Diamond Reveal Animation

This is a really special shot. It's the "ALL" grand reveal of the story, and we wanted a nice piece of animation to compliment that idea. When animating this, I added several deformers to the vault door, to really try and push the geometry of the vault door to warp and twist in the fashion of a tex avery cartoon to really push physically what we could do to simply spice up the shot - add that extra degree of excitement and energy to the piece. The timing of the snap works well, and overall after consulting my tutors on the flow, and it's piece within the story, I feel it has worked tremendously within the film. I now look forward to seeing what will be done as we take this shot further into the Lighting and Rendering stage.

Credits Sequence

As I had completed my section of the animation, and i was waiting for rendering to take place, before i could begin compositing, I decided to piece together a short but sweet little after effects credit sequence together for the film. Nothing that would hinder the overall film too much, but just something a little visually poppy that would compliment the film - using the blue colour palette we already have co-existing within the world we have created, and almost delving beyond the film to show what may have happened just before the credits began to roll. 

The use of design is only recycled pieces of imagery from the pre-production stage, that is a mixture of things we used, and designs I just threw together to just get a feel for what I was doing. It was very fun to revisit this stuff, I'm certainly glad I kept hold of it a little while longer! 

Shot 4 - Explosion and Character Reveal

I only did the animation with the characters within this shot, and guided Alice through the production process of using dynamics to blow up the wall in Maya. The rest is Michael MacFadyen. 

Within the animation, we stumbled upon a little bit of a technical issue. In order to have the characters walk through some fog and into the foreground - this would have meant we would have had to either fake the look, which would have hindered the shot by fading the characters in via post production transition, or we would have had to import a fog set-up in which would have increased our render time immensely. We wished to keep the film as render-friendly as possible and so, instead of having the characters walk in, I decided to time it all out to the same specs as the animatic, but have them pop up. Not only do I feel that this is as goofy and in line with the rest of the film, but it also allows Mikey to further import this back plate light behind the wall explosion set-up to illuminate the shot, and keep the render time low. 

Below is a screenshot of the completed render. 

Animation

Whilst Harley is Animating his portion of shots for the film, below is an update of my progress.

On the Jackhammer Gag, I consulted one of our tutors over the Easter period and she gave me a couple of pointers on the body posing - and perhaps having more unstable feet, emphasising his stability with the powerful tool. 

I enlisted the help of second year - Patrick Collins to assist me with the Chainsaw Gag. I felt a little less confident of how to approach this shot. We always had a clear vision of how we wished for it to play out, chainsaw cutting a hole in the ground - man falls through, chainsaw follows -  but we wanted to inject a real opportunity for some flavour - lovely arcs, and a more expanded sense of performance, and credit to Patrick he especially opened my eyes to this. He blocked out the initial shot, and how the man could really be pushed proportionally (breaking the rig once or twice in the process) but he had a bit of fun piecing that together and figuring that out and i'm massively thankful. When it came to it however, some issues with timing followed. The man didn't spin around fast enough at all, and so i took it upon myself to just alter the timing of the performance, however this took up some of my own time and drained me of other duties to the film, so I handed the shot over to Harley further down the line to just complete. And he has done so. So with 3 animators tackling the shot, combining our knowledge and what we thought we could bring to the shot, we have brought it to life.

(See Patricks blog/show reel for Poses and thumb nails)

Above is Patricks Blocked out shot in Stepped preview mode. Which basically means the shot is not inbetweened, so the inbetweens had arms and legs flapping all over the place. 

Below is a refined version that Harley and I worked on. 

From here on, it will be Alice's role to cut a hole in the ground for the man to fall through. 

Shot 28

As I was Animating this shot when the Alarms catch out the characters, I needed a little bit of help on how to really approach catching them out.

Firstly a friend of mine helped me shoot some reference footage to really capture the accuracy in anatomy when approaching it, really replicating how real bones and muscles would coincide with one another during such an erratic piece of performance from a Monkey. But seeing as we couldn't get a monkey, a human was close enough.

After consulting a tutor on how to take it further, it was suggested to me, to make the animation Pop in 1 frame - The Arms up, curl up the anticipation just a ‘wee’ bit more, then when the arms reach the top, let them stretch up further, really throwing the arms up really far, then let the monkey come back down into a more comfortable position. 

 - If 1 frame is the difference between curl & pop, then anticipate it more, and have the drag and the overlap more apparent between the arms and the body, so have the arms flap up after the body, so that the power comes from the hips. 

Shot 8

I did the animation on Shot 8, when the two characters have reached the bank vault door - leading into the next act of the film. I discreetly decided to have the monkey scratching his behind purely for comedic value to just build on top of what we have already done.

Character UV Map's Applied to Models

So after a couple of set backs in regards to the character texturing/UV mapping, what with animation needing to take place and this being pushed back on the agenda, it was time to get it done. And below showcases the results of that. As we have strived to recreate a cartoon style, we didn't wish to do anything too flamboyant with the character textures, other than really instill an illusion of life on them, to make the man look like a man, and the monkey look like a monkey, and really that was the ultimate essence of that, and we needed to give them a little more personality, a little more heart, and make them look a LOT more thief-like, so hopefully with the combined colours and use of snappy little light heartedness to them, I have helped to breathe some new life into these models. 

I really strived to recreate a more realistic face texture, in regards to recreating blemishes and possible heated areas of the skin, and a tired-ness under the eyes. The film takes place in the middle of the night, so it was important to us that at least one of the characters looked tired, to give the story a bigger sense of plausibility - showcasing that this guy is actually pretty exhausted to be up at this time, it really helps push that through, and we really wanted to recreate that with the textures in the skin. 

Both of them collectively together, each containing their own bit of personality, but unified within the context of the film. 

Research and Inspiration on skin texturing - Peabody & Sherman 

You can see especially in the skins of Sherman, Penny & (Mona) Lisa how such simplicity is retained in the skin texture to tie in with the metaphysics and production design of the world being visually presented, and how the aesthetics of the computer shading allow to make sure that it doesn't look at all, either dead or too plaster-scene, it's an almost, perfect vynl-esque look that really compliments and utilises other aspects of the 3d software, which for our film would be very nice to achieve.