but I will want to go in and add an extra bit of polish to certain aspects of it.

Shot 39 Blockout

Here's the blockout for shot 39! Tate quickly turns his head to notice Taren running directly behind him, I think the blockout is slowly getting there so I'll soon be splining the animation!



I was initially going to have a more complex movement but I've since decided against it.

Shot 43

After the "completion" of Shot 42 I decided to go in and work immediately on the shot directly after it!

It's quite an easy shot with the camera ever so slightly moving backwards with the wings of the egg flapping.

So far I want to go in and heavily finesse the movements of the wings, but I also wish to go into more detail and add a few blinks/additional head movements for Tate and Taren.



It's slowly getting there and I will return to it once I've worked on more shots.

Shot 42 Splining

Very very very slowly getting there! Although I'm not at all happy with the shot yet. I've essentially finished Tate (left) but Taren needs a lot more work doing to him until I deem him as finished, but I should hopefully have it finished by the end of today! I want to ensure there's a lot of nice subtly in this shot, so after Taren is done I'll be going onto the polishing stage, ensuring everything is believable with a lot of appeal.



Edit: After watching this a few more times it has come to my attention that their movements at the end clash too much so I'll ensure they're separated a bit more to allow the viewer to view exactly what's going on.

My preferred method of working

I'll be doing when working on the project is block out the whole of my shots and then start going in and working on each of them all individually, this is my preferred method of working and I know Guy will also be following the same method.

A lot of the time I just add in basic animation for some of the characters which I guess could be considered layout animation.

Rendering to start this weekend!

Eeek! The rendering for the film will actually begin this weekend, albeit on the very few shots that I have actually finished! I'll be doing so on my home computer which so far has been proven to be able to render the tests out insanely fast for the different render layers. Once that's done I'll be tweaking the shots in After Effects and start to place them into a Final Cut file along with some of the playblasts to get an idea of how it'll all look!

I'm really hoping to be able to make the June 17th deadline for the finished film!

Shot 42 Blockout

Here's the latest blockout I started today for Shot 42! The shot will show all 3 characters as they fly past the camera, with Tate and Taren holding onto Ernests legs. A lot of work still needs to be done before I start to go beyond the blocking stage, but it's slowly getting there.

I still need to animate the wings for Ernest, but I won't be doing so until I'm essentially done with both Tate and Taren's animation.

I've tried to make Tate (left) somewhat confident of a character throughout the film, whereas Taren (right) is a bit more concerned in terms of characteristics. I'm hoping it shows to an extent with this!

Shot List update!

It's been a while since I decided to showcase the shotlist, but I now have the most updated one to show off! The changes made to the shot list reflect the changes I made to the storyboard the other week (late I know), this was because I wasn't happy with the flow of the story, and I only came to realise this as I started to animate a few shots (which have been cut). I essentially wasted time animating the shots, but alternatively it gave me a bit of time to practice.

I've assigned the shots for both Nick and Joe as well, but depending on how much they're willing to do it could very well go up.

As it stands right now I have 24 shots to animate, Guy 12, Nick 3, and Joe 3.

Storyboard update

An update!

I wasn't at all happy with the story flow before so I took the time to fine tune the story and storyboard a bit. It's a bit late in the whole grand scheme of things but I feel it needed to be done in order to get the best possible film out of the project. One of the main reasons I did this was because I felt the amount of shots in the previous storyboard were far too much considering the time we have to finish the film, I've taken the shots down from 50 to 43, and although that may not sound like too much of a change I believe it has improved the flow of the story quite dramatically.

Tree Branch Render Test

Lacking the characters there, but the visual style is slowly getting there!



A lot of the films compositing will be done in a combination of Photoshop and After Effects, since a lot of the backgrounds for the shots are static. There's still a long way to go before this is what I consider to be perfect, but I just wanted to ensure some of the elements worked nicely.