The Willful Witch

The Willful Witch (working title), is the name of my senior thesis animation being done at The Cleveland Institute of Art. I will be posting my progress here as the school year goes on.

[thewillfulwitch]

And without further ado I preset my Thesis shot, Mischief Managed. This was definitely a huge learning curve in terms of how much I had to do by myself in order to finish this, but I’m glad I got this done, and I can say I learned so much from this process. It’s not perfect but it’s a step in the right direction.

[thewillfulwitch]

It’s been a wild ride but my BFA Thesis Defense is in 12 hours. I would like to thank you all for coming on this crazy ride with me. I will put the short up on my Vimeo and post it here after my defense. Again thank you all and hopefully the presentation will be recorded so I can post that as well.

[thewillfulwitch]

Another frame from my thesis. It’s starting to come together but it’s crunch time now. I gotta get cracking on rendering more frames a week. 

[thewillfulwitch]

I couldn’t wait to upload this, so here it is. It’s not the most impressive thing, but here’s the opening scene from my thesis with it’s Final title “Mischief Managed”. Now I have to spell check it, and fix the timing but I’m really happy with it so far. A friends showed me how to use the free Saber plug in for after effects. Now to prepare some files for 16 hours of rendering.

[thewillfulwitch]

Okay Final Final Final Test Render for this scene I swear. I got the lighting right and I’m going to render it out this weekend. I Did my math and it’s roughly going to take 16 - 18 hours to render this scene out. After that there should be a decrease in time for the next 4 scenes because I’m going to render the background out sepearatly from the character and composite back together. There are a couple dark areas that bother me, but other than that I’m okay with it as a whole right now. It captures the mood of the story. With her sneaking into her brothers room.

[thewillfulwitch]

I have a Final Title and I’m working on the title card as well right now. When I near the end of rendering I’m going to upload the intro with the title card. Until then I’ll keep it a mystery.

[thewillfulwitch]

Okay so ANOTHER test render of the room. I did a couple post edits without render passes on this one, but this is the pretty much how I want the lights! Now on to rendering out a scene tonight. Going to be taking up 5 computers this time as opposed to the 3 I used for the intro and hopefully it will be done by Morning.

[thewillfulwitch]

Another Render Test. I used JJJ_GammaTools for some gamma correction and got some help trouble shooting my light problem. It’s getting there but now I’m a lot less stressed about getting my lighting done.

[thewillfulwitch]

Here’s a test Render for second scene where we get a look into Aaron’s room for the first time. It\s waaaay to dark so I’m going to have to fix a lot but so far its heading in the right direction.

[thewillfulwitch]

Another test render of the room, this time with smoke, I did want there to be a lot of smoke in this shot because other wise it just looked too wimpy haha. I will do some color correcting and what not when but for now it looks like this scene is ready to render! Hopefully it will be done by the end of the day since I’m boosting the quality a bit.

[thewillfulwitch]

A render test of the opening scene, not all the textures are there and I need to lighten it up a bit, but hey they don’t call it a test for nothing. After the textures are done I’m going to add in a smoke sim and then I can do a final render and color correction pass on this. I plan on rendering scenes as I finish them and making a master after effects file and dumping things as I go. I’ll do rough color correction on the bit and pieces and then do a final over all color correction pass at the end.

[thewillfulwitch]

Some fur tests, I originally planned to have fur but due to time constraints and possibly not being able to have enough computers to render with at school it’s probably going to be a no go, but still it’s a skill worth knowing.

[thewillfulwitch]

Along with some animation I did some FX tests this week for the vortex. I need to tone it down a bit but it’s going to get there.

[thewillfulwitch]

A screen shot of the animation process at work. I have to use one monitor, my sisters desktop, when I’m at home now due to multiple hard drive failures and the graphics card on my laptop heavily artifacting. Sucks but life goes on oh well, just gotta keep chugging and get this done!

[thewillfulwitch]

I'm starting to animate for my BFA, So here's some of the progress mixed in with the animatic.

[thewillfulwitch]

A work in progress blocking shot of scene 3 I believe from my thesis film. The timing is horrible but I’m just trying to get poses down right now. There are a few skinning problems that I will address but I’ll tackle those as I go. 

[thewillfulwitch]

So here’s an animation test of the Amy_Rig_v1! I sent it to some of my friends to play with and find some errors that I might have missed. I know for a fact that there’s a skinning error between the legs but I’m not as worried about that area because the skirt will be covering that. Other than that I’m ready to finish layout environments and begin blocking!

EDIT:

As of typing this is 2 am and I’m not wearing glasses so excuse any spelling mistakes, but I noticed that It’s not looping on desktop, I’ll check mobile in the morning and then if it’s not looping there I’ll upload a looped version.