Completion

The first draft of our film is complete! On the off chance it gets sent to festivals or something, we're refraining from posting a final copy.

It's been a wild ride, on which we've learnt many crucial lessons about timekeeping, shortcuts, narrative structure, team management, and last but not least, After Effects.

I developed a knack for Photoshop, and am frankly flabbergasted I managed to churn out so many aesthetically-satisfying backgrounds. My Flash skills have developed, my work method having become more streamlined and precise, and my leadership skills, although fundamentally lacking for someone who isn't really a director at heart, have come along in leaps and bounds.

Gary and Jake had moments of inactivity, and there have been some frustrating moments, but their unwavering loyalty to the project meant that I never felt the project was jeopardised by anything they did. Ultimately, that loyalty (and, at times, genuine love) for the film was the saving grace, coming together and making sure there was something to show for all the discussions and development work.

Overall, I am delighted to report that the feel of our final film is pretty much how I envisaged it at the beginning, narrative and aesthetic tweaks aside, and my team did well.

Further tweaks are to be made for the blu-ray submission, finishing extra shots and polishing the footage more, but for now I intend to sleep.

Compositions and animations

As the 3D elements made slow progress, that aspect of production was shelved, and the textureless 3D environments were used as perspective reference. Jake moved onto working full-time on post-production, and as I've been animating shots he's been adding the backgrounds to them and lighting them where possible.

Jake's work has improved in quality and quantity since changing from Maya to After Effects. AE is clearly a program he feels much more comfortable with, and he seems to derive genuine enjoyment from experimenting with the software to create some cool effects.
His experimentation is paying off - we've discovered a wealth of options within After Effects that could serve to make our film look fantastic.

To demonstrate, here are a few of the latest shots:

Final Backgrounds

Here are the final backgrounds.

There may be a couple more here and there as we encounter more reasons for stuff to be drawn, but for now it's the basic definitive set of backgrounds.

The Completion of The Big Shot

Shot 4 was always the one I was dreading, as it's a long, continuous take of the man performing key actions for the film. But aside from the addition of the bird at the beginning and the hanky dropping at the end (quick finishing touches), it's done now, and I can post it up and seek solace in the knowledge that the remaining couple of little shots won't take nearly as long to do.

Audio

Alex O'Brien and Lilly Cording have been lovely enough to conjur up a fantastic soundtrack for our film! A link to the final work is here.

More Backgrounds

Background Development

After a decidedly slow start to the whole background side of production, I'm happy to report that things are looking pretty. The trickiest look to nail down was the park, but after a few simplifications and a better understanding of colours, I feel it's making progress.

There needs to be a couple more shadows here and there, and the trees are going to have a few leaves, but that's pretty much it for this shot.

Man Walk Cycle

Animatic Update

Background 1

I've been meaning to post some more stuff, as production's well and truly underway and things are starting to come together.
For a start, here's a colour script, and its fruit, a partly-finished background for the establishing shot of the park:

The nearest buildings in the horizon will be slightly more faded out, and colours will be tweaked to cement the relationship between the trees and the grass (orange needs to be incorporated somewhere), but it's still a good example of the colour scheme for the second act of the film.

Brief animation update

A complete shot...

... and a work in progress.

Walk Cycle, pre-polish

Animation, comp tests, the usual stuff

Lately, I completed a few shots for The Magpie and test composited them. Here are the results:

And here are a few other shots I've been working on:

Here's a composition test for the opening shot. The camera movements aren't prefect yet, but the technique seems to produce something quite nice. Note the layered movement of the clouds in the background!

Animation Update

Composition development

In between animation, I've been supervising Jake's 3D work. One issue that was raised was the look of the park, an area Jake's still working on, and so we looked for relevant autumnal scenes to draw inspiration from. The picture below was a strikingly appropriate example, complete with bench and usable colour palette:

I took the main colours from this picture, and started plotting out how things in the park should look in terms of colour, tone and composition. The picture I'm particularly pleased with is this one:

As you can see, the colours are much more washed out than in the source image, and as the camera angle only consists of things in the mid-to-far background, the purple-ish mist is much more dominant. It looks suitably autumnal, though, and as long as I can get a bit more oranges and yellows into the shots, presumably when things are meant to be nearer the camera, things won't be too purple overall.

The Twinings' adverts have provided some inspiration, come to think of it...

Angry Man progress

A big massive update

Hello again.

I've been so busy, I've neglected my blog a bit. But at least there's plenty to post! I've been animating, for both Estelle's film and my own film, supervised the slow but accelerating progress of my film's 3D elements, worked on my dissertation and did some paid animation work to keep me stocked up with coffee and biscuits (vital animator fuel).

A shot for Pups. I animated Jenny, and keyed out Pup to make it easier for Patrycja to animate. I'm particularly proud of my mastery of coat toggle physics - it gives so much life to the performance but requires the least concentration to animate.

More Jenny animation. Estelle's set her film tighter deadlines than I set myself, so against my better judgement I've found myself animating substantially more Pups stuff than Magpie stuff. I've been striving to change this though, by adopting the economic methods I've had to develop for Pups and applying them to The Magpie. Work speed has improved as a result.

Magpie stuff! This is one of my favourite shots; I enjoyed animating the subtle transition from the rediscovered child in the man back to the self-centred drone he was at the beginning. The bird poo on his shoulder, the final punchline, is kind of his ultimate punishment for shrugging off his whimsical side so quickly.

After a period of exhaustion, I returned to form and animated this weirdly appropriate shot for Estelle. Working on Pups has really helped me develop a flowing style to my animation; Jenny's hair and her coat toggles are veritable playgrounds for a perfectionist animator with a penchant for physics.

A shot I started recently. I could feel myself channeling earlier work, namely animating Cave Johnson and Basil Fawlty, when I started depicting this simmering fury. I really, really like animating people on the verge of mental breakdowns. Funny that!

The Magpie: animation and experiments in composition

Compositing was always something I had intended to do especially right when it came to the final cut, as it has such a large effect on the general aesthetic and the audience's perception of the film. I went into After Effects with what was then the only fully animated shot of the film, and played around with masks and effects until I found a combination of tools that accurately recreated the look I was going for.

I used this lighting and filtering test, created in Photoshop, as a visual target while tinkering in After Effects.

For this film, it's important for me that the flash animation doesn't stand out too much from the backgrounds. There's always going to be a certain degree of separation as they're starkly different mediums from each other, but the animated characters have to nevertheless look like they belong to the world they've been placed over.

Also, I've been getting a fair chunk of animation done. Having concentrated on Estelle's project, Pups, lately, I've been striving to redress the balance in my workload. Shot 4 of my film, the shot where the man encounters the bird for the first time, is a long shot to animate and so I took a break from that and concentrated on a shot from later on in my production schedule, just to keep things interesting. In this next shot, shot 17, the man is sitting on the park bench and prepares to eat his lunch. However, just before taking a bite from the sandwich, paranoia suddenly sets in and he looks suspiciously around to see if that mischievous magpie's around. He's clearly still sore from the handkerchief fiasco from earlier on.

Pups: Shot 2

Here's the latest shot I animated for Pups.

The Magpie: images so far

Here's a compilation of all the visual material from this blog, from the very beginning. I figure that a definitive visual summary of all that has been posted would come in handy.