Pitch Project - Mismatched - A cartoon series for kids

The aim of one of our projects this term has been to practice pitching, culminating in a professional pitch at the cinema to our class and lecturers. The content of out pitch has been secondary to the pitching itself in terms of the purpose of the assignment. The main goal was to do an exciting, innovative and well delivered pitch to resonate with the audience.

Andy Luck came up with the idea for the content at the beginning of the project. It worked well because it incorporated our equal commitment and involvement. To sum it up - we were to pitch a children's cartoon series, and each one of us were to design one of the main characters. At the pitch we could dress up as the characters to make it all the more memorable. We had a practice run through two weeks ago which proved essential for getting valuable feedback from Rosa Mulraney. There were a lot of flaws at the time - mainly: Why should we care about these characters (whats their motivation) and why are they on a boat.

We ironed these problems out throughout the week using Facebook as a platform for discussion. We also re-jigged the order of our pitch bible so all the business information (show formula, formats and audience etc.) would go at the end rather then the beginning. Andy was going to summarize the key concepts of the show at the beginning along with the title page so the audience had a fundamental idea of what the show was about before launching into design work.

Here is a photo of my costume:

A timing plan of our pitch:

And the pitch bible itself. I will briefly summarize the order, presentation and content of our pitch:

Entrance to pirate music, all wearing our character costumes. I'm pleased to say this seemed to amuse the audience.

Title page

Andy Introduced the basic concept and audience. ie. We have four characters who have been outcasted from society. They all have their own motivations and dream of obtaining treasure which is different for each individual. It is for a child audience aged 9 - 12. etc.

Character pages

Here we each talked about our own character.

ie. Chai is wild and crazy in nature, he has joined the ship in search of adventure and irritates Nigel the tiger by bringing chaos to his sense of order and structure.

Ship setting and Pilot episode

Thomas spoke about the setting of the ship and an idea for a possible pilot episode. They run out of bait and use Chai the chip as a solution. Chai attracts this huge fish and chaos ensues.

The world

Joseph spoke about the world and how it accommodates for their crazy adventures. Its a spontaneous, funny world.

Synopsis

Andy read through these bullet points talking about the business side of it and into more depth about the formula of the show.

We rounded it up and took questions from the audience.

The verbal feedback we got was to have a key character that children could latch onto and get interested in intially. For this we suggested Chai the chip could be the protagonist as he is the source of the main funny situation that occurs in out pilot episode idea. It was also mentioned that we should probably have 2 female characters and 2 male characters instead of the '1 token female.' It was suggested that we should spread out the text-heavy synopsis at the end of the pitch bible throughout the pitch bible - or at least simplify the text at the end so fewer key bullet points could be expanded on in verbal form.

In further written feedback it states that there is some confusion in the character relationships and how they work with each other (It would be nice to have more clarity on this point as I thought each of us spoke about the dynamics of our character and relationships with other characters.) They also said a few areas may not be relatable to a kids audience, they were mainly referring to Nigel the tiger here, whose motivation is a bit too grown-up (he wants a mortgage!)

On a positive note Kathy mentioned there was potential for longevity here (I believe this is due to the depth and play between the characters and the formula of the show.) The costumes worn at the pitch also reinforced the comedy of our project and it was suggested we should test the pitch out on children.

I think the final pitch went well. There was a bit of an issue with me trying to power my ipod speakers at the beginning - so next time I will either use battery powered speakers or simply make use of the computer to play the music (which was the solution in our final pitch.) Also it may have been nice for me to try and stay in my costume throughout the pitch - for this I would have needed to cut another hole for the mouth so my voice wouldn't be muffled. In the final pitch I took my costume off when I talked about my character (I soon put it back on again.) I think we could have benefited from one last dress rehearsal as well - unfortuantly we were all too busy with other projects and events to make time for this.

It was quite an enjoyable day, and there were some really good entertaining pitches and ideas.

Animation Technologies Assignment - Virtual Reality

This term we have looked into Animation Technology. We were assigned to research into the history, present and future of a technology that is relevant to Animation. After browsing across various areas I decided to focus in on Virtual Reality. In particular, focusing on an experiment which involves virtual reality modelling. You can see my essay on this if you scroll down to the bottom of this post.

We also had to do a 5-10 minute presentation on our topic. For this I have posted up the slides that I showed with corresponding text that represents what I spoke about with each slide. Look at this to get a quicker impression and understanding of my topic.

Presentation:

I looked at Virtual Reality for my project. First, a little bit of history:

Morton Heligs 'Sensorama' was a mechanical device that included a stereoscopic display, fans, odour emitters, stereo speakers and a moving chair. It embraced all senses.

The Philco Corporation developed Headsight. This was a headset connected to a camera - when the users head moved, so did the camera. It allowed Helicopter pilots to fly at night using headsets that were connected (via magnetic tracking) to infrared cameras positioned below the helicopter.

Ivan Sutherland was the first to connect the Headsight to a computer and established some principles of Virtual Reality which are still in use today: The Virtual Reality comes across as a real environment. It is generated by a computer in real time. It allows users to manipulate virtual objects.

Antonio Medina was a NASA scientist who found a way of controlling Mars Rovers and experiencing Mars from Earth.

So, what kind of environment is required for Virtual Reality to work?
Here is an example:

This is a 4-sided stereoscopic head-tracked immersive display. It uses the same technology as 3D films. Oppositely polarised light is projected in at 4 angles allowing the virtual world to be fed in via computer and interpreted by the user in 3D space.

The main experiment I looked at used this same structure:

Do check out the video link! It is quite remarkable.

Effectively its like being inside Maya. It incorporates a bi-manual interface and allows the user to interact with virtual objects using 2 hands. The head and less dominant hand is tracked using ultrasonic technology. Input comes from both hands (one of which controlling a wand - the equivalent of a mouse.)

There are 3 different modes. Immersive, Table and Mixed. Immersive is 1 : 1 allowing the user to get up close and inspect their work. Table is table sized (!) and allows for quicker and easier editing. Mixed (like the above picture) is a combination.

The software was developed using C++ and Open GL. It is based on an earlier program by Cabral et al. This program allows the user to put together models using model pieces. The models update in real time as the user manipulates them.

Here's another experiment I have looked at. This one involves tactile feedback and allows the user to feel the holograms. So here, the user can feel virtual raindrops splashing on their hands. Again, it is worth checking out the video found at the link above.

So what are the future applications? Well...

We would be more like virtual builders with a greater degree of natural interactivity and control. One possible application demonstrated in my picture above is in Scene Planning and Pre - Visualisation. You would be able to work collaboratively around a 3D scene. You would physically be able to move the virtual cameras, lights and characters. You would be able to check what the virtual cameras are viewing in the 2D viewports and adjust the composition to suit your needs.

Other areas of future application are in modelling and animation. With modelling the standard could be what is achieved with Maya today. With tactile feedback you may be able to literally feel the models, so effectively it could be like working with clay. Painting and Texture applications could also be created. In animation, actors would be motion captured much like they are now, only they would be able to act within a virtual environment. This may may lead to more convincing acting.

To sum up my presentation:

On an ethical note: If Virtual Reality becomes more prominent as a means of entertainment and media we should be careful not to get addicted to such entertainment and keep a sense of our physical real world identities and realities.

On a positive note: A more immersive and interactive virtual process would heighten our physical and mental engagement and reduce RSI. A greater natural interface between the user and the software would enhance our enjoyment of the work involved.

Essay:

Animation Technologies Assignment

Projected History - Final Ship

There was room for improvement on my last video to do my ship a bit more justice. Previously, the movie represented my ship a little bit too much on the 2D side. Now, I have changed the camera position and created an ocean shader resulting in a more impressive 3D render with a kinda real looking (but not really) ocean underneath it. I'm content with this and it seems to have been all worthwhile! Fingers crossed for Simon getting it projected in freshers week later this year..



I achieved this by first rendering the ship alone from Maya using Mental ray. Then I put a black surface shader on the ship and rendered the ocean shader using Maya software. I then composited them together using Composite and put it through after effects to make the final movie files. I also experimented using a bezier warp tool in After Effects to create more of a fish eye effect, this works well in making the ship seem massive. I will upload a video of this and put it here soon. The whole process took a day from when Simon told me yesterday he would like the final ship files to this afternoon when I handed them to him.

Negotiated Brief - Music Video

For this we are given free reign and can do anything we like (so long as it is related to animation.) This is a great chance for me to explore and develop some of my own ideas and techniques of producing animation. I'm also hoping to develop a personal style and look to my work. As I enjoy linking visuals to music I have decided to do a video for my musician friend Nathan (Lazulene is his music alias). Click on the link below to listen to the tune I will be doing the visuals to. It's called Terrestrial Sci Fi.

So far I have done a fair amount of research watching music videos and audio visual albums. I have done several mind maps and also produced artwork and written down ideas, thoughts and feelings whilst listening to the track. My new Sony Nex5 camera will come in handy, I have just ordered an intervalometer for it which will be useful for time lapses (I'm looking forward to doing a sunrise time lapse which I reckon will suit the latter half of the track.)

I will go on continuing the pre-production stage for another couple of days and hopefully end up with a rough storyboard. I'm considering that it may be wiser to aim to produce just a few clips to fit different parts of the track as it is a bit of a tight deadline (less then 4 weeks, taking into account the Mapping and Audio Visual festival in Geneva.)

Here is my work space :-)

Here is my work, initial doodling, research notes and ideas:

These show my thoughts/ideas/feelings that I got whilst listening to the music..

The 3 pages above condensed into one page..

Heres my visual response whilst listening to the music - These have been fun to do and should hopefully come in useful..

Some experiments with using cellulose thinner applied through magazine/printed imagery onto blank paper..

I like African and Aboriginal art - the visual look of it may help feed into my animations..

Richard Morrison - an Inspiration!

This guy had a great attitude to his work and life generally and I gained a lot from his lecture.. He is well known for directing film titles - see his website here.

He kept coming back to some important points about not letting the machines take over and keeping creativity and ideas generation alive - saying how its good to get into the idea with all your senses. The computer is a tool just like a paintbrush (albeit a very sophisticated paintbrush!) but we are the ones with the ideas. Life and reality around us can be used as a great source of inspiration. Here is a quick sketch I did inspired by his lecture.

Other points he said were:

Its a marathon not a sprint: ie. Expect to be churning out work on a long term basis!

Its best to have preparation and research sorted before embarking on a project.

Fear is a good thing because it stops you being complacent.

If you're sure of your idea stick to your guns. Don't let agents, producers etc.. change your mind.

Be relaxed with the idea. Don't force it out - things will happen for you.

Mentoring from directors can help push your ideas.

You must be consumed by creativity.

The more you share, the more that comes back.

All jobs are great - you just have to find the best part of it and not get anxious with ideas being thrown out.

Be like water. Go with the flow.

Pete Felstead took a video of his lecture, I will link to it on this post if it gets uploaded online. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in working within the creative industries..
Richard Morrison works for Th1ng - an Animation and Mixed media company - in Soho.

Fun in reverse

Presenting a compilation of videos we purposely filmed so they would do cool things in reverse.. enjoy :)



Its great when you catch a bit of time to fulfill creative curiosity! I captured the footage on my new Sony NEX-5 which I love. Featured in the video is my girlfriend Nina, cousins Brenda and Eddie and myself.

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..)

Projected History.. My ship is now in ship shape! Woo!

This project has been chugging along happily in the background alongside all our other projects and so it has taken a while but.. the ship is pretty much complete(depending on Simons approval.) This image shows my work in progress.



Firstly, I created two patches for the front and back of the ship that imitated the curves of my original Polygon ship. Then I stitched the patches together - adding another curve to the front half before stitching to keep the result in the right shape (second image.) Following this I converted it to Polygons (third image) then divided up the hull into six areas (fourth image) in order to add on the 6 separate texture maps. This allowed for the texture to be detailed all the way across (which is important as this will eventually be projected to a very large size.) Since this work in progress image, I have changed the font and perfecting the texture as much as possible in photoshop to keep it looking as life like as possible.

I think ultimately it would have been good to get photos of this ship using a good DSLR camera on a more overcast day as opposed to using my compact camera on a sunny day. The problem was these ships come and go fairly quickly, so the opportunity for photographing on a day with overcast weather whilst this ship was at the docks didn't present itself (typical!)

Here is a little test movie of the most basic way in which the ship will be animated. At this stage I'm not sure to what extent the building will be in front of it - you may just be seeing it through the buildings windows. The idea is that the hull will occupy the size of the whole building as it goes through it.



Since the completion of my ship, I have been experimenting with the ocean shader in Maya. The first image has been rendered using mental ray, and the second - using maya software. As shown both cause problems, but I'm sure there will be away around these. It requires a bit of research and playing around with render settings, using alpha channels and composite. The question is whether there is need for the ocean. It looks cool but would it make sense perspectively looking at it going through a building..





Here are a couple of images I rendered just for the sake of it. (I used photoshop to get rid of the visual errors that came out in the renders like those above.)





Nice :)

Cinematography - The Hoovering - final film

This was a nice project to work on and I really enjoyed learning the technique of film making. Its a little dark (literally) so you may need to close the curtains and turn the lights off to watch it in its full glory!



Heres the documentary:



It was a good team to work with and I'm happy we saw this idea through from conception to completion. I have learned many skills from this which will come in useful for animation and film production. As a director, it was a bit tricky at first as there were a lot of people in our crew but I felt more comfortable in this role as the production went on. Good times!

Post Production - super bins - final piece

Ryan and I handed in our project last night a bit last minute :



I have to say that despite all our efforts - it is not of the standard I was hoping for. In the future we must be clear of when the deadline is early on and plan in contingency days. I think we could have used at least 2 - 3 extra days on this to overcome the following problems:

- The fire (which appears to look like a cloud following the bin.)

- The bin also appears to judder as its rising up - perhaps this could have been edited out or made smoother in Maya.

- Rotoscoping to loose the edges of the real bins that you can see come through our CG bins.

- A final bit of lighting correction would have been nice as well - as the edge of our virtual spotlight can be seen as the green bin rises up and out of the lit area.

Still, on a positive note, I have learned a lot from this project. Mainly the techniques behind integrating 3D animation with live action footage but also some more unusual things such as placing 2D animated textures on 3D surfaces.

Heres a breakdown of the work I contributed towards the project:-

Design and Animatic
Filming
Tracking and Stabilizing the footage
Matchmoving and placing the 3D bins in the scene
2D Animated textures and eyes
Lighting the scene
Painting/touching up the bin textures
Compositing and rotoscoping
Rendering

I am pleased with how real we have managed to make the bins look. I also like the little bits of animation we've added. It is a shame we couldn't finish it properly in time for the deadline. The best thing we can do now is learn from this and apply it to the next project.

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 :)

The ship continues.. Projected history update

So the battle between Polys and Nurbs continues..(wow! a slightly geeky comment there.) I think as a result of my efforts today I have realised Nurbs are far more efficient for this ship in terms of speed of getting them made, and quality of the result.

So first, I completed the Polygon ship as much as possible. While it looks fairly good, I was sure that Nurbs would end up looking smoother. Pictured at the top here is my latest update on the Polygon ship. As you can see, I made several lines around the Polygon ship and the result at the bottom of the picture is what happened when I lofted the lines producing a Nurbs ship..



Yeah.. a bit of a monstrosity! I think its probably because a lot of my control vertex points on the curves are not consistant from curve to curve. Then, I was struck with a moment of inspiration. I had watched a tutorial on stitching Nurb surfaces earlier and produced a quick sketch of how I could make two different Nurb Patches - one for the beginning and one for the end of the ship, and then stitch them together.



As a result of this, I tried a quick test which took around 10-15 minutes and I was happy to see that it was possible to make a Nurbs ship using this method. Not only did I do it a hundred times faster then my Poly ship, it has come our looking much smoother :-)

Post progress

I have been working on this quite a bit over the last week. First, I looked at the animatic to figure out the timing of the actual shooting of the bins to allow for the animation that would take place. I drew this scene plan that helped when it came to filming - a birds eye view of the scene showing camera movement with the timing:



Then on a nice sunny morning, we got down to the bins for filming. There were a few minor issues - cloud cover that kept changing the lighting - we needed just one consistent lighting to keep things simple. Also people who kept coming along to put bottles in the bins. It was all good in the end, we had a few windows of opportunity that we jumped on and got several takes done. Ryan counted out seconds whilst I filmed the bins. Here is our chosen video that we are going to use:



Not bad but very wobbly as it was all hand held. As we're aiming to layer on both 2D and 3D animation I thought it would be best for the footage to be as smooth as possible to allow for a nice subtle coming-to-life transition of these bins. So I've spent a fun week tracking using Composite...

This was all fairly new to me so there was a learning curve involved and much of the work seemed to be setting up the folders properly to allow for a consistent workflow. In a nutshell it involved going through the footage 50 frames at a time in Composite, adding 2 tracking points using a tracker node, then using a 2D transform node to connect to the trackers and stabilize the footage. I also added another layer in the 2D transform node in order to animate the scale and positioning of the footage (to stop it going out of frame.) Then rendering it out and repeating the process. Though it has been a lengthy and slightly tedious process it has resulted in a smooth camera move and the footage is much nicer to watch:



The sudden acceleration is a bit weird at the end, but hey.. maybe we can make it work nicely with the bin doing a gradual lift off then a star wars like time warp into the distance!

Today, I used Matchmover to track the footage and translate it into a Maya scene. Looking forward to the moment of putting in Ryans 3D bin into the footage, things are getting exciting :)

14/3/2011 - Update

I have worked on a lot more stuff since the last posts above. These images show what my animated textures will look like on the bins.





Today has been fun because we have finally put together the CG bins with the footage into Maya.



Can you guess which one is real and which one is CG?...probably - but pretty good I think considering we havn't played around with the lighting and rendering. Still I'm quite happy with it. Ryan worked on the model and texturing - nice job mate! :-)