Final and Reflections

The final went much more smoothly than the midterm did (which has magically reappeared in the folder, much to my surprise). I started with a couple key scenes and added more until I ended up with a 25 second commercial.  More Maya work went into than I previously expected, mostly because it wouldn't cooperate with rendering every time. I'm pretty happy with how the masks in the TV set and DS came out. The PC is a little wobbly so I opted to use that as the last scene and have the title zoom over it as a sort of distraction. The sound is probably my least favorite part because I'm limited to sub-par equipment and it can pick up white noise in the best conditions.

The wobbling PC scene and my shameless distraction

I did most of the special effects (particles, masking, color correction, some of the motion graphics) in Combustion and put it together with transitions in After Effects. The audio was recorded in Audacity. The text effects were done in Illustrator and Photoshop.

The final product...

Storyboard for Final

This is the first storyboard I drew for the final. My concept is a commercial for a game a friend and I were working on. It features rubber ducks, so I planned to recycle a duck model I made in Maya last year.

The first two frames are the sort of infomercial gimmick where they depict life as dull and grey until the subject of the commercial is introduced; compare the normal boring rubber ducks with the magic swimming Maya ducks.

The next part would describe the game, preferably with two actors playing against each other. The commercial would end with the game title and a release date. Down in the corner are my notes about what techniques I might need to employ; Maya, particle effects, motion graphics, transitions.

Rotoscoping

I realized that my old homework was unusable due to a missing file so I did a new one. My original rotoscope was sort of a failure anyway; I tied a toy to a string so I could make it dance on my desk and later edit out the string, but the trackers were all wrong and it didn't work. So here's one of my gerbils walking around outlined in blue.

Drawing over the frame stuff like Walking Life was the kind of rotoscoping I was most interested anyway, and the only reason I didn't do it at first was because I was having trouble getting something easy for me to animate. I wish we had the kind of program the Walking Life studio used to interpolate frames, but they are unwilling to release Rotoshop to the general public.

The anything goes homework

For homework I was smart and tried to do something for my final.

 

It's the magic animated ducks in the sink. I rendered a video of them swimming through air and resized them until they fit in the sink. I used a still image rather than a video because initially I tried to zoom in with a camera, but it was tricky to get the scaling to look good. I think the particle effect is a nice touch, even though I had to do it by hand because the tracker wouldn't cooperate.

 

I tweaked the emitter a lot. It's so useful to know after the problem I had with the tree before.

Particles

My idea for the particle effects homework was to make a fall tree from the leaf effect and change the colors from green to red and gold. This is what I came up with at first:



It looks kind of like a Minecraft tree, and the falling autumn leaves particle is invisible. In class, after adding a mask to the leaves, moving the autumn leaves to a different layer, and making two layers of the tree trunk so that it would work properly, it looks like this:



I couldn't find how to change the colors of the particles at first so I took a screenshot. You have to go into the particles menu and make sure the last node is selected.

3D composite

Exploring the ocean in my submarine.

I used a background image from Google for the water and stretched it out so there would be lots of room for the sub to go. The kelp are closest to the foreground, the sub's in the middle and everything else is way in the back. The camera and sub are keyframed to move to the right.

2D composite

My first homework was a 2D composite where Roscoe and I fight a giant praying mantis.

Originally the FIGHT had a fiery texture using the Set Matte operator, but when I opened the file to take a screenshot it wasn't there.

Belated Inspiration Post

I'm Emily, junior IMM major and future homeless person.

I like horror. And the Slenderman, the greatest urban legend ever born on from a photoshop.



(Skip to 2:30 for action.)

I like animated movies.





Trivia: Coraline used new technology to model facial expressions. (Article here)

Finally, I like the musical stylings of the Gorillaz. Especially this video.

Midterm reflections

Starting Out
I had a fair amount of trouble with this midterm. First came the problems with doing Paranormal Cativity; I filmed 2 different key scenes, but while trying to edit in my ghost cat Combustion would repeatedly crash and I didn't know why. My other problem is more personal; my dog passed away and let me feeling really depressed. I decided to film a sort of memoir of him as an alternative to Paranormal Cativity because this was something that was really important to me and I couldn't stop thinking about it. My idea was to have a green screen behind me while I talked so I could insert photos and particle effects.

Working on it
I was able to get the equipment I needed, but couldn't get the camera to work. I had to use my point and shoot camera as a back-up. I wrote a script for what I wanted to say and set up a small mic and Audacity in case the camera didn't pick up any audio. Filming was not particularly difficult, just emotional.

I think I ran into the most trouble when I went to the lab. Combustion ran so slowly when I used particle effects and every time I wanted to preview my work I had to sit through a stuttering mess until it warmed up enough to show me the video. It also crashed a lot and I learned that using 40 seconds of particle effects is not highly recommended. Lack of transitions between backgrounds became another problem; I couldn't find a decent way to fade in between photos so things happen pretty suddenly. When I exported the video, the audio was missing but I decided to fix it later.

And that's where things went really wrong; I had saved my files to the sharedrive because my flashdrive said it didn't have enough room for everything, so I just kept a copy of the exported video. When I went back to the labs the next day, my folder was gone. All the Combustion files, pictures, and the original footage were missing. The next best idea I could come up with was to open it in Final Cut and add scrolling text to make subtitles.

Final Thoughts
I'm not particularly happy with this project for a number of reasons. I had to use sub-par equipment and I think the quality suffered for it; I wasn't sure how to do some of the things I originally planned to do in Combustion, so my vision doesn't match up with the execution; I felt rushed due to Paranormal Cativity falling through and finally, it's been a sad week for me. I don't think I will continue with this as the final project as I want to do something a little more light-hearted, I think.

Midtern abstract

I forgot to do the blog part until now. Anyway, due to technical difficulties I was unable to do my original idea Paranormal Cativity, so this is the abstract for the project I have done.

Jack: Memoirs of my dog, who passed away recently, with photos and footage greenscreened behind me, like a montage or a scrapbook.