Finishing Touches

I thought I would be quite clever and make a DVD cover and DVD label. I have one of those printers which allows you to print straight onto a DVD. I will admit, it took a couple of attempts to get the DVD looking how I wanted it. It still looks a little bit greener than it should but it clearly states my name and the fact it is my showreel.

I carried on with the room and blind theme so the DVD cover and label both have pictures of the room with the writing on the blind. I like the picture but it is not very obvious that it is a animation and modelling DVD. It looks more like an architect DVD. Even so, I think it looks quite professional and have a small sense of pride knowing that I worked so hard on it and on this project. I put a lot of time into learning DVD studio Pro and spent a lot of time rendering and editing video to get a good portfolio and some content on the DVD. It may not be all good but at least it shows what I can do.

Tomorrow I have to hand it all in so I just need to leave the DVD to dry before anyone plays it and its all ready to be handed in.

Testing

I finished my DVD and have been testing ti out. I had a few initial problems with extra buttons I had created out of nowhere so when I used the mouse select a button to take me to another menu, it was taking me completely the wrong menu. This soon got sorted after a while searching through different menus and backgrounds. I managed to get it looking exactly the way I want it.

I had to add the bars and tones to our estings entry and this was a very confusing process for me. I couldnt quite grasp the concept of why we needed to use it and all about the timecodes. All I knew was that we had been given this file that needed to start at some random timecode, play for so many seconds then it eventually played our animation. I managed to do it with some help and I think I did it correctly as my animation started to play at exactly 10:00:00. However, if someone asked me to do it again on my own, I wouldnt have a clue what to do.

After this was accomplished, I burnt it onto a DVD but again the rendering was playing up. After a bit of searching and digging into the settings, I realised that the file was almost  1gb which is not surprising that it kept skipping. I used compressor to get it down to about 10mb without losing quality or resolution and that meant that the estings entry for broadcast played fine.

Lastly, I had to burn my DVD with my showreel on. This was pretty easy as you just click the burn button in DVD studio and it tells you if anything is wrong which it didnt seem to be. Fifteen minutes later a DVD popped out of my drive telling me it was done. I had already tested it using simulations but I wanted to test it one last time to make sure. I put it back into my computer and tested it for a final time which seemed to go well.

Adding Content

I have had so many problems trying to add content to this DVD. It hasnt been DVD studio but After Effects. It would not render .mov files properly so they kept skipping and jumping all over the place. I could render them out in .mp4 files but DD studio would not recognise them.

Luckily I have another mac at home that I was able to borrow that also had After Effects CS5 on. This meant i could render the .mp4 files then take it over to the other mac and rerender them as .mov. The problem I had with this is losing quality. The quality would have been majorly different and some of the films were already not a good quality. When I delved a bit deeper into the issue, I realised that the videos were not skipping at all when I simulated them on DVD studio. This meant the original .mov files were fine all along. It turns out that my computer did not have enough processor and memory free to play the files back correctly (it didnt dtop me from rendering them all again just to make sure).

Getting the files into DVD studio was easy and within about an hour, I had all eleven videos on the DVD and playing corectly with buttons linking them all and getting them to play on demand.

One thing I was slightly disappointed about was my Buddy character. All the issues meant I literally have not had any time to finish the model of him. I just need to model his hair and glasses which does not seem much but I wanted to pose him and that would have meant rigging. My aim is to finish him in the summer then use him to learn how to rig thoroughly and correctly.

I have edited so much sound over the past few days. I managed to pick eleven different tracks and take either a breakdown, instrumental or intro within their songs and create background music for my videos. I am definitely not a good music editor but my plan is for the user to concentrate more on the video than on the music.

I am very close to the finish line. I need to adjust a few little bits on the DVD and then test.

Making the DVD

I have been exploring DVD studio Pro and have found so many tutorials that had factors that I would like to incorporate into my DVD.

The main theme for my DVD is to do with a room I created for a client a while back but I loved how the scene was lit. This has lead me the the idea of my menus being on blinds. This could be quite confusing for the user at first because they just see a mass of colour with some form of bar at the bottom. To make this less confusing, I have created animations to go on top of my backgrounds. The blinds will come down and then the buttons will appear, when they select the next menu, the blind goes up and then another, different colour blind comes down.

I created this on Maya and then edited it in After Effects to get my desired effect but this is how it looks:

This is the beginning of my showreel but the blind will have different things on different menus. The blind will also be in different positions depending on which menu and different colours. 

I had a few problems making the buttons because I couldnt get the text to change colour on the rollover which meant that the user did not know what they were selecting. However, I wanted it to be perfect so I  had to recreate the whole background with my name and things on, to get the overlay colours correct so they would then change colour on select and activated. 

I have never used DVD studio pro before and I still do not know what half of the tabs mean and what they do but I have managed to make a DVD with animations between the menus and music. Now all I need to do is add the content. DVD studio has been difficult and frustrating at times but so is all new software. I think I have managed to produce a good shell of a DVD with good menu interchanges. I hope it doesnt all go wrong when I add the content.

Sound

I have gone through my whole music catalogue to find music for my different videos and also my showreel.

Some of my views are less than 10 seconds long so I have just used intros from some songs. Other videos are almost 30 seconds long so I have stitched some music from intros together to make them slightly longer. These have then been put over my videos.

Lastly I have been choosing music for my showreel. I dont know how long it is as I havent put it together but I have a selection of music I can use so ill decide when it is almost complete.

I used garageband and itunes but some music did not stitch together as seamlessly as others. I dont think it is too noticeable so I have left it in.

Editing Content

I have gathered together all the content that I need. I need to add some cameras to my models and render different points of view. I have then had to add music to match the videos.

I have done most of my editing on After Effects but I have had some major issues. After a day of 8 hours rendering my Maya decided to be really slow. Also mental ray takes about a minute to render a single frame. After all of that, my after effects decided to malfunction on me. It would render out fine but as soon as you play back the video, the sound is ok but the video keeps breaking up and will not play smoothly.

I solved the Maya issue by turning my mac off and leaving it to cool down before making it work again. Mental ray is still slow but it understandable when it has so much to render. The issue of after effects is still there but there is nothing I can do at the moment. I will try to rerender it on a different computer to see if its the files or the computer.

I have been making the shell of my dvd on dvd studio pro. I have made different pages and made buttons to different pages and videos. I will add animations between the menus to make it a bit more interesting but this means going back into Maya which is still occupied with rendering.

Flash, Rendering and After Effects

After I created the animation and set up the scene in Maya, I rendered it out. The next thing I had to do was put it into Flash. I had created the advert in Photoshop without the E4 and also crated the seats to go over the scene also in Photoshop.

I imported the image sequence form Maya into Flash (making sure it was a png sequence so would not have a background). I then imported the advert image behind the image sequence and the seats in front of the image sequence.

This is what it looked like:

I added some lighting in Maya to light the scene.

When I went to render it, it would not export it as a Quicktime .mov or a h.264 .mp4. I don't think there was anything wrong with my file but Flash kept crashing. To get around this, I exported it as another image sequence.

I took this image sequence into after effects and added the other scenes to it. The other scenes were mainly still images but they were not on the screen for very long.

Here are the other scenes:

This was created by Sarah and I added a fly to this scene so that it wasn't just a still image. It was just a black dot with a simple animation to give the impression of a fly.

The cinema scene shows everyone in their 3D glasses. It makes it more obvious that they are watching a 3D film.

This is the end scene and was created by Lily. This is after the E4 has fallen.

After it was all put into After Effects, I just had to add the sound and sound effects of the fly. I then exported it to create a .mp4 file.

Content for DVD

I have been deciding what I would like to put on my DVD. I wrote a list of everything I have actually done and all the videos that I could include in my DVD. I then narrowed this down so I filter out the worst stuff and that I has left me with a lot of work.

I have decided on a structure of my DVD. The first page is going to be the main menu, this has showreel, animation and modelling options which then lead to the categories that I have grouped my work in.

The animation menu will show all my walk cycles, my ball with tails and quadruped animation. It will also show my E4 estings entry.

The modelling will show the house and dining table and chairs I modelled for environments project, The projector from my industry exercises 1 and the pool table and balls from my tutorial. It will also show some personal work which is a room will skylights in that I created for a client and a character I designed and modelled in Maya.

All these menus will be linked by animations and then will play the videos selected by the user. I will create and add my showreel onto the first menu if they do not wish to go through all my separate projects.

Most of my models are still images so will have to make turntable animations of then before and after texturing and then add them to the DVD. This means editing and adding music which still  needs to be chosen.

Shatter tests

I have made the E4 in 3D and have added the animation to it. I have been reading and trying a lot of tutorials to get the glass of the cinema screen to shatter.

I have tried several different ways. The first was to make it a cuboid and object shatter it but you could see the shards before it had shattered taking away the surprise from the audience that it was going to break. I read a lot of tutorials about using nCloth but I didnt want to do that as it didnt really give me the effect I was after. Lastly I used the dynamics to create a crack shatter on a plane which I made almost completely transparent. It didnt really look like much to begin with as you couldnt see the cracks appearing but then I read that you could add forces like gravity to make the shards move without having to animate each shard by hand(and there were 10 shards).

I added some forces and his made it look like it would explode a little bit and then fall to the ground from gravity. I was pretty pleased with the way it looked but thought it could be better so this os one of the shatter tests that I did but it was not the final one I used. I had to try many different shatters and keep adjust ing the magnitude of the forces to get the finished shatter.

From the video, you can see I added curtains around the edge too just to give a more realistic feel to it.

I did some tutorials about nCloth and though about getting the curtains to draw revealing the screen which is how I made the curtains in the first place. I soon realised that time was a big problem as we had exactly ten seconds to get the message across and there was literally no time for the curtains to draw. This led to the decision to make them static.

I made them by adding a sine deformer to a few planes and this made them wavy. For the ones at the top, I then added a bend deformer to the wavy planes to bend them around to look like the top curtains. They turned out quite well. I then added a deep red texture just like a classic cinema curtain.

Making a DVD

Whilst I have been doing the Estings project, part of the assignment is also to make a DVD with your work on.

I have been looking at DVD Studio Pro to create my DVD on. I can use Final Cut to make my footage and adjust my content and then the DVD Studio will allow me to add this content an create custom menus and things.

To do this I have been looking at tutorials on the internet and now have a fairly good idea about how to create my DVD.

The main problem that I have is my content - my lack of content. I need to find a way of adjusting my content to make it look more than it is and potentially better than it is because there is not much I am happy with. In the worse case scenario, creating more content to put on my DVD.

I thought making the DVD would be the hardest part but it is actually the content and finding the content that I am going to struggle with.

3D!

We have decided to add elements of 3D into our animation. Rather than making the E4 fall in 2D, we are going to make it in 3D and add it to the 2D scene making sure it fits in with the style and look of the scene.

I have already started making the E4 in Maya and set up a camera so it matches the perspective of the camera in 2D. The next thing I need to do is to make the glass of the screen shatter when it is hit and also the curtains move.

I can do this using dynamics (to make the screen shatter) and nCloth (to make the curtains).

Sarah is going to texture the scene for me and UV map it.

I now need to do some Maya tests.

Development of scenes

We have decided to make our animation 2D and use Flash. Me and Sarah both have experience with flash from college but we will have to teach Lily.

So to put it into Flash we need to have all the components. I have suggested to do it all in Photoshop first, using different layers, then it is easy to save an import all the different layers from Photoshop into Flash.

So the part we are doing at the moment is taking different scenes from Sarah's storyboards and developing them in Photoshop. We are also not sure on the style we are going for so I have asked for us all to do some to get different styles.

Here are my work in progress images.

This shows the advert that will be shown on the screen. It's going to be a retro style advert and I still need to add the man on the right hand side. 

This shows how the advert will look on the screen. You can see the audience in the foreground (which still need hair) and the curtains which frame the screen. 

This is one style that I created. Again it is not finished as most still need hair and none have necks or bodies yet.

This is another style that I went for. These all need hair and their bodies need to be changed so each one is different rather than all the same. 

These are still in development and still need to be finished. 

Storyboards

So we were having discussions about the story and we thought that it had to be humorous and it had to be modern. We had ago at creating some ideas and then Sarah had a good idea about basing it on a 3D film.

The idea is that people are sitting in a 3D film watching the adverts and an ad for E4 comes on but instead of stopping, the E4 goes straight through the screen and squashes the audience.

It fills the criteria and everyone agreed it was humorous so we decided to do that. Sarah volunteered to do the storyboards so that is what she is working on whilst me and Lily start to develop some of the scenes and styles of the piece.

Research and analysis

So I have studying and looking at the E4 channel to do some research. I have also been looking at the esting website which shows all the previous competition entries and this years entries so far.

The website is:
http://www.e4.com/estings/index.html

So the first thing I did was look at previous entries and I did this by looking year by year.

The first competition was in 2008. The shortlisted ones and the winners tended to be technically good even if the story was not amazing. At first the competition was to advertise and identify E4 music which was a section during the day on the E4 channel. All the shortlists and winners showed the logo almost the whole time or revealed it shortly after the start so people knew exactly what they were watching. Some of the most failed ones were because they had just stuck the logo on at the end and not integrated it at all. Many were technically poor.

The second year in 2009 saw more story and more humour over technique. Some of the entires were very technically good but they didn't even get shortlisted because there was no rhythm or story. Again, many did not integrate the E4 logo and could have been used to advertise anything because the logo was just stuck on at the end.

Integrating the logo has now been added to the brief (probably because so little actually integrated the logo).

Looking at the channel itself, it aims at young adults and mainly features comedy programs or dramas that are also aimed at young adults. They know their audience well because it is very popular amongst this age group and every show is very appealing.

It has a purple theme and all of their own idents shown recently use animation methods to a very good standard. The most recent being the claymation E4 idents that usually show an area or room with lots of things going on at once. This could be why they have launched this competition to see any new talent.

The competition is only open to people over 16 so it encourages their target audience to create an ident for them. Most idents that have been created are usually very weird and unusual which is what the channel usually favour. They are usually quite comedic as well.

Although they only last ten seconds, the best ones have always given you a sense of story. For example, one of the shortlisted ones was a butterfly catcher that then falls over. Another was a boy on a child toy that turned out to be quite fast and violent but he liked it so put more money in to ride again.

These factors are going to be very important. What I have learnt it that it must have some sort of story and be quite comedic. It also does not have to be technically brilliant but could let the story down if it is not. It must integrate the logo from early on and it must have appeal. It does not necessarily have to have the purple colour scheme but it could help identify the channel better.

We have chosen to do the animation in 2D as it contains people so will be much easier if they do not need to be rigged.

The Brief

For industry exercises 3 we are in smaller groups and are doing three things. One is this blog, another is a showreel and the third is a movie for broadcast. 

This term I am working with Sarah and Lily and we have decided to enter the “Estings” competition. Esings is a competition for the television channel E4 which asks us to design a 10 second animation which has to be creative and show the E4 logo. 

The main points of the brief that we need to stick to are:

• It must be exactly 10 seconds
• It must integrate the E4 log and not just stuck on at the end.
• It must not contain anything explicit or violent

The full terms and conditions are found at http://www.e4.com/terms-and-conditions.html.

It is a real competition and must be entered into by the 1st of July 2011 by 4pm. It must also be submitted in any of these formats; wmv, mov, mpg, 3gp, mp4 or mpeg. The file cannot be any bigger than 20mb.

It must be of broadcast quality and the E4 logo and some music that we can use has also been provided within a downloaded pack. 

The blogs are not a problem as they will be written as they go along. The showreel will be harder than first thought because there is not a lot that I would like to show. There are very few pieces of work I am proud of and that I would show off. 

I also have done more 3D stills than animation so they are going to be harder to show also. It is definitely something that is going to need a lot of work on.