Overlays : People listening to the Cailleach

  

 Crowd with flat colours only.

 

 And with some light and shadow, this is pretty rough so it is most likely to be altered, but a rough idea of what we're going for! This overlay is to be used in both scene 4 and scene 38.

And the overlay for a few of the scenes (er, which escape me right now...), the background hasn't been completed for this one quite yet so I've held off doing any sort of lighting and shadow layer for the moment!

Animation

Some animation for the indoor scenes.

So, these were all done rather quickly, as they are very short and simple scenes (with some only being 5 frames looping frames long!). We thought they looked okay, we were going for a line boiling look, and with one or 2 errors in the beginning (making it boil too much) we were pretty happy with these guys!

That is until we tested out colouring on them...

The colours move too much with the lines, and we didn't notice before how much his volume seemed to change (much more apparent with the colours in place). We did a few more tests, but it seemed to just re-enforce that this wasn't going to work. Erin took some time to try and re-draw the frames much cleaner, and then rough them up after to see how that would work out.

Looking a bit better!..?!

However we've overall decided, after this mess we didn't anticipate (and which has now stopped us from having some scenes and lovely and completed for Christmas!!), that once we come back next semester, we're simply going to animate with clean lines to make things easier for ourselves.

It's a bummer we don't have anything clean and coloured for now, but next semester we'll be all set to start animating from the get go!

Scene 04 (Old Lady and Murdo line test)

Old Lady and Murdo line-test with dialogue:

The Old lady jumps in this, one of the frames had moved. Hard to see lip sync with line tests, will double check with scanned files.

Scene 04 (old lady line test)

An Old Lady Line test, with lip sync to dialogue.

The line test is a little blurry, unsure if the test is too quick throughout the middle.

Interior Background 2 Progress

Original layout 

Indoor scene continued

A test with an example of the finished environment, coloured characters with fire animation which was done by Kirsteen.

Interior fireplace tests

Having never animated a fire before, this was a bit of an experiment, but hopefully it looks convicing enough and will fit within our style of boiling lines

Updated the light, moving around opacity layers, its much redder now, added a blue shadow to the characters themselves to test how they look

Water Deforming

 

 

Using deformers to test for creating more movement in the ocean, below are the tests that turned out the best. Render settings and ocean settings were kept basic otherwise it would take 8Hrs per test :(

 

 

Indoor Scene

So after the team decided to concentrate on the indoor scene before Christmas I decided to have a look at creating the Fire and the light of the fire in the room.

The environment (by kirsteen) was already really homely and has a warm feel to it and I really wanted to emphasise and exaggerate that element. I used a series of layers and masks to create the light and particles for the fire shape. I then set key frames for the opacity of certain layers to create the feel of the light flickering and moving.

It was felt that the fire needed to be more than a simple suggestion of fire, but an actual fire...I tried to create a simple fire in after effects using a few fire shapes and changing the opacity and blending the layers onto the above test. However it just didn't come together, so we decided that the best way to achieve the result we required was to animate it by hand.

So after the last test I decided the water layer had to go through a series of alterations to blend it more with the environment.

With a combination of Ps and After effects filters the ocean has a more stylized appearance

The light layers were a little too bright and distracting, however, this will be easily altered once the layers of the ocean are rendered out separately so that I can control their brightness in post production.

In this test I removed the light reflections in PS and placed them back on top of the layers post filter, but I feel the first test was the stronger of the two.

Interior Background Progress

Water and Bkground comp test

Erin rendered out a section of the water she made and I tried to comp it into the test background that Charlie  designed :

Test one with the ocean playing in ones.

I colour-corrected the ocean layer to fit the purple colour of the background.
The water still looked too 3D so it was suggested we play the render in twos instead.

Test two with the ocean playing in twos.

Once the ocean was in twos we felt it was too jumpy and slow....Back to the drawing board.

water Textures

 

 

This week i have been applying textures to the ocean to stylise and some originality and changing settings to view the texture.  The textures were created by Freya, below are a few examples.

 

3D water i have been working on, i think the settings on this this water will be the ones we are using

Final Boat model

 Final boat and oar after many times having to redo it due to technical and sculpt fails as it result it was all done in maya. The body of the boat was created with a sphere manipulated then extruded outwards to created the side panels, gunwale and keel

 The oar was made with a cylinder

 rowlock which was a half circle, then we changed it to a full circle. It may be changed back to a half depending if it causes rig issues

Update!

So I tried to whip up some colour keys a few weeks ago, except I wasn't getting very far, and I wasn't happy with the results. I decided that I might have more luck doing just the 10% (we're to have 10% of our film (so 15 seconds) completely finished before Christmas), and it turns out I did! I'm stilll not happy with the style I painted it in, but that's not how it'll be painted in the final film, so it's not a problem. I am however, happy with the colours. I think the exterior scenes are cold, and the interior ones are nice and cosy.

I used Paul Abadilla's 'Colour Script Exercise' as inspiration/a guide. Except his are utterly lovely. You can find his here.

line boiling in After-Effects

I read online that you can simulate line boiling using after effects:

The team and I agreed that a hand-drawn boil would add to the aesthetic more, giving it a more loose and free feel. However this is yet to be tested.

water reference footage

over the weekend i went to the beach which was freezing and windy to film some reference footage of the ocean these are just a few video clips.

 

Quick boiling line test

Sorry for the odd video capture, couldn't get Pencil to export it right for some reason! 

Just a quick test on how we might do the line boiling for the animation.

Productive Weekend

Freya and I travelled to Plockton over the weekend, the setting where our Kelpie film takes place, to record the Gaelic dialog and various sound effects for the film. 

A beautiful sunrise in Plockton

The same view later in the day

Recording robins and sparrows singing on the powerlines

We took videos, photographs and sound samples of everything and anything we felt may be useful for our final film. Above is a clip from our recording with Kate Beaton, to use as reference for lip syncing. 

We tried our best to replicate the sounds we needed in the film. Such as here, we needed the noise as the boy pushes his boat into the water over the stony beach. This will all come be used when we put together a 'making of' film. 

And putting it all together, here is our most up to date animatic!

We're back!

Well, it's been a while since we updated, but we've been back at uni for a few weeks now, and fully in the swing of things. The course brief has undergone several changes, but we're still working hard to make Kelpies as brilliant as possible.

And in the spirit of productivity, I present to you our Latest Animatic!

I managed to get the dialogue recorded during the summer, but it turned out that it was far too long, and not nearly dramatic enough, so Kirsteen and I travelled up north for the weekend to redo it. It was a very impromptu trip, but we managed to re-record the dialogue, as well as lots of SFX, making it a very successful weekend.

Kelpie Model Progress

 This is the Kelpie so far which will now be taking a back seat as will not be in the 10% of the film for Christmas and I need to start working more with the water.
     The body is almost complete was made mainly by using cylinders, just have to add ears to it and sculpt in details. The head is a work in process, mainly have to create eyes, finish teeth, join it to the body, clean it up the then it should be ready to sculpt to.

it's all about the details, even though you will probably never see the underside of the hoof

Beach Scene

Test for the beach scene we have in our film to see how we can do it. will work on the aesthetic of the water later. render settings were kept basic as the test was just see how it looks.

So after my return from the black abyss that is maya, I am back where i belong. A little place called After Effects. The most predominant weather effect in the film has got to be the storm. I decided to mock up a few rough tests to get us going:

I added in the ocean to help create the feel of the scene and kept the clouds light to allow the splattered paint texture in the sky to shine through however the light clouds did not create dark stormy feel required.

So I decided to go back into maya and try again. This time I tried changing the material connected to the ocean itself with a random texture I found online.

This gave the water a more interesting paint-like texture.

A collection of ocean fails:

Combining PS and AE filters, i tried to create a simple painterly feel to the terrible 3D ocean I created....It didn't work.

Ocean Tests

After messing around a little with Maya's create ocean tool, I rendered out a section.No lighting or anything just plain old ocean. Although changing the given material of the ocean to a more painterly style, the texture did not seem to change very much.




Took these into Photoshop and tried numerous attempts to add a painterly feel to them, importing them in as a sequence and applying set actions to save going into each frame individually.
Basic colour tweaks and a few stylize effects were added to try to further emphasise a painterly feel but the effect still seemed weak.





Numerous attempts to add life but also a painterly feel to the scene using Photoshop in the above example lead to complications. The foam layer on top was too random and in a sequence the movement was too quick and erratic.

3D animatic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi9oQgEAp_A&feature=youtu.be


all the clips of the rough 3d animatic together

Bits and bobs

Landscape Concepts

Landscape Concepts

Cailleach's Chair Turnaround

Updated Animatic

Final Kelpie Developments

Final Kelpie Turnaround

Kelpie Poses

Le Compositing tests

Original under water test

Creating an under water scene during day time





light rays through the water




introducing a sea-bed. However it seems a bit too shallow now.




adding some small under-water particles



And finally a few more particle tweaks.

particle test001 'My Bubbles'

A really quick particle test, to get started.

Composite test screen shots

Screen shots of composite tests. Will upload the videos soon.