#yr2finalproject

[joshua--brand]

The final version of my short film, The Lady Next Door.

[joshua--brand]

The Final Project - Animating my Characters (p.12)

Well, the time has come to say goodbye to another series of posts as I come face-to-face with the end of the project. I am both relieved with the conclusion of this, the most tedious process in the pipeline, and regretful at not having developed it better. There’s no denying that the animation is the least developed part of my film, not for lack of trying, though. I’ve spent a very long time on breathing life into my characters, and have used the time efficiently - with my current level of experience and in this time-frame, I don’t believe I could have done it any better than I have.

One thing I do wish I had done in this process is to have explored motion capture properly... I did consider it in the early stages of the project (when everything was purely conceptual) but I believed that I might be making a very complicated, difficult set of movements for whatever my character was going to be. As a result, I decided to put motion capture to one side, and didn’t think to integrate it once I knew that my project was going to be much calmer than previously intended. Motion capture could, potentially, have saved me a considerable amount of time - however, I wouldn’t have learned as much as I have from doing everything manually. Though I certainly haven’t mastered animation, my skills have developed massively from all of those frustrating occasions at 4AM when I’ve been trying to make a decent walk cycle for a dog.

One side of animation which I think I am actually fairly good with is the more intricate side - if only because it’s not nearly as tedious and repetitive as the most basic movements of the whole body. Making facial expressions was a particularly enjoyable part of the animation process, as I worked more as an actor than as a puppeteer.

Despite the experience of this -my most extensive exploration of animation so far- my career plan is still fixed upon the same goal as it was during the last project. It is still my ambition to become a concept artist or story developer for animated movies, and focusing my efforts into the creative side as I have over these 11 weeks has been a real step forward on the way to it...

I’ve spent today concluding work on the montage, which has been fairly simple to do, and which will really help convey the passing of time in my film. Though I’m still not entirely sure about how organic the montage will look once the footage has been edited together into something complete and chronological. This, as with many things, can only be reflected upon properly once the film is complete - an eventuality which is drawing nearer and nearer every day.

[joshua--brand]

The Final Project - Render Farms

With so few days left in the project, I’ve decided to ensure the completion of the rendering by sending it all off to GarageFarm: a useful online rendering service which I was only acquainted with less than a week ago.

Although 3D animation requires many resources to produce, what it takes above all else is time. As with many things, it requires a great deal of time to produce... unlike many things, however, much of that time is spent after you’ve finished working on it. I am, of course, talking about the painful process of rendering your footage. Whether you’ve made a mickey mouse adventure film, a sci-fi droid saga or a little story of a woman and her dog, rendering is something which you must face.

Simply put, the process of rendering is what it’s called when the computer takes the files which you’ve been working on, reads a list of things to do with those files, and then interprets them with this list of specifications. In my case, I’m asking the computer to take my low-quality, badly coloured 3D “scenes” and to turn them into high-quality versions. Rendering requires a great deal of time and computing power to work efficiently, to the point where artists have to abandon their PCs for weeks - in the hopes that their footage will be interpreted at a high quality, without any errors. For this project, I simply don’t have the time to wait for my clunky desktop to churn out the frames... Instead, I’ve decided to use a render farm.

Render farms are essentially large banks of computers (known by those involved as nodes) which sit and process files all day long. These files come from all over the world to be rendered, by why bother sending your files off somewhere else, what does it do differently from your own computer? Well, each node has very high quality hardware and, when you use more than one at a time, you can render footage which would usually take ten hours, in just one. Of course, these facilities do charge, and I’m having to pay those charges - they’re worth it, as I want to make this film as good as it can be in the time-frame I have left...

I have a planned total of 40 shots for this film, and I’m going to need 80% of those to be sent off, else I won’t be able to finish in time. We’ll see how it goes.

[joshua--brand]

The Final Project - Yet Another Problem

This post is going to be a fairly short one, as I’m in the midst of solving what it’s about. If I find a way around the issue, I’ll probably mention it as an update at the bottom of the post, here.

This was going to be my twelfth and final ‘Animating my Characters’ post, as it is the last day in the schedule for animating (though the workload is beginning to worry me, even without time-consuming problems like this one.) It seems, though, that I’ll be making another tomorrow, right before my hand-in, about how I managed to solve all the problems and put this project to bed at last - though that doesn’t sound very likely to the sleep-deprived person typing this right now... Essentially, the problem is that, when I set keyframes in Maya, the character’s skeleton doesn’t do it’s usual, gradual shift from one to the other, but instead jumps to the next one as soon as the appropriate frame arrives. I looked online and found people with similar problems and attempted to adapt the solutions to my issue, but nothing is working. My only thought now would be to look into the animation graph editor, where the more intricate animation work is carried out.

I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: I did manage to solve the problem, but only by pure chance. I can’t say which of my attempts fixed it, as it only corrected itself once the file had been reloaded for the fifth time... I do know, though, that I can power on with the animation, in the hopes that I can finish it for tomorrow.

[joshua--brand]

The Final Project - Re-Structuring

Today has been very stressful, working on only an hour’s sleep to bring this project to a close isn’t recommended to any animators who may be reading this (though I’m sure you’ve all done it before now and you will probably have to again at some point.) This morning I started my day at 4AM and worked until 12PM, animating and rendering as quickly as I could to complete everything in time. Though I’ve worked constantly over the past few weeks, with work hours varying between 16 and 23 per day, I’ve not been able to satisfactorily submit my film. This is due in part to the time-consuming nature of animation, and the even more time-consuming errors which I’ve faced over the past week, but the biggest problem of all is rendering. I’m paying a great deal of money to have my fully animated files rendered and their finished frames sent back to me... Even then, I’ve had to wait far too long to receive them and my ability to progress with the project has, obviously, relied on a constant supply of finished material to edit and compile.

The project simply wouldn’t have been finished in time, but I was granted an extension and am now breathing many sighs of relief. The extension isn’t huge, but it’s enough time bring this project comfortably to a close before submission - as long as I plan everything properly. In an attempt to take full advantage of this extra time, I’ve broken down the remaining workload into its various sections, working out where errors need to be fixed and prioritising the most crucial shots for the render farm and for my desktop PC (which I’ve been doing the animation on, but can use as a machine to render with.) With all of this considered and organised properly, I can say with confidence that I will have the film uploaded and ready for hand-in on Tuesday morning.

[joshua--brand]

The Final Project - Lighting and Processing

Well, the project is drawing to a close (for the third and final time,) and, with the animation done and dusted, I have been able to move on to the lighting and processing of my scenes today.

Lighting is something which I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with in my animations - I think I especially like it because, unlike the tasks that come before it, the effect of lighting changes is immediate. It’s another of those processes in 3D film-making whose workflow is utterly unique, requiring its own set of skills and involving its own set of challenges. In this project, I’ve done something which I’ve never attempted before in regards to the lighting: only two shots of the entire film have any light sources in them at all.

Since the early stages of visualising this story, I’ve had a very clear idea of the aesthetic I’ve wanted to use. From the start, I knew that colour was paramount to the emotional success of the film, as well as the fact that everything would have to be heavily stylised to allow for such limited detail per shot. These thoughts heavily influenced the modelling and animation processes, to the point where I’ve had to re-build scenes for the sake of their layout and their colouring in this two-tone shading technique I’ve developed (which you can read about further back on this blog.) With so much emphasis being placed on the success of colour and style, the lighting was always going to be a difficult process - one that I was afraid would take up far too much time to perfect. The problem with lighting in 3D is that it behaves in very unusual ways at first; it requires a great deal of tweaking and many hours of rendering to get the right look for each shot. In an attempt to cut down the amount of time necessary in lighting design late in the project, I decided to make a system by which everything was lit, but there were no lights. In each scene, I would select the materials which needed changing according to whatever the colouring needed to be (e.g. the time of day, season, how well the room is lit) and I would adjust them. This process had to be done for every lighting change, every transition between interior/exterior shots, and during particularly low-contrast scenes where everything appeared flat and void of detail.

Although this all sounds like a lot of work for very little result (which, by the way, should be the tagline of the animation industry as a whole,) it progressed much more quickly than any lighting setup would, and gave me complete control over how everything looks when rendered. I know that it was much more efficient this way, as I did have to render a couple of scenes with actual lights... Fairly late in production, I designed a piece of concept art for the most poignant moment in the film: where the elderly lady is mourning the loss of her long-time companion. In this shot, I decided to feature two beams of light (known in the business as volumetric light) which come down at a 45-degree angle and rest on the dog and his owner. These rays really made the image special for me, and I decided that, when the time came around to animate that scene, I would try to incorporate them. This was a very ambitous thing to do, as simply adding the effect to the scene wouldn’t suffice. To make it work, I would have to ensure that the scene’s aesthetic matches up with the others, I would have to experiment with a range of rendering systems for the right effect, and I would have to change all sorts of values to keep my two-tone materials from appearing too bright in the highly concentrated beams coming from the window. All of this was very tricky to co-ordinate, but I managed to come up with a decent result - one that brings a whole new level of emotion to what could have been a very dull scene, indeed.

[joshua--brand]

The Final Project - Designing the Montage

My film can be split up into three main sections, each of which carries its own overarching themes and which is told in its own way. The best way to distinguish between the sections is through the music, which is built from a collection of 10-second phrases; each of these has its own purpose, too - providing the flexibe and dynamic framework for the immediately and cyclically emotional film which it was written for. The first section documents initial discovery and the exploration of the unknown; the second -the montage- conveys the development of relationships through the passage of time (both through the slow increase of physical closeness and through the more obvious aesthetic changes, such as the colour of the leaves in Autumn.) The third, which I’ll cover in more detail as I approach production for it, delivers the great heartbreak of the two humans and follows their eventual recovery.

The first section was particularly difficult technically - especially because it was my first attempt at a full narrative in 3D. Moreover, it featured levels of detail in animation which have proven to be very time-consuming and stressful. As the film moves on, though, the storytelling becomes much more gestural, more instinctive. By this point the audience knows the characters and has a general undestanding of their environment, allowing for other facets of the story to take the place of those initial pointers for the audience. These other facets are mainly emotional devices, such as emphasis on colour and on the metaphorical tropes which  are delivered through environment, blocking and character expression.

Each of these three has its own challenges, and the montage sets itself apart more than the others. It is told in an entirely different narrative style to the other two sections - it’s told, as every montage is, with the knowledge of it being false. We don’t live our lives in montages, therefore the realism of the film is temporarily hindered by the montage; especially in the cases of incredibly cliche’ deliveries.

 I was concerned, when I first came up with the idea of doing a montage, that it would destroy the characterful and emotional narrative which I had fought so hard to deliver in this piece. Thankfully, though, my main inspiration for this project, Pixar’s ‘Up’, featured a similar montage in its critically acclaimed opening sequence, which gave me the confidence necessary to construct my own without destroying everything I had already designed.

(this post will continue tomorrow.)

[joshua--brand]

The Final Project - Fixing the Problem

I’ve managed, at least for now, to find a way of preventing this terrible lag that’s begun so spontaneously when working with my Maya files. It wouldn’t be entirely true if I were to say that I’ve overcome the problem entirely - rather, I’ve worked around it for now.

This post is going to be a fairly short one, as the majority of the day was spent dealing with the lag, and the remainder of the day featured exactly the same processes as I’ve mentioned previously: animating.

To keep the problem from delaying me massively mid-animation, I’ve had to bite the bullet and remove the park entirely. Though the path and the green grass remain, everything of significant detail has been removed, in the hope that the computer would begin working properly again. This decision, though a difficult one, will allow me to be far more efficient in the upcoming days of the project - days which need to be very successful, else I fear that I may not deliver the film as I would like to.

I will rebuild the park once the animation has been completed, importing the finished version into each individual scene to ensure that everything looks the same from one shot to the next. I find that working in slow-motion, as animators always do, utterly changes the perspective of the artist; their more intricate plans for each shot emerge very well, but the overall continuity of the piece can be harmed considerably by such a powerful magnifying glass as we animators are equipped with.