Week 9: Final thoughts 29/11/07

well... Having not seen the final film which matt tells us is looking pretty awesome, I'm still not swayed to consider this a total success stroy, however I would like to focus more on the things we did do well.
Firstly, we communicated extremely well. Throughout the entire projects we really strived to make sure that everyone had a chance to have an input on the final outcome. This was down to making sure that everone was aware of ANY changes being made. So, although the project hasn't come out exactly how we imagined it to, for future employment, team work is def one of our strongest traits to boast in.
I was also impressed with our constant enthusiasm and overall work ethic. I had doubts that because we were all friends, we wouldn't push eachother or ourselves to the same degree as if you were trying to impress someone you hadn't worked with before. Instantly we were excited about the project and really went for it, we opend our eyes to where we were over excelling ourselves to the point where were didn't have the knowledge to achieve what we wanted, esp in the schedule, but this was all sorted in the early stages of the project.
Even when things started to glitch on us, because we we re so organised and ahead, someone could step in to assist the person who was struggling, and thereby taking someof the stress off them.
I am also pleased with the learning outcomes that we have all achieved. The tools that we did know have been sharpened, and the tools we didn't ,we have now practised with to start experimenting with, as opposed to just the 'using to learn' method.
For me personally, my confidence in premiere has increased, but laso my interest in it. Before i was always apprehensive with suing it as I didnt know much about it, but now I use it with otehr things I'm really starting to enjoy it as a neccessary tool.


sooo... altho the film itself may/may not have been a total success, I know the learning outcomes have been worth all the pain, blood, sweat, tears, and random acts of rage...

week 9: Rendering and compositing! 29/11/07

AAhhh, how much I do hate the rendering. Every experience I've had with rendering has never gone well. This time was of course no exception... :(
We aimed to have about 7 shots fully rendered by tuesday and to put into premiere for someone to composite it together and add the music and to add a small credit sequence at the beginning, we were thinking that having the names appear on the ball of wool will lead nicely into the animation.
This was such a bad judgement of time management. We manged to render most of the scenes by weds, however our biggest obstacle was that the final thing looked nothing like how we planned or imagined it... imagine the anti-climax here....
We were impressed with a couple of shots we did, but overall, perhaps it just didn't work?
Me, Matt and Sam spent the whole of weds trying to play around in premiere to see how we could fix the issue without trying to re-render scenes. The problem we were trying to deal with was mainly the lighting. In some shots the lighting looked so cool, but in otehrs it made the entire shot look 'flat'. We knew that this should have been checked before rendering more carefully but we were having a few problems startin renders and opening up the render views to see how it woudl look that we just had to go for it and hope for the best.
Individually, the shots looked cool and we thought we had it but we put it togehter adn it just looked so flat.
Unfortunately we didnt have anyone skilled enough with 'after effects' to really do the final touches on the aniamtion like dust particles etc...which would have really been nice to have, so we tried our best to use premiere to our advantage. We sort of made it looking ok by weds but we were still very unhappy with it. Hopefully come Friday we will be able to all put our heads together to figure out how to make it work!

Week 8: Final section completed and start of rendering! :D 26th Nov

Heres just an image I rather liked shoing off the lighting going down the street, has some nice shadows sweeping across the buildings.

This week has been quite good actually- really got to grips with texturing and some would say i actually started to have a bit of fun doing it. I couldn't say I would enjoy doing it as a job but was enjoyable nonetheless. I think seeing the images this week and what everyone else was up to, i began thinking that our idea might actually come together... well fingers are still crossed. :)

Harvey finished off the lighting in every scene, his scene lookedawesoem so i had the confidence that the otehr ones will look just as good too.

I think alot of this week was just making sure that my scene flowed into harveys scene well and so on...

Week 7: Final environment section completed!! 19/11/07

Yes!! the environment is pretty much completed- Harvey sorted out the lights so we haev the really awesome glare from the sun. i still need to make a clothes line and sort out the clothes swaying but we're ready to start animating parts of the environment. Lukily for us though, as we're going for this desolate type of place, we're tryin to keep things quite "simple". i.e. doors swinging slightly and clothes just swaying calmly. check out the photos- this is gonna lookawesome with the music we have in mind...

week 6: Initial Texturing 09/11/07

Hi guys- This week has been such a bad week :( I've been ill for the first half and really struggled to keep up wit hthe team this week. Sam showed me a brief texturing tutorial, however as i was ill I didn't remember everything... Brace yourselves to see some real shoddy texturing...lol

I'm gonna keep going with to to see how much I can do on my own- but please remember, I'm a terrible texturer and it's something I do need to practise with properly. :p

Week 5: Modelling the Final Section con't 01/11/07

Here are the most recent images of the environment so far! As you can see- the lady's house is pretty much in place and You can sorta see the path the cat has to go. Our main concern at the moment is how fast the cat will haev to walk/run down here- We were tryin to think of cuts/fades- someway to hurry the scene along- that is probs our major problem- tryin to keep to the minute...

Week 5: Modelling the Final Section 31/10/07

Here are the images that show how my section of the environment is coming along so far. I completely forgot to take screen prints of the early process of modelling but lets be honest, that would be pretty boring to talk about! The section is not entirely finished yet but its near enough there- Hopefully we are keeping to schedul so far- I think we're gonna need to come together before the weekend to make sure the final street will be ready to use soon too.

Sam is pretty much finished, Harvey is pretty much finished... Kanika is gettin there too, tho she took time out to learn texturing so thats well worth it, and matt is already starting to animate in the enviornment! :D

Week 4: Modelling a Draft Version of the Street 26/10/07

I just made this in half an hour to see how many extra windows, doors, balconys I need to make to make it look more varied.

The images have come out alright- I put a directional light behind the camera to see how well the light falls on the buildings and whether it looked too clattered. Im pretty pleased with the lighting to be honest. :) Its all temporary as I rushed most of it just to get a general idea of how it will possibly look.

Here's the shot of the alley we're thinking of using. Will have to talk with Harvey to see how this will work with his model of the alley.

Week 4: Let The Modelling Commence! 25/10/07

While Sam, Kanika and Harvey got on with building huge chunks of the environment, I thought I would help us out by modelling things which we could all use in our own sections as well as my own. I.e. I started modelling various windows, doors, etc.. This would be my aim for over the weekend so that when the others come to building their buildigns I would have built up a library of things they could import- I did this for a few reasons.
1. It would make life alot easier when it comes to building various buildings- You would jus tbuild a plane and import what i'e built for quick buildings.
2.Continuity (spell?) similar windows to show its in the same place
3.I could be flexible and vary in what my buildigns look like.
4.Easier to texture single objects such as windowswhen they aren't attatched to walls.

Here are a slection of stuff I've built during the day and also the stages they were built:

week 4: Finalise Storyboard sections 25/10/07

Well, the storyboards are finally in place! Here is the storyboard from my section (section 2) where the cat comes out of the dead lady's house and walks down the narrow street into the alley.

Week 3:Finalise Narrative 25/10/07

Well after coming back from Barcelona, we were all pretty fired up to crack on with the work :D
We NEEDED to finalise our narrative this week. This was pretty easy... although there were a few ups and downs and a couple of disagreement (to be expected), but we all managed to sort things out and come up with a pretty cool idea.

(pls excuse my poor explanation of our idea)=

After our meeting with Jared (tutor), we were pretty happy with our idea. We decided to go for the Global Warming explanation of why the world has been destroyed... : yeah sounds pretty boring dont it eh? no spaceships... no guns... no bombs... whats the point of doing it at all!! well, we wanted a really strong narrative but also very simple. Having global warming as our theme, we could focus so much more on experimenting with animated buildings- windows blowing open and then closing, curtains just flapping in the wind, after effects such as dust and heat hazes, strong lighting effects such as sun lens flare etc... we really wanted to push a desolate and barren environment that still had this energy in it- this of course demanded moretime, by trying to push ourselves with a really complex theme would only set us up for more problems later on.

We wanted this idea that due to global warming, the earths surface had dried up (all pretty cool textures) which cause earthquakes. We can really play with the idea of having huge chasms through the environment, and buildigns collapsing.
We weren;t too happy with having just a fly-through camera, so we came up with an idea that we'll have a guide- we went round in circles over this one- we weren't too sure if we wanted a person, an animal or whatever. In the end we went for a playful cat. The cat starts off by chasing a ball of wool down this hill and through an alley until it reaches this huge chasm where the ball of wool falls over the edge and the cat is left bemused and a little sad that he's just lost his only bit of fun *chuckle*... I can still imagine this cat peaking over the edge with his little face looking all sad and confused.
The cat is completely oblivious to the fact that the enivironment he's playing in is barren and desolate. Hopefully we'll have a lot of fun with this.

I probably didn't explain that as best as I could but you get the general idea. :)

BARCELONA!!!

AwesomO!! "Boyfriendo!"

Here are just a selection of photos to share our experiences of Barcelona. I'll comment on them to clearly show which ones are personal, and ones that are project related ;)

Heres a really cool building that I thought had loads of features on that I could use in the environment- The balcony, the window and the door way. The texture on building is amazin too!
The colour palette may work too, so all round, this building is near perfect for what we're looking for! :D We can tweak it to make it work but I think i will get most my influence from this building.




Heres a image I took that we could possibly use as a texture. It woudl save us painting it i photoshop- but it would also be a nice idea if we were able to use real grafitti in our environment to add to the authenticity of it all.
Group photo of us all (except me cos i'm taking the photo!) Harvey (left),Kanika,Sam, Matt.
Matt is actually lookin at the camera, hes got wonky eyes yo usee...
We told Harvey to keep an eye on our bags, hey... hes good at his job is all i can say!
Kanika... dam u, why are u just takin a normal picture!?
Sam is of course tryin to get me into bed... and its only the first day...




I had to put this photo up! Me and Sam completely owned this bear every day! It was a gift Sam won Kanika on the first day but we terrorised it so much. LOL











sorry one of the images is upside lol.. I suggest you take your head off and hold it upside down to see the image.

Week 2: Initial StoryBoard Ideas 16/10/07

I shall just explain the storyboards; well this is completely seperate from the stroyboard below- thats the first thing you need to know. The image above is more of a concept drawing more than anything. I wanted to explore more of the contrast between light and dark and what images would be really cool to exaggerate that.He I have the entrance to the alley and the entrance to the courtyard. Wide shots but really dramatic! This is the actual storyboard so far- what we initially tried to capture. The cat 'somehow' knocks the ball of wall out of the ladys hand (who is in fact very much deaded). the ball bounces out the door and then out into the main street with the cat follow. zooms out to show that the place is destroyed. Its obviously not finished and has no Barcalona signature architecture yet but it was more of a case to have the ideas on paper as quick as we could. See how it's working, if it is that is, and go from there. Are the angle working? are the zooms too fast etc.. all stuff liek that we were tryin to think of now so we could work out how muc hwe needed to model.

Week 2: Narrative_Ways to End the World 16/10/07

Firstly, We made a brainstorm of all the possible ways we thought we would be able to destroy the world. We came up wit hvarious ideas, examples are; global warming, alien attack, huge earthquakes, natural disasters, world wars etc..

(brainstorm image)

Sci-Fi:

As were all talking in our group meeting, most of us had a growing interest in a 'sci-fi' approach. Although our ideas were fairly farfetched, we kept throwing ideas out there and the rest were adding to it. Perhaps we got a bit too carried away with the sci-fi genre but the we had to exhaust ourselves of all early ideas because most of the were very cliche.

(scifi image)

I tried to take the sci fi idea down all possible routes keeping in mind that the animation still had to be within our capabilities. Unfortunately I wasn't convinced that we would be able to succesfully pull off a beautiful sci-fi environment, (within the time limit) and also spend time focussing on the narrative of the animation too. This was something I was struggling to over come.
We could get so carried away with trying to make the environment look stunning that we resort to having a fly-through camera and don't leave ourselves time to progress with the narrative at all.
The general group mentality was to create an original film rather than just an environment. Narrative would have to be extremely important. I just couldn't find a strong narrative in a sci-fi envionment that wasn't cliche.

Conclusion: We met again at the end of week 2, before Barcelona, to discuss the final idea. We all agreed that having a more natural disaster situation gave us enough opportunity to focus on the narrative- Global warming idea was still being played with here, and it wasn't set in stone.

Week 2: Spanish Buildings Research con't 16/10/07

After having such a disappointing week looking for Spanish buildings, I was almost about to give up looking and would settle for waiting for Barcelona to coem around. Until!...I met up with Harvey who said he was nearly at the same stage, but he suddenly found some awesome images of Spanish architecture which would be perfect for our research.

Here are just a few which I think will likely be a big influence on our environment:

This was one of the better photos I found that is actually in Barcalona. We really love this archway as a group- Hopefully we'll get to see it in person and take some more useable images of it. It looks complex but we're convinced it would be a nice feature in the film- esp if it was destroyed! :D

I really like this small street- I don't think its Barcalona but This is how i can imagine the shot that comes out of the old Lady's house into the street. Thsi sloping road going down into the alley- I really like the strong contrast of light and shade.

This is one of my favourite images so far! I've really struggled to find decent photos of 'Spain' or at least Spanished themed buildings that look old and half destoryed. I'm surprised people still live in these buildings! Sucks to be them, but hey! this is awesome research for us! :D I can definately see this as being the alley- If we closed the alley up a bit and made in smaller- this would be a really nice shot I think.

Most of these images I found with Harveys help so he'll probs have the same ones-we were trying to figure out how we can avoid using a plain for the sky-we foudnm this image and it answered it for us!... have extremely tall buildings! :Dyes, it may sound a bit ridiculous but as far as we know Barcalona has tall buildings, so what not make them taller! exaggerate! The colours here are excellent too! the texturing is going to be fun but so hard!

Heres just an image of a house I thought looked like it could fit in our environment. perhaps I'll use it, perhaps I won't, who knows at this stage. I jus treally like how they have built a new wall to the right of it but kept the old half really shabby- why?? why not improve the old bit incase it falls down with you in it?!? Its gota pretty cool lantern too which I may steal...

Week 1: Random Ruined Buildings Research 16/10/07

Here are just a few images I found that although aren't related to Spanish architecture, will hopefully help in recognising how buildings collapse and what usually remains standing.
This will help create a more convincing demolished environment. ;)

I really liked this image when I saw it- Its a little difficult to see all the detail as it's not in colour but its a really good source to look at debris and the destruction of buildings.

The guys were talking about having archways made out of stone which soudned like a really cool idea- Thought I look for some random archways and see what google comes out with. Thsi was the best one I could find : The group seemed to like it but we still gonna have to wait til we go to Barcalona for us to find exactly what we're looking for though :(

This is actually a Gears of War image but I thought it would go better in this section of research- wit hthe otehr runied buildings. I think I chose this image for the concept side of things- looking how simply they make the buildings look destroyed without doin every bit of detail. here they have just 'opaqued' or something, the bits of wood which has a really nice effect.

Week 1: Spanish Building Research 16/10/07

Trying to research Spanish style buildings was a struggle! I thought trusty 'google' would do most the work for me but it failed miserably. I found a fair few images, problem was, I had no idea how the rest of the group visualised Spain. I gave myself the job, along with Harvey, to start researching and designing Spanish buildings to get a good head start. We both hit a brick wall... very fast.

We both found a few images that we thought would probably work, however, basing our enivornment on Barcelona, where neither of us have ever been was pretty difficult.

I was still trying to find a spanish town which was traditional enough to look 'Spanish' but also something similar to the cities in 'Gears of War' and 'Fallout'.

Here are the examples I found:

This one I thought resembled the gothic look that appears in Gears of War. Knowing there was a Gothic Quarter in Barcelona, I thought this would be a good image to start with.

There was talk of a courtyard being the main focus of our animation. However this was the only clear image I could find of a courtyard.

As you can see, even this image is fairly poor. I should have to make sure I get enough photographic evidence of courtyards in Barcelona.

Here I found a really nice image of a building on the edge of a courtyard.

I really liked the tall windows it has in the tower and the white brick work.




This was the closest image I found that I considered to resemble Spain as I saw it in my head. I really liked the tanks and the sandbags in this picture too.

Here is a poor image I made on photoshop in a few minutes to try to show the rest of the group how I visualised 'Spanish' architecture.

I think I was growing impatient as I felt I couldn't move forward without having photographic evidence of Barcelona.