Week 1 – The Beginning: A Start to another Great Project

The start to another great project has got us feeling a bit overwhelmed from week 1. Learning about the expected brief, learning outcomes and criteria required to pass this module has made us feel a wave of emotions, both excited and anxious.

To begin with, we watched some student work example videos for inspiration and to gain insight into the level of detail and precision needed in our work for this trimester. With that being said, we were also made aware that no one from our batch was specializing in animation, thus we all had to do a little bit of everything – vfx, animations, etc. We need to up our game right from the start of this unit!

An animatic is meant to be a pre-visualisation of any film or animation with proper story beats, timing and sound. It has to be a low-poly version of the final work.

Later on, we dived deeper into learning about animatics and how to create them in 3Ds Max. We were taught about the different cameras and how to use the various lenses for specific purposes, safety frames/margins and using the rule of thirds in our compositions. More importantly, exporting a scene from viewport capture as a preview animation was also very insightful.

Different lenses and the field of vision.

We also learnt the basics of After effects editing such as the shortcuts, how to use the UI, importing/exporting, setting margins and more. Compositing our shots is a very crucial element to narrating a story, and that is something we have to research more on to develop our short films better.

In our Animation class, we used a pre-made rigged character called LUKE to practice various poses. It was a pretty fun class where we were given 3 minutes each to pose the character based on human references. So, it first started out with Rashed himself posing for us, and later moved onto each of us (students) posing for one another, and finally, google references of professional athletes/dancer poses. It was a good way to warm up with our speed in posing and animations again. We also revised how to animate a walk cycle using key frames and dwelled more into the curve editor where things got a whole lot confusing! Using the step curve to fix issues and timing and then splining it was a more efficient way of going about with animations.

I realized that my speed in posing needed to level up as I couldn't complete majority of the poses in 3 mins. Hope i get better for the next class.

Our Project:

As a heads up, we were told that VRAY rendering takes upto 25 minutes to render just one frame!!! This means that we HAVE to be done with our work maximum by week 10 to finish rendering on time.

The level of deatil and realistic textures + rendering quality done by the VRAY render is jaw dropping.

We have to start thinking of ideas and pick a genre, define the demographics, and come up with concepts for our presentation next week. In order to get some creative juices flowing, we watched a couple of short films for ideas, and are trying to keep the scope of the project within one character in just one environment. It’s also important that we know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and use them to our benefits so as to be more efficient with our time management.

Our presentation is due next week and we have to pitch our ideas with the following requirements:

My part of the storyboard

-story

-Demographics

-concepts

-storyboards

-mood boards

-inspiration

-production plan

-Animatic

-R&D

We have quite a lot to do and so we have decided to split each task among the three of us, so that everyone has a say in it. I was tasked to flesh out the story and demographics, design some concepts for the main character, storyboard part of the story, make a lighting/ambiance mood board and create an animatic from my part of the storyboard. To help us finish well on time, we used pre-made models and rigs from online to symbolize the robot character we are going for.

The mood board I made for our story.

So far, everything is set for next week and we are ready to pitch our ideas. Hope we get the green light to start working on it, as we have a ton lot of work to accomplish for the unit. Fingers crossed.