Scene 13 Finalised

Hey guys here's scene 13 finialised! Sorry for no uploads over easter but I hope these next few posts make up for it! :)

Scene 12 Finialised

Hey guys here's scene 12 finialised! Sorry for no uploads over easter but I hope these next few posts make up for it! :)

Scene 4 Finialised

Here's Scene 4 all finished and ready for final use! Sorry that I couldn't do any work over the summer but I hope these next couple of posts make up for it! :)

Scene 16 V8

Version 8



I tried removing the weird blur from the head as she looks back down after catching the bug, as well as creating a few more heads for the turn itself. I think it looks a lot better now! I'm still not totally happy with the head toss at the beginning though — again, I think it's the blur — probably not needed but I'm not sure. The inbetween head I made is ridiculous, though, and doesn't make any sense, so I blurred it to cover it up... maybe if I fix it up a little it will look better. I'll have a play around with it and see what I can do! :]

Animatic for Alternative Opening

I thought I should put up the opening alternative animatic here in case anyone wants to look over it again. Y'know, just in case any other criticism or comments spark up when you least expect it ;] I think it would be handy for all of you to see it again anyway since I only showed it to you once before the holidays started.

Storyboard

Animatic V4

More tweaks! This one sees the addition of the further amended chase scene as well as some other slight adjustments.

It seems that we lost the original file for the second scene (barn door zoom), so I had to reconstruct it. I've attempted to get it as close as I can to the original! We made some slight tweaks to the transition between the exterior and interior of the barn — The cross dissolve has been slightly lengthened and now occurs a bit later. The panning on the inside of the barn starts out a little slower to match the speed of the zoom, which hopefully looks better!

I made a minor adjustment to the zoom on the blueprint — I slowed it down just a tad, to help give Sam a little more room to play with in terms of sound. The only downside is that now the blueprint isn't dead-centre and you can see some of the table on the left-hand side. It looks a bit weird but that's something we can come to correct later on.

We also slightly altered the side-on shot of the crow walking through the field. Originally, she came to a complete stop, but then in the next scene appeared to be walking again. This looked a little odd so we trimmed a bit off the end so that she doesn't stop moving. It's only a small change but it helped to keep the continuity between shots.

The last notable change is sticking Sam's logo on there as a placeholder. There's absolutely no animation there, it's by no means finalised — it just kind of pops up and disappears. I would have tried to do something a little nicer for the timing, but my laptop started shrieking and whining about having a low battery, so I pretty much had to get it exported on the double.  Sam has very kindly offered to animate the title sequence for us, so I shall leave decisions regarding the timings and whatnot in his capable hands :]

Seems to me that it's really coming together now, but as always, suggestions and comments are more than welcome!

Scene 07 V5

This is, in fact, V5 — I just opted not to upload V4. Wasn't too much of a difference, mostly just a sort of in-betweeny stage as we tried to figure out the hang glider timings and whatnot. I'm certainly willing to upload it if anybody thinks it's valuable to do so but for the time being it didn't seem worth using my Vimeo upload allowance on it...!

The crow now runs whilst looking to the right. I just created two separate images of her two-frame run cycle and alternated them for five frames each with some keyframes to give the bobbing/waddling effect.

I also shortened the length of the black/white flashes to one frame each. It's not too much different — barely noticeable, so I don't really think it matters too much which version we opt to use. I did attempt to have an inverted silhouette of the crow against the flashes but it looked a bit peculiar and didn't really 'read' — the image kind of persisted in my vision and, to me, lessened the impact. I'll upload it later on so you can see what it looks like!

Aside from that, not much new. I'll slot this into the animatic and hopefully have a revised version for you all tomorrow.

Animatic scene 07 V3

Afternoon everyone!

Great to have everybody in and working away today. Lovely stuff from all of you! We're making good progress and I'll be typing up a quick recap of everything that was discussed both Monday and today a little later this evening. 'Til then, enjoy this delicious revised animatic scene:

I've basically just animated the crow's run cycle to help us visualise how she might actually run, as well as to help synchronise the scrolling of the background. I've made some attempts to fix up the scarecrow's crash — I corrected the scrolling ground so that it was a little slower to match the bushes. I was having problems with the spinning hang glider and getting the speed of the scarecrow right, so Jazzy suggested removing the spinning and simply having him approach the camera at high speed. I think it works a lot better this way and is much less distracting! She also pointed out that the scarecrow remained in-line with the crow even as the background slowed to a stop, so we now have him moving towards the camera much earlier.

Ron gave us some great advice and suggested preceding the camera shake with a flashing black/white frame effect. He showed us a very clever car crash scene in 101 Dalmatians where a similar technique is used — for a split second the cars flash orange/yellow — a very subtle effect that you don't really see but definitely 'feel.' After the flash occurs in our animatic, we cut straight to the camera shake. I think that the scene is working much better now as a result. The addition of the crow's cute little waddle is ridiculous but (hopefully) quite effective...!

Here's the scene Ron showed to us, if you watch closely you can see the effect:

I've managed to download it and am able to go through it frame-by-frame, which helps to see how it's constructed.

The effect is literally just three frames of flashing colour with a slight camera shake. You'll notice that there is no other indication of the crash — no crumpling bonnets, or anything. In fact it doesn't even appear that the two cars have really impacted at all, but the effect is so fast that it 'reads' very well as a crash. For our version of the effect the flashes each last for two frames, which might be just a little too long. I'm considering cutting them down to one frame each and perhaps even showing a silhouette of the crow in either black or white against a background of the opposite colour (similar to the second image above)? What do you guys think? Do you have any suggestions? :]

The only other thing I'd really like to do with this scene is to have the crow continue her run cycle as she turns to look at the scarecrow. You'll notice that she stops moving her legs/bobbing around when she turns her head — I'll need to separate her head onto a new layer in or simply create a new image with her legs reversed in order to do that, otherwise her head will change direction with the rest of her body. And that will be weird.

Sorry, rambling over. Hope that made sense! GOODNIGHT EVERYBODY.

Alex

Animatics With Sounds V2

Hey eveyone! Here is version 2 of the animatic with some sounds! I've added and changed a few around and I was able to edit it properly thanks to Adobe premiere! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsq8BAuoYQ8&list=UU1A7KhFaa_HGzT0wJhMNN7g&index=1&feature=plcp

Crow flock test V1

Following on from techniques explored over the past couple of weeks, I put together a test of the flock of crows from the opening shot. It should serve to give us an idea of whether the timing is working, the angle of the birds and the pattern of their flight. It also gives us an idea of how we might go about constructing the rest of the puppets for the animation and any potential issues we might encounter!
 
I was considering how best to approach the construction of the puppet — creating separate wing shapes as experimented with previously would look really nice if pulled off correctly but it might just be too complicated and fiddly to animate convincingly. I came across this video on Youtube of a bird somebody animated in After Effects, using one solid shape for each wing and rotated on a 3D axis to simulate the beating of the wings, very similar to what I did with my first bird test:

It's not terribly realistic, but it got me thinking and I decided to return to a similar technique. Instead of using one solid mass, however, I thought I might try breaking the wing into two separate components — much like we did in Digital Skills, with separate layers for each joint. This would give a degree of flexibility when animating the wings,  allowing me to break and freely rotate the joint to give some delay and overlap to each section.

I drew out a simple wing shape in Photoshop and split it in half, each section on a separate layer, with the connecting sections rounded out to allow for neat rotation at each joint. Then imported it into After Effects as a layered composition and created a hierarchy of parent/child relationships — the wing tip a child of the wing base, the head a child of the body, etc. This meant that if the body or base of a wing was moved, the head or tip would follow, but I would still be able to rotate the tip and head independently.

Once everything was parented up correctly I moved the anchor point of each limb so that it would rotate from the joint rather than the centre. I then just keyframed a basic up and down motion of the base of each wing, giving me a very static but distinct 'flapping' motion.

You can already start to see problems with the puppet at this point. The base of the wing sticks out when the tip is rotated, and the base has a really sharp edge that sticks out of the body when the wing rotates downwards. All totally fixable, though!

To loosen things up a bit I then added a little delay/overlap to the tips of the wings, so that they would drag behind as the base of the wing travelled down, and continued forward when the rest of the wing was being pulled up. I also added a little rotation to the body and head, as well as a slight jerk to the body caused by the beginning of the flap, the force of the movement pushing the body upwards.

I also turned on the motion blur switch at this point, just to smooth things out a little.

I did also have a little poke around in After Effects' curve/graph editor, applying what I'd learned about function curves in Digital Skills 2, just to give a slight overshoot to the wings as they reach the top of the movement. It was far trickier than I thought. The curves don't behave entirely as you'd expect (sometimes, when you drag slope handles, absolutely nothing happens!)

 I don't know if I'm just not used to it or if it's genuinely less intuitive. It has a separate graph for speed and value of keyframes which was massively confusing and just seems needlessly complicated. The top graph is the Value curve, and the bottom is the speed graph. If you look closely towards the last keyframe on the top graph, you can see that the curve extends very slightly above the keyframe. It's this that gives it the overshoot — the wing travels a little higher, then slowly comes back into the pose defined on the keyframe.

The speed graph is a little trickier to read but it's the same principle. I'm not entirely comfortable with how it works — I need to read into it a little more — but basically, the vertical axis represents an increase or decrease in speed (represented by high and low points on the curve, respectively) and the horizontal axis represents the 'influence,' controlled by bezier handles. The 'influence' basically controls  how quickly the object reaches the speed indicated on the graph — much like Softimage, the wider the curve, the slower the acceleration.

To reach the graph editor (if you dare!) simply click on the parameter whose speed you want to alter and click on the weird graph-y icon thing next to the giant stopwatch/keyframe button. The graph editor will open up in the timeline panel, displaying either the speed or value graphs.

To change which graph you're looking at, just right click and choose 'Edit Speed' or 'Edit Value,' depending on which you want to alter.

Anywho! As a result of all that tinkering, this is what I eventually ended up with:

 

It looks just as bad as my first attempt did at this point, but experience has taught me that once it's actually composited and put together it (hopefully!) will look much better. Fingers crossed.

It looks too quick to me — I think that the wings should probably delay slightly at the lowest point before beginning the upstroke and vice versa. The body movement is off as well. It looks like it comes up too soon, before the wings have even started beating, so that needs to be shifted a bit — probably just as the wings come down, or after they hit the mid-point? The motion blur does seem to disguise the dodgy rotation sticky-out bits, though. To some extent.

Being just a test, I didn't go all-out trying to make it perfect and gorgeous, so I just dropped it straight into a new composition.  I used the same techniques to put it all together as I did before, assembling multiple birds into one composition and adjusting their start positions so that they didn't all flap in perfect sync. Using the animatic timing as reference, I simply keyframed the scale and position parameters to fly them across the screen and towards the camera. I duplicated the flock layer a couple of times and slightly shifted the start/end points to create a larger flock.

One of the flocks originates from the wrong point and I think they need to spend longer on the horizon at the beginning of their approach. It's quite a distance they're covering so, realistically, they need to spend a bit more time as mere dots, gradually getting bigger and then increasing in speed as they draw nearer.

For the purposes of a test, though, I think it's alright. It's given me some ideas, highlighted some issues and should hopefully aid us in the composition of the rest of the shot!

Animatics With Sounds V1

Hey everyone, here is my first animatic with some added sounds and backing music to see what sorts of things could be used in the film. These aren't official as some of them are either not right or are a bit to extreme so I will research more and post a couple of more versions! By the way, sorry for some sounds not being added where they should be, I completely forgot :/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w-x26PTvR0&list=UU1A7KhFaa_HGzT0wJhMNN7g&index=1&feature=plcp

Animatic V2 & V3

Hey everyone!

We've pretty much finished amending the animatic now, so have a little gander:

Massive apologies for the quality of the second scene (with the zooming on the barn door) — I didn't seem to have a copy of the scene file so had to rip it from the Vimeo version and resize it accordingly. I'll replace it with a higher-quality clip on Monday.

Unfortunately, our amendments have increased the length of the animation considerably and it now clocks in at almost 2 minutes. A lot of it is simply backdrop animation, so I don't think it's unachievable, but I do think we need to seriously consider where we might be able to cut back on some of the scenes.

I did another version very quickly, cutting out the first shot of the crow walking through the cornfield looking for the scarecrow. I think it still works reasonably well without it and it manages to cut back the time to around 1:45.

Personally, I feel that most of the timings are pretty much fine now, but there are still a couple of things that are tweakable — I don't know about anybody else, but I think that the transition between the outside and inside of the barn is a bit off? I think it's because the pan across the inside of the barn is a lot quicker than the zoom on the doors. We might need to look at either speeding up the zoom or slowing down the pan (at least for the beginning part)? Looking at it again, I think that the scene transitions a bit fast — I'll perhaps try holding the zoom just a bit longer before it fades. Does anybody else have any suggestions? :]

The other thing is the zoom on the blueprint — this is probably just me being a little pernickity, but I kinda feel that could be just a tad slower?

Storyboard animatic

 

Quick and dirty, but it's in sequence and gives us a vague idea as to the scope and timescale of the project, as well as helping Jae to "visualise" (audialise?!) the sound. The timings are terribly off in places and it isn't necessarily an accurate representation of the actual timings. It's very difficult to try to balance the timing and feel of the original with trying to keep the panels "readable" on-screen.

Sorry about the dodgy fades/effects — had a number of problems with Premiere Pro that I was simply not able to solve — problem with the preferences file which, for some baroque reason, prevented the timeline from being played back. I'll probably go back and re-tweak things a little later on (no doubt it will annoy me otherwise), but it should give you an idea of the general flow.