The Final Film

Without further ado, I present the final completed film 'Kakapo'

Overall I'm a little uncertain how I feel about the final film, but I'm generally positive in my opinion. I am proud of myself for not only completing the film, but also doing so well within the deadline. There are few edits that I would like to make, and am seriously considering making them for the degree show. 

I am glad that I stuck to the 2D medium for the film, as I think it gives the piece an appeal that CGI sometimes lacks. I also think it helped me to not be slowed down by technological hurdles. However, that being said, I am now starting to seriously consider making a move over to CGI, now that I feel my animating skills are a lot stronger and after having worked closely with it for my set.

Regardless, I am proud of this film and I feel I worked my hardest to get it completed.

Music

Here is the music that I have chosen for my film, which you will recognise from my animatic. 

The title of the song is Spring Morning 3 by De Wolfe Music. The music  is royalty free and was obtained from the Media Departments extensive royalty free music library.

I like this piece of music, as it both captures the light heartedness of the vignette, as well as the peril that the character is placed in. I also like how the classical music evokes thoughts of old cartoons from the 1960s/1950s.

Compositing the Film

Now that I have all my animation completed, as well as all my renders for my set, all that remains is to combine the two elements into one. To do this, I firstly need to place a blue or green background onto the animation, which can be keyed out using the Key lighting tool in After Effects. See below for example.

The reason I need to add a colour to the background, is because the default background colour on ToonBoom is white, and if I use the key lighting tool to remove this in after effects, well it not only removes the white from the background, but also the white from the Kakapo's eyes and the Owl's body. I chose blue for most scenes, but green on scenes with the Pigeon because the blue was a tad too close to its own colour scheme.

Below is the same scene, after the keylighting had been used to remove the background colour.

The process needs tweaking, but I'm happy with the results, and hopefully bar two scenes that require more advanced editing, the compositing process shouldn't take up too much of my time.

Working with Jo and Tim

For my film, I asked Jo Raithby if she could colour two scenes for me on ToonBoom. She accepted, and as evidenced in her own blog, she completed the task to the full. She was all set to deliver the work to me, when unfortunately she fell ill, also documented in her blog.

Because of this, I felt that through not fault of her own, Jo would not be able to deliver the work to me in time to fit my own schedule. Therefore, I elected to colour the two scenes myself, which took very little time and allowed me to start properly compositing a lot earlier. Jo will still get credit in the film for doing the work, because she did it even though I ended up not using it.

Below are the scenes in question, coloured by myself.

On Thursday, Jo requested my aide when it came to cameras and helping her render. Originally I was to set up the render on my own home computer to help speed things up. However, this plan fell through when my computer's copy of Maya unexpectedly started crashing repeatedly. This seems to be an issue with Maya itself, as I encountered similar problems with Matt Evans work a few days before.

Therefore, me and Jo used the studio computers to render her work. I also set up the cameras angles for Jo, who asked for my help with them because she felt my understanding of camera angles was stronger than her own.

This week I also recieved the work that I asked Tim Storrow to do for me. In my film I have multiple shots of a book with the pages turning. I requested that Tim Storrow do these for me in Maya in order to lighten my own work load and make things a little easier on myself. Tim did exactly as I asked, and the only issue of note that cropped up was the rendering, where Maya for no apparent reason would refuse to render the toon lines, necessitating that I restart the entire computer and render again. This only seemed to happen on the university Macintoshes, and was not an issue elsewhere.

Below is an example of one of the page turns:

This completes all of my work regarding the Client Oriented Practice and Team Production unit of the course. Throughout my blog you will see all the cases where someone worked on my film or I worked on theirs clearly documented. I personally feel that I was very lucky with the people I worked with. Every one exceeded my expectations and delivered to the deadline on time.

Line Up for Dave

I asked Dave to animate the background characters in my film in the shots they feature heavily, mainly because I felt that I did not have time to do it myself, but also because I felt that it would make things feel richer (nothing makes things look fake like cardboard characters). I also had great faith that Dave could deliver the work to a standard I'd be pleased with.

He exceeded my expectations and I could not be happier with the work that he gave me.

The only issue that did occur with this is that originally I had requested Dave to animate the background characters in another scene that I did (see his blog for the scene in question). However, because of time constraints and it not being 100% necessary to the film, we agreed to forego it.

Overall, I'm happy with it and thankful Dave could do it for me.

Susan's Model

For my film, Susan Bell made me a small model of the the central character, so I could use it for reference. Below are a selection of photographs of the finished model.

I felt that Susan did a very good job with this, especially considering certain aspects of the character make it difficult to translate into 3D (the hair in particular I felt she did a wonderful job with).

I found this useful to have as reference, and nice to have.

Thanks

Work from Dan

Hello all

As part of the requirements for the course, I handed out jobs for people to do on my film. One of the major areas this included was the task of colouring in my work. I already uplaoded what Laura did for me, and today I recieved the two scenes that I asked Dan Wilkinson to colour for me.

An issue arose with the above scene; because I had not made it clear that the white band across the pigeon's beak was meant to be white, I recieved it back black. This was an easy problem to solve, taking only a few minutes to do so and was not the fault of Dan.

Overall I am pleased with the job that Dan did on these, they look great.

On another note, keen observers will note that the pigeon's wings were a blue colour in my concept art, whereas here they are grey. Why was this changed? Mostly because I felt that it made drawing and colouring the character overly complicated, and on top of that, I felt that the character only really needed two core colours (red and grey) and a third was unnecessary.

Anyway, that is all for now.

Compositing awaits.