Week 7 - Roles in the production Pipeline: Getting things done
- Leighanne Fernandes
- Nov 13, 2020
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 22, 2020
This week has been super productive in terms of getting my tasks done. Something that struck me this week was how I am doing SOOOOO much on my own. It made me step back a little and analyze my situation. It also helped to put things into perspective, which added a little boost to my self-esteem but also put the anxiety to rest.
In this journal, I will discuss and showcase my progress for the week (which was quite a bit) and document all the research I've gathered for every little thing that crossed my mind. I believe doing the research at this stage helps me plan and foresee things in a much organized manner. This definitely helped me maintain my stress.
Progress Updates
In order to keep things more organized for my Advisor meeting this week, I added a new folder onto my drive called "Meeting Progress Updates" with sub-folders in them.
To begin with, I was able to work on the Live Action edit for the Paradise intro. This is the part where I directed, produced, scripted and Art Directed on my own. The shots came out pretty well and I was quite pleased with the results as I was editing it as well.
(1) VFX AND MOVIE EDITS
Below is the first draft of the edit until the animation starts.
Paradise Draft edit 1
I will be sending this to our audio engineer to add the necessary sound effects. The black screen is where we will have a title sequence. The feedback I received was that these shots are pretty well timed and the flow is good.
Below is another shot on just the VFX for the eye that I worked on in After effects.
Eye VFX edit Draft 1
For this I received various feedback from different people. I am documenting this here as well because it counts as part of my Quality Assurance.
Feedback from team:
Play with the colour correcting of the shot with the pinning down on the street
An added feather or blur to the edges might be good too - To feel like its a vision or dream
Feedback from my brother (as part of someone who's not involved in production and as an audience member) - he is also super critical!:
For the initial part where the character was walking into scene, the warp stabilizer was giving a weird push effect that looks bad. Try to fix that or remove it - This feedback was implemented because I agree with his opinion on the warp stabilizer.
The shakiness at the start feels more natural because you are following with the character and it makes you feel what he is feeling - wow, brother! You are a genius.
For the eye, try to add a reflection on the footage inside the eye because "it looks too perfect". Try to make it look like it was actually inside the eye.
For this shot in particular, I used a specific example as inspiration and benchmark from the Music Video Lullaby by Got7 (JYP Entertainment, 2018). I studied this shot carefully and tried mimicking the same effect. I'd still say that there's a lot of room for improvement in my shot but I got the initial gist of it. I noticed the reflection in the eye is more prominent and there is a sort of curvature to the footage inside the eye that makes it more believable.
Feedback from Bing:
The shot looks good but the footage inside the eye looks a bit flat. Try to give it some curvature or roundness so that it looks like its in the eye.
Feedback from Amit:
Optix compensation - for curvature
I think a little tracking and would be nice, just to help it look like its sitting inside the eye
You only have to track a certain aspect just to make sure it looks like it fits in the eye
And of course optics or "Spherify" to make it fit in the eyes
Hence, the feedback I received are mainly the same/similar fixes. I will get to that when I get the time to refine the edits next.
(2) POST PRODUCTION SHOTS
From the last two shots that were rendered in WEEK 3, I was finally able to get to the post production on these. I wanted a slight break from the stress of animating, so I decided to work on the compositing, editing, color corrections and get these shots out of the way.
Since Into the Spider-verse (2018) is our style benchmark, I tried going back to study the quality of their post produced shots. One thing I noticed is that they use halftone dots as an overlay in some areas to create that comic book feel to the animation. I wanted to try out variations with and without the overlay and see if it'd look good.
Into the Spiderverse (2018)
Below are three versions I had as drafts. The first one being without Halftone dots, the second and third ones being variations. I ended up going with the Third one. Bing liked it very much too.
This is the final shot after compositing and editing with color corrections/grading.
SHOT 1 - Hands
I'm glad I realized a small issue with the fps on this one. It was exported as 30 fps when it was rendered at 25 fps. I immediately fixed that and re-exported so as to not cause issue later in post production.
SHOT 2 - Neck
I also made use of the Sapphire Cartoon effect that was recommended by Amit in my last meeting with him. I feel this overlay gave the toon effect a more stylized push and i really like how the textures now look a bit hand painted - which is what i was going for.
These shots are currently approved.
(3) ANIMATIONS
I am CLEARLY struggling with the animations. It really isn't something I'm enjoying and it's getting me a little worried now. I have spent around 3 weeks on these animations because I just can't seem to get it to look right. More importantly, I never expected these shots to take so long to animate.
Looking at my list of animation shots, I realized that only shot 3 and 4 will be animation heavy because the other shots involve close up expressions which will mainly use the facial morphs and very very basic animations for the police officer. So, I'm not too stressed with that as of now. I just want to get these shots done and out of the way.
That being said, I had a 2 hour consultation with Rashed this week and he helped me through the feedback while demonstrating the fixes. He also sent me the files so I can use as reference. I will now be having four hours of consultations with him on two days of the week to help me progress with this.
As of now, I'm not too happy with my animations but I worked on cleaning up the kneel to stand animation and worked on a walk cycle. For the walk cycle, I tried using the CAT motion tab and followed this tutorial for that.
(Miloš Černý Animation, 2018)
I will work on the feedback and show it to him on Sunday for approvals.
Research
With the amount of work I put into this week, it got me pondering on something. I have been doing the work of an entire animation production company by myself. Yes, that took me a while to absorb. But what made me think like so?
I've been juggling different tasks this week. I been doing the edits for Paradise, the vfx on the shots, the compositing on the rendered shots, the rigging (facial rig coordinating with my collaborator), the animations and coordinating with all my collaborators to ensure they are doing the required tasks. I also created my own assets such as this matte painting for an HDRI to use in my scenes. Let's also not forget how I hand painted my own props to use for the shoot and coordinated with our graphic designer for the additional Paradise cover art video prop. I did all of that and I'm still doing more. Am I insane?
These are roles for individual people and groups of people in the industry. There's a whole department for each of these roles such as project management, development, pre-production, production, post production and marketing/distribution (Screenskills, 2020). The only thing I'm probably not focussing much on is the marketing and distribution department because that's being organized by our team leader Joshua.
That being said, I've listed down all the roles I am actively taking role in. They are as follows:
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Animation Director
Animation Producer
Production Coordinator
DEVELOPMENT
Writer
Concept Artist
PRE-PRODUCTION
Storyboard Artist
Art Director
PRODUCTION
Character Designer
Modeler
Texturing Artist
Animator
Lighting Artist
Environment/Layout Artist
Matte Painter (Magid. 2019, p.1)
Crowds Animator (Magid. 2019, p.1)
POST PRODUCTION
Compositor
Editor
VFX Artist
(Screenskills, 2020)
Yup! that's a lot, isn't it? Sometimes I can't believe that i'm doing all of this myself. I don't want to compromise quality because of the quantity of tasks I'm doing so that's something I'm trying to ensure with the feedback I'm asking for from various people. Hence, the Quality Assurance Checklist really helps.
On a side note, I find it hilarious thinking how the credits list is going to show up with all these titles and my name beside them all. Directed by Leighanne Fernandes, Produced by Leighanne Fernandes, VFX by Leighanne Fernandes, Edited by Leighanne Fernandes, and so on.
With that, I feel confident enough to say that I've done well for the week! I'm going to do my best to get approvals in the next week and progress with my tasks accordingly.
References:
JYP Entertainment (2018, September 17). GOT7 "Lullaby" M/V [gif]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RUeTYiJCyA
Magid, B. (2019, Feb 4). 5 Crucial roles in Animation Film Production you may not know. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@beth.magid94/5-crucial-roles-in-animation-film-production-you-may-not-know-f9ed75a75ca6
Miloš Černý Animation (2018, Sept 25). Procedural Humanoid Walk (Part 1/2) - 3ds Max CAT Animation Tutorial [video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNTi1j2qEoM&t=177s
Persichetti, B., Ramsey, P., Rothman, R., Lord, P., Arad, A., Pascal, A., Miller, C., ... Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (Film),. (2019). Spider-Man, into the Spider-Verse
Screenskills (2020). Animation - Job Profiles. Retrieved from https://www.screenskills.com/careers/job-profiles/animation/
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