I think this unit has been good for organisation and learning skills such as referencing. It has also been good to learn about broadcasting controls because when I was doing the subtitles, I would not even thought about the action grids unless I was told. I think my organisation has been good. Even though I am slightly behind on my personal schedule, I don't think this could have been helped because we have had so many unforeseen issues.
I think the way the shots came out was good - I am particularly happy with the environment shot but we still need to improve. I need to investigate issues like not rendering properly and referencing correctly before I go any further because these will only pull us back even further if they are not sorted soon.
I think my marketing is going well and I will happily continue to market the film until the degree show. I will also continue to market myself and get my website up to date as well as completing a better showreel and uploading that to various websites. Now that I have my business card designs, I will get them printed. I will also add more contact details to our group contact card and get some printed for the degree show.
I think I have responded well to this unit and kept as organised as possible. I think that I am not perfect and still have some work to do but I can use the skills I have learnt for this unit to progress further in y professional career.
Friday, 16 March 2012
Two Shots
As a group we have been working on getting two shots done for this project. The first, we decided, should be an establishing shot. The environment was pretty much complete so it just needed a slow zoom into it. This is how it came out:
(if video does not work, it can be seen at: https://vimeo.com/38626556)
For this shot, James modelled the environment which was then tweaked by me (I added the flat surface to the top of the hill). I modelled and added the stairs and pavilion. The textures were mainly basic textures which I simply added but the stairs texture, I got an image of beige stone texture of the internet and then added it to make it look a bit better and a bit more like stone. I added the trees using paint effects but they came out much better than expected when rendered in Vray. I also changed the settings of the ocean shader to get a nice river effect than flowed in the direction we wanted.
I rendered all the main environment using Vray but the river would not render unless I was using mental ray. I made everything a bright green colour (except the water) and then rendered this so it could just be keyed out in After Effects. Once both parts had been rendered, I used After Effects to key out the green but there were still some parts visible. To get around this I used a mask and it worked perfectly. Once the keyed shot was layered over the environment shot, t was hard to tell they were not rendered together.
I created a slow zoom using After Effects because then all the footage would stay perfectly composited. I rendered it in After Effects and uploaded it to my Vimeo account.
The second shot has some character animation in. We didn't just want the scene where they are sleeping to be a static image so Lily posed the characters and added the breathing animation. We had real trouble with this shot because the animated characters would not import into the environment scene correctly. When we tried to import the environment into the animated characters, the rig stopped working so the characters no longer moved. We had problems with rendering too. The animated cat had eyes which would not render using Vray. I tried to use a static image but it looked very poor (https://vimeo.com/38626617) and I was not happy with it.
I had tried several different ways to get the eye to render but the only way was to delete the eyes and start again. It took my a long time because once I had recreated the eyes, they would not move with the head so they kept coming out of its body. In the end, it was getting too late to keep messing around so I animated the eyes so that they moved when the head moved.
Now I had a working animation but I could not get it into the environment without the rig not working or the animation not being carried across. All of the group tried to make suggestions but because I was the only one that had both the animation file and the environment file, the others couldn't do it. My and James Tomkins are the only ones with Vray as well so it was either me or him who needed to render it.
In the end James suggesting that we composite the scene. I spent a one time adding lights to make sure that it matched as closely as possible. It took a long time to render the animation in Vray eventhough it didn't have any environment. I then took a static image of a small part of the environment. Using After Effects again, I keyed out the green background of the animation and added the environment image so it looks like they are sleeping on the grass. I then rendered this and uploaded to Vimeo. Here is the shot:
(if the video cannot be viewed properly, you can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/38635102)
The video quality is quite poor because of limited upload sizes on Vimeo but the final film is in much better quality.
I think this shot is better than it was and I prefer it with animation than just a static image.
(if video does not work, it can be seen at: https://vimeo.com/38626556)
For this shot, James modelled the environment which was then tweaked by me (I added the flat surface to the top of the hill). I modelled and added the stairs and pavilion. The textures were mainly basic textures which I simply added but the stairs texture, I got an image of beige stone texture of the internet and then added it to make it look a bit better and a bit more like stone. I added the trees using paint effects but they came out much better than expected when rendered in Vray. I also changed the settings of the ocean shader to get a nice river effect than flowed in the direction we wanted.
I rendered all the main environment using Vray but the river would not render unless I was using mental ray. I made everything a bright green colour (except the water) and then rendered this so it could just be keyed out in After Effects. Once both parts had been rendered, I used After Effects to key out the green but there were still some parts visible. To get around this I used a mask and it worked perfectly. Once the keyed shot was layered over the environment shot, t was hard to tell they were not rendered together.
I created a slow zoom using After Effects because then all the footage would stay perfectly composited. I rendered it in After Effects and uploaded it to my Vimeo account.
The second shot has some character animation in. We didn't just want the scene where they are sleeping to be a static image so Lily posed the characters and added the breathing animation. We had real trouble with this shot because the animated characters would not import into the environment scene correctly. When we tried to import the environment into the animated characters, the rig stopped working so the characters no longer moved. We had problems with rendering too. The animated cat had eyes which would not render using Vray. I tried to use a static image but it looked very poor (https://vimeo.com/38626617) and I was not happy with it.
I had tried several different ways to get the eye to render but the only way was to delete the eyes and start again. It took my a long time because once I had recreated the eyes, they would not move with the head so they kept coming out of its body. In the end, it was getting too late to keep messing around so I animated the eyes so that they moved when the head moved.
Now I had a working animation but I could not get it into the environment without the rig not working or the animation not being carried across. All of the group tried to make suggestions but because I was the only one that had both the animation file and the environment file, the others couldn't do it. My and James Tomkins are the only ones with Vray as well so it was either me or him who needed to render it.
In the end James suggesting that we composite the scene. I spent a one time adding lights to make sure that it matched as closely as possible. It took a long time to render the animation in Vray eventhough it didn't have any environment. I then took a static image of a small part of the environment. Using After Effects again, I keyed out the green background of the animation and added the environment image so it looks like they are sleeping on the grass. I then rendered this and uploaded to Vimeo. Here is the shot:
(if the video cannot be viewed properly, you can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/38635102)
The video quality is quite poor because of limited upload sizes on Vimeo but the final film is in much better quality.
I think this shot is better than it was and I prefer it with animation than just a static image.
Tuesday, 13 March 2012
Identifying an employer
The area that I would like to work in within the animation industry is commercials or shorts. There are lots of companies out there that create animation for advertising. Because of the argot market of our film, I have tried to find companies that also focus on children's television shows as well as commercials as this would best suit where I would be looking for employment and they would be the most interested in our film.
The first company, that I have mentioned in previous posts, is Blue Zoo. They are a great example of a studio that animates children's television and does television commercials. They have worked with cartoon network and nickelodeon as well as doing diverts for kelloggs "choc and roll" cereal. I did not know anyone from the company so I looked on there website and found their info@bluezoo email address. I sent them this email:
The first company, that I have mentioned in previous posts, is Blue Zoo. They are a great example of a studio that animates children's television and does television commercials. They have worked with cartoon network and nickelodeon as well as doing diverts for kelloggs "choc and roll" cereal. I did not know anyone from the company so I looked on there website and found their info@bluezoo email address. I sent them this email:
This was to make first contact and hopefully get this message around their studio to generate interest in the degree show. It also encouraged more contact with myself and made it clear that it was for animation. I have not had any response at present.
I remembered that a few months ago Steve Smith from Beakus came to ravensbourne and gave us a talk about how he started up Trunk and Beakus. From that I remembered getting his business card with his email on.
Beakus have done commercials and web adverts as well as children's television. I thought they would be a great company to contact. This time I sent an email directly to Steve Smith and this is what I wrote:
As of yet, I have not heard back from him either.
At the beginning of this year, I had some contact with Philip Hunt, a director for Studio AKA. I was talking about the water from Lost and Found because our film focuses quite heavily on the water as well as it is based around the river. When I was corresponding with him, he gave me some great advice about seeing the water as a character in itself rather than some settings that make it work. To finish our conversation, I invited him to our degree show and left it on a positive note.
Lastly, while searching for companies, I came across Lumiere Studios. They do a lot of commercials and Idents for different channels. They have a lot of experience and a very big client list. I thought I would attempt to contact them. When looking on their website, it gives you a producers name and email address so I sent her an email similar to the previous ones but I got a reply very soon afterwards.
I asked Rob who is our degree show rep and he said that they had not made the official invites yet but if I forwarded him the message he would send them out to her as soon as they were ready. I sent an email back to Claire and explained this so that it did not look as though I had ignored her.
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
Rendering
We have decided not to use the render farm to render our film. This for many reasons:
1. It does not take too long to render on our computers and the maximum length of a single shot is about 10 seconds.
2. I have found rendering in Vray quite temperamental. If a shot is rendering how it should be looking, then the render farm will not know so it will carry on with the render and therefore waste us time.
3. We can keep an eye on the rendering when it is in our own homes. Me and James have computers that have really fast processors so we can render a shot, make the image sequence into footage and composite the shot together within a few hours. We can tell when it is done so set up the next shot and start compositing the previous shot all at the same time.
I think with all the problems we are having with Vray and rendering, it is not an ideal solution to use the render farm. If we find a more stable way of rendering in Vray so we can guarantee that it will work each time so it is just a case of straight rending, then the render farm would be more beneficial to us.
1. It does not take too long to render on our computers and the maximum length of a single shot is about 10 seconds.
2. I have found rendering in Vray quite temperamental. If a shot is rendering how it should be looking, then the render farm will not know so it will carry on with the render and therefore waste us time.
3. We can keep an eye on the rendering when it is in our own homes. Me and James have computers that have really fast processors so we can render a shot, make the image sequence into footage and composite the shot together within a few hours. We can tell when it is done so set up the next shot and start compositing the previous shot all at the same time.
I think with all the problems we are having with Vray and rendering, it is not an ideal solution to use the render farm. If we find a more stable way of rendering in Vray so we can guarantee that it will work each time so it is just a case of straight rending, then the render farm would be more beneficial to us.
Thursday, 23 February 2012
Referencing
Ac couple of weeks ago we were taught how to reference our files into a scene. This is so if the models change, they automatically get updated in the other scene. This is a very handy method to use, especially for us as we have three characters and an environment. The characters are changing all the time so they are constantly being updated. If we had any animation, this would be lost with the updated models, but with referencing this does not happen.
We have had a few problems with out referencing and they are mainly rendering issues. I have found that when I reference a model into a scene, they no longer render in Vray (We are using Vray to give us the black outlines for our cartoony characters). The strange thing is that in their own files they will render in Vray just fine but as soon as you reference the file into another scene, it will no longer be visible when you render.
This is a problem, that is ongoing but it is something we will have to figure out how to fix. Referencing is very important for us because the models so often need changes. It can be something small, like a weight painted wrong, or something huge like having to add more set driven keys or changing the texture so having to repaint all the weights. Referencing is definitely something we need to use, it is just a case of solving this small issue before we can render any character animated shots.
We have had a few problems with out referencing and they are mainly rendering issues. I have found that when I reference a model into a scene, they no longer render in Vray (We are using Vray to give us the black outlines for our cartoony characters). The strange thing is that in their own files they will render in Vray just fine but as soon as you reference the file into another scene, it will no longer be visible when you render.
This is a problem, that is ongoing but it is something we will have to figure out how to fix. Referencing is very important for us because the models so often need changes. It can be something small, like a weight painted wrong, or something huge like having to add more set driven keys or changing the texture so having to repaint all the weights. Referencing is definitely something we need to use, it is just a case of solving this small issue before we can render any character animated shots.
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
Business cards and marketing
As part of my plan to market myself, I have designed mini business cards. These have all my contact details on. I am also designing a group contact card for the degree show and for our film.
For my business cards, I will be using the company Moo and using their mini business cards. I will being using different designs and ordering 300 cards. These are my designs:
For my business cards, I will be using the company Moo and using their mini business cards. I will being using different designs and ordering 300 cards. These are my designs:
The card at the bottom will shows the back of each business card and the other pictures are the front designs. Most of the pictures are photographs I have taken and some others are of my own 3D work. It has all my personal details on so they can get hold of me by telephone or email and has my web address on there too.
I have made a mock up of what the group contact cards will look like and this is it:
The first image os go the front and is the poster that Sarah has created. The back shows all of our profile pictures with the roles we had in the group. There is space for us to add other details such as a website address, twitter or linked in account details.
My own personal website is currently under construction. It is www.olywalters.com and even though it has a basic structure, I still need to add pages and my work. This will be updated and added to throughout my career. t is vital that this is done before the degree show but all the base is there - I just need to add information to it.
My showreel also needs updating. I am not very happy with it but I have some small parts which I like. I am going to add to it and rework some parts before the degree show so I have a more up to date showreel. When this is done, I will put it on my different accounts and also on my website as an overview of what I can do.
Saturday, 18 February 2012
Updating
So I have lots of different accounts on places like linkedin.com, creative pool.com and AnimationBase. I also have a youtube account with all my tests that I have done posted on it. None of these accounts have been updated - most did not even have a picture of me.
This is what I have been doing all of this week. I have updated my CV so it shows that I now have a foundation degree. I have also taken a profile pic - the one I have sent to James previously, and added that to my several accounts. On some of them I had to explain my skills and write a summary about myself.
I still need to update my website so that I can put it on my business cards for the degree show. I have a basic website but it is not focused towards my profession. I need to add my contact details and add some of my work and artwork. I also need to redo my showreel, I looked at it recently and it is already out of date, It has some things on there that I am not particularly proud of and that I could have done better. This will eventually go onto my website as well and onto my accounts so that people who are looking at my profiles will be able to see the best of my work.
I have tried to network a bit more on linked in and twitter so more people will look at me and know who I am. I never really used twitter but I think it would be a good idea to get more people interested in what I have to say. Linked in has been a great tool because I have been able to join groups and make more connections. I have been able to find older students and see what they have done since they left to give me aspirations and ideas of what I can do. I have managed to make a connection with a recruiter at the Moving Picture Company and look into lots of groups to start to make contacts.
I am hoping that if I market myself and my work well, I can make more connections within the industry which will help me secure a good job when I leave.
This is what I have been doing all of this week. I have updated my CV so it shows that I now have a foundation degree. I have also taken a profile pic - the one I have sent to James previously, and added that to my several accounts. On some of them I had to explain my skills and write a summary about myself.
I still need to update my website so that I can put it on my business cards for the degree show. I have a basic website but it is not focused towards my profession. I need to add my contact details and add some of my work and artwork. I also need to redo my showreel, I looked at it recently and it is already out of date, It has some things on there that I am not particularly proud of and that I could have done better. This will eventually go onto my website as well and onto my accounts so that people who are looking at my profiles will be able to see the best of my work.
I have tried to network a bit more on linked in and twitter so more people will look at me and know who I am. I never really used twitter but I think it would be a good idea to get more people interested in what I have to say. Linked in has been a great tool because I have been able to join groups and make more connections. I have been able to find older students and see what they have done since they left to give me aspirations and ideas of what I can do. I have managed to make a connection with a recruiter at the Moving Picture Company and look into lots of groups to start to make contacts.
I am hoping that if I market myself and my work well, I can make more connections within the industry which will help me secure a good job when I leave.
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