E4 Estings Final Film

This was the final outcome for the E4 esting competition. We came across a lot of problems when we started making this. We originally wanted it to be entirely animated in flash. But we thought we should play to our strengths to save time and incorporate 3D into our ident .


We had planned for it to have flash but Oly had trouble exporting from flash so instead had to put the image sequence into After Effects.


We didn't plan out or timing very well as we kept exceeding the 10 second mark. We had to speed stuff up and cut stuff from the final film. I did the final scene in our E4 video, we didn't really have time to animate much due to the time constraints of the competition, we didn't realise how slow 10 seconds was. When I was drawing the final scene, with the E4 falling onto the audience, we thought it best to remove the people and make the blood a purple pink colour so not to make it too morbid.


Overall I am a little disappointed with our final piece. I liked the idea we just needed to refine it. The film itself is poorly cut and I think we needed more animated scenes such as when the audience is watching the cinema screen we should have had flicking lights rather than a static image, and for the final image we should have had the E4 fall onto the audience and chairs with the E4 moving and the blood splatter to come over it last. But due to time constraints and bad planning on our part we didn't have the time.

iDVD

I used iDVD to make my dvd. I had to borrow a mac because I use PC. I didnt manage to grab any screen shots because of this.

I really enjoyed using iDVD. If I had a mac id probably use it more, it was simple enough to use but not being a mac user i did have a little trouble and it probably took me a bit longer than it should have done because I was having so much fun with it.

I picked a theme and then changed the background so that it matched the them I used in my showreel.

 This was the main theme page I used for most of the menus and I used it in my showreel aswel. LiW6 is like my nickname that I made up a while back. Its my username for most things and will probably be my "brand" name in the future.

To add a bit of variety to my menus I drew a couple of pictures to mix it up a bit. I drew this one for my gallery so that it wasn't the same picture through out.

And this was used for contact details on my DVD. In all the pictures the background is the same and just changed the colour to keep the same theme throughout and to show off my drawing skills by drawing myself in a cartoon style.

I probably would have picked a different theme if I was to do it again seeing as the theme I picked you cant see the back buttons very well and I couldn't figure out how to change the colour of them or how to move them (if either were possible)

Final Showreel

This is the final out come of my showreel. I left out some contact details when I uploaded it to youtube as I don't want strange people ringing in the middle of the night. The contact details are on my main and final showreel.

I'm quite happy with the out come, there are probably a few things I could tweak but I spent so much time rendering that I needed to leave time to burn it all to dvd and to set it up.

Storyboards

These are the storyboards that Sarah drew up for us quickly. This gave us a basic outline of what we wanted to have in our video. The basic outline is people going to see "E4 in 3D" and as they are watching it it falls out of the screen and onto the audience.  We planned to do this all in Flash and had a CG E4 fall out of the screen.


We used the storyboard to help with our timing as we only had 10 seconds for the ident.


We talked about a colour scheme and in the end decided that we would go for mainly purple but it wouldn't just be solely shades of purple like many of the other entries had.

Lip Sync

I decided also to do another lip sync, this time not as long and using a different rig. While I liked the Moom rig I used originally, I wasn't too keen on his facial features and controls.

For my new lip sync I decided to use Max instead. He has a more human like appearance and I preferred his facial controls and the way he looks.

I had no idea what I was going to do for sound. I wanted it to be short so Id have enough time to animate it all. So as I was browsing youtube trying to find some ideas, I came across this video from SMOSH.



I chose to do the Dragon Ball Z part (1.53) because of its lame joke. Plus there was a small chance for a little bit of interaction between the two characters.

This animation took me a little longer than I first anticipated. While it took me less than a day to get the lip syncing done, the rest of the animation was reaaaaally dragging on. I have been animating on and off this for a few weeks. Its very nearly finished now, then all I have to do is, put in cameras and render it.

Here is the final video, When I was rendering I accidently forgot to render a few frames towards the end so the sound falls out of sync. I would have gone back to re render it, but Maya decided that my student licence had run out. It would not let me render so I couldnt render out the last frames.

Walk Cycle

I re did a walk cycle because I wasn't very proud of the first one I did, it was slow and didn't flow well. So I chose to redo it for the show reel.

At first I was going to use maya to do my walk cycle in. But I had recently been playing around with a little program called Miku Miku Dance. Its a free japanese animation program that has been translated (poorly I might add) for us not Japanese speaking lot.

I was quite excited to use MMD because it has a motion capture feature, all you need for the motion capture was an Xbox Kinect, which I so happened to own as well. The program can capture everything except for facial features and finger movements.

Now the kinect can be used on a computer with the correct drivers, which I spent a good few hours figuring out out how to install correctly. The official drivers are yet to be released but I thought I'd give it a go and see if I could get it running with the unofficial ones. I couldn't. Miku Miku Dance refused to find the Kinect sensor and didn't think it was installed. It was a shame because it would have been a lot of fun to much around with motion capture, jumping around my house like a mad person.

In the end I decided to just animated by hand a walk cycle. I like MMD's style of models and there are many to find aswell. This was the first full animation I did in MMD.




I had a little trouble with her feet, I don't know if thats a problem on my part or on the rig itself, overall I am happy with the walk and think it a lot better than my first one.

This walk flows a lot better then my first attempt a year ago, I got the timing a lot better on this one, I feel she could afford to be a little slower but I don't want to play around with the timing too much.

Miku Miku Dance

I have had this program for a while now, I stumbled across it whist browsing YouTube, saw that it was free for anyone and thought I'd give it a go.

It took me a while to get my head around, while it was translated into English the interface was unusual and I had no idea what any of the buttons did. I had to find the one English tutorial out there to understand how to animate and load models.

After a couple of weeks of shouting at it and learning the ropes I finally understood how to use it.

 The interface is a a lot simpler than say Maya but that meant I had to figure out where everything was. The controls for the models and camera, lights and props are at the bottom while the time line is to the side. Another thing with Miku Miku Dance is you don't really have much control over the frame rate. I can only have 60fps, 30fps or no limit. I chose 30fps as it was slow and easier to animate too as 60fps would have been too fast.

This is probably my favourite model. APPEND Rin. She's probably the best looking one I have found and I want to give credit to her modeller and rigger and what ever else they did because they did an amazing job with her.

You can customise the backgrounds as well, I think Rin looks good on a black background but I can load an image there if I want or import a scene.