Barista Post progress - rotoscoping complete :-)

This has been a bit of an unforeseen mission! Generally speaking it has gone along fine but there have been a few moments of 'when will it end!' After keying out the blue colour, there was still a bit of grey fringing going on. On the good latte I thought it was necessary to keep all the hands in for Tom to trace over and create the cartoon hands. Half way through doing it Alex mentioned that I didn't need to worry about the hands as Tom could just start using the live action footage to trace over and then comp it later. I thought I may as well continue tracing areas out around the hands for the rest of the good latte and it could go on my showreel. On the bad latte I adopted a much simpler method as you will see further down..

Heres an image from the original footage.



I divided the images into groups of 50 and set up a work flow through composite, keying the images then adding several animated garbage masks to go over the grey zones. The grey fringing occurred because when I extracted all the blue background using the keyer it also extracted other parts of the image where the blue was reflected (such as parts of the cup.) So I could use keying but only to a certain extent.

Generally it was fine - I added around 5-10 masks for each 50 frames but for the penultimate 50 frames of the good latte I had to add over 30 animated masks! This was mainly to eliminate the grey fringing caused by motion blur from the hands and jug.

The first image shows the grey areas that needed extracting, then the next one shows all the masks that I needed to create to do it! This was after Alex told me I didn't have to worry about the hands so it was my own provocative.




This image is taken from the badly poured latte. In contrast to above, I did this way quicker. It just required 2 masks - 1 static mask for the cup then another animated one for the jug. As you can see I didn't worry about the arms or hands here. I kept the keyer applied to keep the colours consistent to the good latte.



Here is the result of my work. You can see white fringing around the hands in the good latte movie, but in practice once these are imported into animate pro and the transparency is set to straight the white fringing goes away so it shouldn't be a problem.





It feels good to say I have now completed this task!
(provided that Alex is happy with it..)

Barista update

Alex has now got me earmarked for post production and handed me some footage of a nice and not nice latte being poured. My job is to make the background transparent so he can place a nice wooden texture underneath it. This has been made easier by the blue paper Alex layed down under the latte but still had some minor challenges. The blue reflected onto the mug so I couldn't key it out completely and ended up having to animate several garbage mattes to get rid of areas that still had unwanted greyness. It took me most of Sunday to do 150 frames. A lot of this time was spent learning how to use Composite for the task. Once I figured out a method I did it relatively quickly. Only 500 ish frames to go :)

Barista update

I've spent most of today on this. Whats changed from the last animatic you ask? Well.. I've done the happy guy again, theres something about the last happy guy that didn't look quite right. I'm happy with the happy guy now. I've also put in where the coffee machine and surface would be in the scene.



Heres the same thing just with slightly altered timing.



I hate to say it but its still not complete. These stickmen take a surprising amount of time to look right and theres a lot of tweeking to do with the vectors so that the lines are always same thickness.

Alex mentioned it'd be nice to get different thicknesses of line in the stickmen to show the weight, but I'm thinking now that it would be more efficient to use the same thickness of line for the body as this would save a lot of time - especially when it comes to animating.

Animating is all thats left to do on this shot. This will probably take another day to do - as I dedicate a day a week to this project - thats another week. I hear rumours that Alex has mentioned something about me doing post production on his project - I look forward to talking to Alex about this..

21/2/2011 - update

I spent a few more hours today on the project just trying to get the animation done. Unfortuantly, I didn't save and Animate Pro crashed so I had to redo a large chunk of the work. I treated this optimistically and re-did the bit of animation more efficiently. It helped having done it already and I used guidelines the second time round to help keep the elbows and armpits in line. I'm finally beginning to use a consistent approach to animating these stick men. The happy guy now moves into his stretched back position..



6/3/2011 - Update

I have spoken to Alex recently and he has said the only way he will get the work flow compatibility to work between our Animate Pro 1 and 2 programmes is to trace over my work. Therefore he has suggested I stop animating and leave it all to him and Alice. I will hand him the movie file from my last animatic and will be put on hold until the post production stage of his project where I have suggested I may be able to help with editing and compositing.

Barista update

update 09/02/2011

I have spent a full day today reworking the animation based on further feedback from Alex on my last animatic. He said that the happy guy goes on a bit too long (originally he gave me 80 frames to work with, but said we could add more time if necessary - I think I added too much..)This is unfortunate as I really like his happy little jiggle!

Today I redrew some new poses for the happy chap and tried to complete the final key frames. This time keeping in mind everything Alex has said and given us about the proper way to draw stickmen! So below is a semi finished piece (lacking the actual animation, final touches and timing adjustments.) I hope to complete this on Friday.

Barista progress

I have spent today working on Barista. Alex has given us a PDF which he created on how to draw stickmen which is very handy. He has also given us the script which has helped enlighten me on the story that we will be animating. I think it will look real nice visually.

After some feedback from Alex, I have started to re-plan the Act 1 Scene 1 stickmen response to their lattes. I think the bit of animation I produced before was a bit lifeless and dull so this morning I took some video reference of me acting out the happy and agitated stick men:



From this I have drawn out thumbnail sketches of possible moves for the stick men. Alex has said how he would like an over the top approach to the cartoon stick men. These drawings should be very useful in capturing their varying emotional responses in preparation for the animation.











So I took a few of my favourite poses (ie. the body wiggle!) and applied it to the stick men. This is just an animatic.. Hopefully I will be able to make it final before next week. I worked differently to the way I did before, more freely - sketching it all out.

Crew Assignment - Barista

I have joined Alex's team to help produce his animated film featuring a character called Tim who works in a coffee shop. You can check out his full design bible below..

Barista Bible

You can also check out his blog here.

My main job on the project will be animating..but like Simon's project I'm happy to work across other areas if required.

I really like the look of it - combining real textures with animated characters and backgrounds. The story sounds like it will fit in the 'rom com' genre with some fun surreal moments and interesting Wes Anderson style camera moves...

So far I have started doing some work in Animate Pro which is like Flash only many times better for Animation. Alex has asked me to do some rough Animation of a couple of stick men characters for the first scene of the film. The 2 characters both receive a cup of coffee - one is good, the other is bad. Here is what I have produced (using Alex's rough rough version as a reference layer within Animate Pro.)



Not bad for a first attempt I think - now I will wait for some feedback/constructive criticism from Alex..

26/1/2011 - Update

Today I spent from 10am til 6.30pm working on improving my previous attempt on this bit of animation. It was very helpful to receive some tuition yesterday from Alex on how to draw stickmen! He also clarified that I should work on trying to make the animation as final as possible. We are currently having technical issues trying to get compatibility between all our software so I'm a bit unsure at this stage of how we're going to transfer our files between us.

Here is my updated animation:



And in context:



Obviously we'll loose all those rough markings in the final one! Anyways.. I think what I need to do next on this is make the arms a bit longer so they will definitely extend behind the counter and out of sight. I also need to make it more obvious on the stickman to the right - what is his body and which bits are his arms. I will sit back a bit for now and wait for further feedback from Alex.