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.