Synoptic Project : Early Stages

So a week has past and a lot of work has been done for the synoptic project so far. In this blog post, I’m going to be going over everyone’s work that they’ve produced over the past week.Let’s start off with my work. Over the past week I focused on refining the story. This was mainly because when I pitched the story it was pretty much all over the place and I though it was essential that myself and my team mates knew what we were doing so that we could get stuck in with some more Pre-Production jobs such as VFX tests, Pre-Vis and so on. The new and improved version of the story (spanning over 4 pages) turned out quite well in my opinion and I think that the way I laid it out was beneficial in a way, since I laid the refined story out with “stage directions” so that it would be easier to create the storyboard when we did. Also the team really liked how the story looked now, since it wasn’t a complete mess anymore.Speaking about storyboards, one of my other tasks was to create a draft storyboard of the first act in the story, instead I used the storyboard I used for my pitch to show the team an example of what one of the scenes could look like.As well as this, I created a document full of short film inspirations so that the team had a better understanding of what we were going for in the finalised film. This was in terms of: Colour Grading, Cinematography, usage of effects and so much more. Heres an example of a short film I found called ‘On My Way’ by MakeDo Entertainment…

As for my team mates, Jacob had gathered gathered music inspirations that we could hand over to the music students so that they could later produce the score for our short film. Here are a few of the tracks that Jacob gathered:

Beth had drawn some more character concepts based upon the drawings I had produced for the pitch.Here are her drawings:

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Daniel had created a mood board for references we could use for the short film. Some of these references were Gotham, Stranger things and the most obvious, Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

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And last but not least, Tom had brought in some reference photos that he took of possible filming locations, mostly local to the college. Here are some of his images…

So where do we go from here? Well what myself and the team intend on doing is following the stages of the VFX pipeline therefore going through the 3 main production stages: Pre-Production, Production and Post-Production. So what we’re going to focus on next week is getting the Storyboard completed and doing some VFX tests so that we can experiment with different effects and see what would look nice in our final edit.

 

Attack of The Aliens: VFX Breakdown

Over the past few weeks I’ve been refining the story for our synoptic project, however as well as this I’ve been preparing for University interviews and getting my portfolio prepared for these upcoming interviews. As I’m wanting to do Animation and VFX, I decided to make a first attempt at creating a breakdown video for the VFX short I created last year, Attack of the Aliens. This is mainly so that I can show off the things that I have done in order to create my pieces and so I can also build up my Animation and VFX portfolio even more.So I thought I would create this blog to show you the breakdowns, I have created for some of my projects that I have created throughout my years at college.

Hope you enjoy!

Portfolio Modelling Task – Part 3

Over the past few weeks in our portfolio modelling task set by Matt, I’ve been making making quite a bit more progress; it may be slow progress but its progress nonetheless. Just in case you missed it, in my last modelling task blog I presented my sketches and reference images that I hand drew for the project so that I could start modelling…

Well over the past two weeks, I’ve made quite a lot of progress on my character and in this blog post I’m going to be going over my progress so far.

Before I began modelling my character, I made sure to keep in mind my previous character model that we did last year.What I mean by this is that I tried to copy the same techniques that I did with this character than I did my previous character character model, for instance using the box modelling technique and using quads and even modelling one side of the characters body so that I could later mirror the one side so that the character would look symmetrical and not lopsided.

My first step that I did before I even started modelling was setting up my reference images. I did this by setting up 2 planes and adding my hand drawn reference images to them using lamberts in the Maya hypershade menu…Once this was done, I then went onto modelling the torso and honestly this was my main focus; this is mainly due to the fact that my character is very bulky in his build, making some areas somewhat difficult to model and get in the right positions. Anyway, I started off by modelling one side of the characters body, using the box modelling technique, which if your unaware of is the practice of extruding from a simple box. I box modelled up to the where the neck area should become a sort of “V” shape. Then came the extrusion of the shoulders and the arms; this was tricky! This was difficult to overcome due to my characters bodily structure being bulky, Matts advice to me was to try and extrude out and shape the mesh to look right using edge loops and he was kind enough to show me an example. I refined the edges that Matt had placed for me and it gave me result shown below…Then I extruded the arms, this was pretty simple once the shoulders of my character were refined. Firstly I extruded from the shoulder and manipulated the extruded edge to fit with my characters muscular upper arm. I then extruded again however this time scaling the extruded point down to try and replicate the lower arms structure, I messed around with the edges forming the entire arm giving me this result…I decided to skip the modelling process of the characters hands for now only because I don’t really have a top down reference for the characters hands, I think this will be one of my focuses for next time.

Next it was extruding out the neck and head of the character. At this point I was kind of stumped due to the fact that my characters neck is very wide and also with my character having a very large chin, so I asked for Matts help once again. His advice for me was since my character was this way, to have the neck extrusion on a slant so that the face and prominent chin would look better, therefore giving me a better result. This was also beneficial due to the characters facial features being slanted too…I then extruded the head out so that I could start forming the shape of the characters head; I extruded all the way to the ear portion of the characters head…Just to see my progress so far, I decided to select my model and mirror my character so that I could see what the whole body looked like at this moment in time. The upper body so far is shown below…

Overall, I’m really happy with my work so far! I think that my focus for the next few sessions should be to create a hand reference for my character so that I can give my character hands and also the create the lower body of my character so that then I can create UV’s for my character and export my model and take it into Mudbox for some sculpting work like smoothing out some edges and making the model look better as a whole.

Synoptic Project : Team Allocation

Pitch time is over and you know what that means?! We all finally got to find out what projects we were working on for the next 6 months and what groups we would be put into. So in this blog post, I’m going to be talking about what idea got picked and the team that I was put into.Well as you all probably know, our class had to pitch our ideas for our chosen industry and of course, mine was VFX so as you can imagine I pitched a VFX sequence. If you want to read more about my pitch and the feedback I got from it go ahead and check out the link to the blog here…So after much discussion between all of our tutors, they finally came up with a decision with which projects they wanted us to work on. The VFX project that was chosen to my complete surprise was my own! Honestly I thought that mine wouldn’t get picked mainly because I thought my delivery of the presentation was very poor and the idea wasn’t very clear; I didn’t even vote for my own to get picked honestly! Despite this, my tutors must have thought that this idea had a lot of potential even though at first it wasn’t very clear.

Anyway the group I was put in is shown in the table below…Once we were all happy with our job roles we then discussed a timetable to work by. I say this mainly because Beth and Daniel are from Next Gen Blue, the other second year Next Gen class and with this we needed a timetable/ schedule to work by so that we could all see each other regularly with a decent work flow. The timetable is shown below…Once this was sorted, we got onto talking more about the project.

We discussed the tone we were going for in the short film, possible shooting locations and the idea in its current form. Obviously it needed to be more refined to make it more feasible. With this in mind we all had set a reasonable target to meet for next week. The jobs to do were as follows:

Beth

For Beth I had set her the task of creating concepts for characters and locations, such as inside the characters head and stuff along those lines, using some of my sketches from my pitch as a guide…

I felt that this would be the best job for her and with her being in the Creative lead role for the project, quite fitting.

Jacob

Since he had done such a great job obtaining suitable sounds for the halloween game project, I had set Jacob the task to create a document full of film scores and soundtracks that were intense and had a horror type feel to them. This is so that we could later go to music students and ask if they could create a soundtrack inspired by some of the tracks we had shown them, giving our project a unique sounding score. Even though this didn’t link to any of his roles, I feel as though this will still benefit Jacob as well as the group, as this will start to let the creative juices flow and get us inspired.Daniel

Daniel’s task was to create a moodboard. This task mainly consists of gathering reference images and other material so that we can get inspiration from it and reference some of this later on down the line if we get stumped on anything during the creating process. Once more, this didn’t quite link to any of Daniels roles but again it will help the creative juices flow and get us inspired.Tom

For Tom I had set him the task of taking photos of different locations we could shoot footage at, this was based upon my brief explanation of the projects story. Several of these locations included the college campus, local parks and etc. Again I felt that this job was fitting for Toms position, with him being Shot supervisor and all.As for myself, I set myself the task of completing and refining the storyboard as well as trying to get a draft storyboard done, as really this needed to be done before we could continue and go on to film in later stages. Hopefully these tasks can be achieved by next week in time for our next session.Even though I wasn’t so confident about the idea in the first few hours that it was picked, I do intend on making the story better and refining it so that next week my colleagues will have a better understanding of the story as a whole, so that we can begin creating a final storyboard and get started on filming our project.

Synoptic Project – Pitch

Recently, myself and the rest of the class pitched our ideas for our upcoming Synoptic Project. In this blog post I’m going to be going through the pitch, the idea I was trying to get across, my personal opinion on my performance and my tutors feedback from the pitch.

So, what was my idea I hear you ask? Well if you read my previous Synoptic project post, then you may recall me talking about my idea briefly (link to previous Synoptic Project Post).In short my idea is a short film, lasting 5 minutes or 10 minutes max, that tells a story of a man who is cursed by a mysterious figure, leaving him to fight his inner demons and to uncover the truth about himself throughout the story. This idea is basically a live action interpretation of our Global Game Jam game Remember. Anyway on to the pitch.

For starters, I introduced myself, the pitch and what I was going to talk about with the opening slide…On the next slide I talked about the actual Idea I had, which I explained previously in the post. I didn’t want to bombard the audience with too much information at once, so I decided to have a minimum amount of info on the slide so that it was easier to take in. I also mentioned how the project related to the themes we had to choose from, this one relating to the fictional character theme…Next I briefly talked about the inspiration I had for the idea. The main inspiration of course being the game jam game, however the other inspirations include stranger things, because of the dark and dreary presentation of the upside down: Jekyll and Hyde, because of the split personality and general horror elements and tropes, such as the greater evil is the one we don’t see, which leaves the audience to wonder and imagine what lies in store for the remainder of the film…I then went on to discuss character design.For the concept, I basically took the game jam concept art and made it more true to life, I did this so that everyone could get a good idea of what costumes the character would wear throughout the short film. I also did this because the other idea I had (the Lambton worm), had costumes that would make the short no feasible due to the costumes having to look accurate and etc. So me producing more true to life concepts would give the crew working on this project a better understanding of a character wardrobe and so on…Then I talked about the storyboard I had produced…The storyboard I made was set around about the 2nd act in the short film where the main character would come in from work, throw down his keys and put on some music. Then he would walk upstairs to look at himself in the mirror and think about life, however unknown to him a figure is watching him from his bathroom, calmly but like a hawk…Overall I’m really happy with how the storyboard came out.

Then on the next slide I discussed the different job roles that people could take on if they wished to join in, this was so that everyone would have plenty to do as well as building up their portfolio’s.Then I talked about the feasibility…So was the Idea feasible? Yes, definitely! However, whoever decided to work on the project would have to do there part in keeping the project afloat. This then led me on to talk about pacing and what kind of work flow we would be working at. So with this in mind I talked about how we would be working alongside the VFX pipeline throughout the project.This final slide finished off the pitch.

Honestly, I think that my performance in the pitch was very poor and I wasn’t too clear about my idea and the visual effects I wanted to create for the project. I had missed out a tonne of things I had wanted to pitch to the class and only when the Q&A came around did I realise this. For instance when we were pitching individually, I pitched a scene to my class mate Cate where the character gets grabbed by himself through a mirror, much like in the Ang Lee Hulk movie… However I missed this out in the actual pitch and to be fair this really annoyed me afterwards. I just wish the pitch had gone better if I’m honest.

The feedback that my tutors gave me was that they thought my pitch was well organised and looked quite good, but the execution was very sloppy and could definitely be improved, the execution being actually talking about my idea and explaining the concepts I had prepared for the pitch in depth. As well as this, they said that I must be more clear about my ideas as, again I admittedly missed out a lot of ideas that I wanted to pitch for the project.

Overall, the pitch could’ve gone a lot smoother and to make sure my future pitches go better in the future I’m going to make sure that I prepare much more, like for instance rehearsing what I’m going to say before I go into the pitch as I didn’t rehearse too much for the pitch in the first place if I’m honest. So to improve I’m definitely going to rehearse more and cover all of the content I wish to pitch, i do believe that this will help me I’m the future and I’m definitely going to apply my tutors feedback to pitches I do in the future so that I can produce the best pitches I can possibly do.