Production 'almost' Complete

Been a while since I last blogged.

Production has been going pretty alright I guess. The other three Crewsaders came over to my house on Thursday after school to shoot my scene about 3D animation. Finally, it was my turn to be on tape. We set up the scene using all my toys and collectibles that I had since my childhood and used them as part of the set design. Jem composed me in the shot and adjusted the setings in the camera so that the lighting would look as perfect as possible, as light was directly shining at the camera from my window. Greg was trying to distract me while shooting me, and I have to say that he did succeed. As I mentioned earlier, that guy is really good in de-stressing the group. Keep it up bro. Wendy took over the microphone and we began filming.

A few wrong takes, but after a while, we did it. In the last shot, I was supposed to say "You may ask me, why spend so much time on it? I would say, why not?" Greg pointed out that the last sentence doesn't really make sense. The audience would not buy because I would be posing a question and the audience would be expecting an answer to that, but instead, I simply say "why not?" The audience would be confused and wouldn't accept it because one moment I pose a question asking why and then to reply that, I say why not. Am I making any sense here? Anyway, I hope you get the point I'm trying to make here, whoever is reading this. So we spent a while thinking of the ending of the scene. We have this consistence in this script whereby the speaker at the end of every module would say something inspiring and thought-provoking which would leave the audeince wondering about it. And we wanted to maintain this consistency in this module as well. Eventually, we decided to stick to the old idea because we felt that it is thought-provoking. Oh well...

A 3D lamp will be later added on the table in the scene, and hopefully, it would seem that I'm interacting with it.

The next day, it was Jem's turn to be on tape for Photography and Video Fundamentals. Greg, Wendy and Jem came to school at 11.30 in the morning to check out locations to shoot (I was having morning class). They did a great job. Initially according to script, our plan was to shoot at in the classroom next to the P1 classroom. However, the three of them found a great place to shoot - the dark room on level 4. It was really eerie there. Scary! Because it was so quiet, and so dark without the lights, it was as if you were walking with your eyes closed. We saw another room deeper insider, which I pressume was a lab where they developed photographs. That place was the scariest. Reminded me of the laboratory in 'I Am Legend' where Will Smith maintained checks on the zombie. We decided to film there as we thought it was quite interesting, but thought that the audience woldn't find it any interesting. Thus, we changed location, but still inside the dark room.

We decided to film at the dark part where the "alley behind" could be seen clearly with the proper lighting. We found that the lighting was also kind of interesting. We also used a new technique to film Jem's reflections talking to the camera instead of Jem himself talking to the camera. Greg did a good job in handling the camera. His hands were pretty steady considering the fact that we weren't using a tripod to film in some of the shots. The audio also turned out pretty good.

Okay, so that's what we have shot so far. Let me go over the things that we have already done and things that are yet to be done.

Things that are done:

1. Ideation shooting
2. 2D Art Fun shooting
3. 3D Art Fun shooting
4. Photography and Video Fun shooting
5. 2D Animation shooting
6. 3D Animation shooting
7. Opening Credits (roughly)
8. Ending Credits (roughly)
9. Map (roughly)
10. Wendy's Mushi Animation (almost done) =D Good job man!
11. A rough cut of all the modules combined into a sequence

Things that are yet to be done:

1. Drawing Essentials shooting
2. DM Fun Shooting
3. Scroll Scene shooting
4. 3D Lamp animation
5. Greg's animation
6. Mountain animation
7. Finalising opening credits
8. Finalising end credits
9. Colour correction
10. Testing out which codecs are the best

Phew! So many things left, so little time. Have to stop procrastinating already =(

Shots of 2D Animation Done

We finished shots of 2D animation.

Yesterday, we handed in our blogs to Wahidah. She saw our rough cut for interim again and gave her comments. She mentioned that in certain parts, the audio was not clear and we might have to reshoot that particular scene again. She also said that the composition was really good for the 2D art fundamentals scene, thanks to Jem once again for his solid eye for camera =)

After that, Jem and I went for over to Greg's house to work on the 2D animation scene. Wendy did not join us as she wasn't feeling well. She decided to stay back in school and work on her 2D animation of her Mushi character. On the way to Greg's house, Greg was telling me his ideas on what we can work on after P1 finishes. Him and his awesome crazy ideas. I think he can grow up to be a really good story conceptualiser or character designer or even a director for that matter. Don't worry Greg, it's not a small job at all =) Jem took a nap in the meantime.

Once we reached Greg's house, we decided to start filming rightaway. But there are always distractions like Greg's Optimus Prime model. Greg made a deal with us that he would finish all his shots within an hour, otherwise he were to treat the rest of us to lunch. We started out by doing a bit of set design to make it look like an animator's room. One thing about Greg's room - he has a lot of collectibles, be it figurines, toys, model cars, helicopters, planes, etc. Thus, we took a few of his toys and placed it around his desk. We placed his best drawings around the desk and pinned some on the wall as well. Then, Jem and I moved onto filming. He composed the shot nicely as always (man, you rock at this bro) and moved onto filming it. We noticed that the ambience noise was a bit too much, thus we had to turn off the air-con. At one time, the air-con started leaking, thus we fixed that problem by masking a tape with cotton wool around the part where it was leaking so that it wouldn't be recorded by the microphone. Greg, however, lost his bet [ =D ] because both Jem and I wanted to strive for perfection and give us flexibility during post-production. Jem also noticed that the lighting was a bit of an issue in the scene, but I suggested that we could use After Effects to colour correct the shot and try to make it look as natural as possible.

We finished much faster than last time and went home.

When I reached home, I was so tired by the one and a half hours of journey that I instantly fell asleep, which I explains why I did not blog yesterday. Then arrived this morning...

I had a super nice rest because there was no Multimedia Fundamentals class in the morning. Today, we were supposed to shoot Wendy at her place. Thus, Jem, Greg and I met at Compass point at around 1.45 pm and by the time we had lunch and took bus to Wendy's place, it was already 2.30 pm. We immediately moved onto setting up the scene in terms of set design and lighting.

The lighting was challenging here, because the window was facing the camera and direct light was shining at it, blowing everything out. We closed the window and put the camera on manual mode to adjust the aperture and other settings to get a nicely exposed shot. Wendy's room had those fluroscent lights, thus the scene had a warm feel to it without any colour correction in post =) However, there were harsh shadows on her face. We solved it by using a fluoroscent table lamp and shining it from the top. Greg and I took turns to hold the table lamp by climbing onto the bunk bed in her room. We worked in a really hot environment as the noise of the mounted fan on the wall was too much for ambience. The three of us helped Wendy to memorize her lines and have her performance look natural, she did quite well eventually. Good job Wendy. We also saw the animation that she had done yesterday. Even though it was incomplete, I think it was really mind-blowing. The squash and stretch on her Mushi character was really evident. Good job =)

After the shoot was done, we left. Tomorrow, the three of them will be coming over to my place to shoot me for the first in this project. Hope I can do well with the least amount of takes. Good luck, Raj.

End of the First Block

A lot of things have been happening.

As far as progress is concerned, we finished up Greg's and Wendy's shooting for 2D Art Fundamentals. Initially, it was kind of difficult to set up the scene. It was already 7.30 pm and the lighting was a major issues. We had chosen the design space to do out shooting for this module but due to low lighting conditions, we decided to explore around and find a better place to film. That's when Jem and I discovered this place near the Design Gallery. The background had this nice depth and instantly, we decided to film there. After doing a bit of audio tests and object placements in the scene for the sake of composition, we began filming. It was horrible. It wasn't as easy and smooth as I had expected it to turn out. All of us shouted "Silence on the set" so many times, but certain people just choose to be so inconsiderate purposely and thus they had to contribute to the already irritating ambience noise we were having of the cleaners using the machines to clean the campus. This has been the day where I had cursed the most during production, and partly ended up being irritated at Greg at times. Sorry bro, no hard feelings yea =) Anyway, we carried on shooting and took many shots until I was satisfied. Wendy had gone off a little earlier as she wasn't feeling well. After everything was done, the remaining three of us proceeded to the 3D Animation Lab to prepare for our DHC presentation the following day. Jem and I worked on our presentations whereas Greg worked on his blog and character design.

The following day, we were supposed to shoot Jem for Ideation. After showing Wahidah our fourth or fifth draft of our script, we decided to go to Jem's house to shoot. However, Greg had lessons in the afternoon for DHC so he couldn't join us. Thus, Jem, Wendy and I left for Jem's house. Everyone was feelings kind of gloomy and tired because the following day was interim. Haiz...

Anyway, upon reaching Jem's house, we slacked a little before moving onto shooting Jem in the toilet (Great ideas are generated in the toilet, which is why we decided to shoot Ideation in the toilet). This time, I was in charge of camera and Wendy holding the microphone. Jem is great man. While being in the shot, he was also telling me what kind of angles he wanted and advised me on how to compose him in the shot. And when we looked at the recorded tape, it was awesome. That guy really does have an eye for the camera, even when he's not looking through one. Good job bro! This shooting was easy and was done within approximately 40 minutes. Once we were done, we set off for school to prepare for the following day's interim.

We reached school by approximately 6.30 pm and set of for the 3D animation lab. Greg did not meet us there as he was using Andrea Lim's laptop to do his animation. Wendy, Jem and I settled down to do work. Wendy worked on her Mushi animation, Jem worked on the Map using Photoshop and I worked on the layout for the mountains. We worked until 11pm until the guard came to tells us that it was closing time. Jem did a fantastic job on the map. Simply wonderful. Just like how I had visualised it to be - burnt, ancient, parchment-type and epic-looking. Do check out his blog to see it. I worked on the mountains and tried to match their layout in top view with that of that map because the mountains will be transiting into the map. It was damn hard, and took me a lot of time to come up with -- ENTIRELY NOTHING. I was really frustrated, thus I decided to help Jem with the map by telling him what it should look like and where it should be burnt and etc. After a while, Greg cam back with bad news - he did a bit of animation, BUT he forgot to save before the program quit unexpectedly. Damn. Never mind. Better to learn from mistakes sooner than later. All of us went home then.

Wendy had sent me her rough animation that she had done, and I have to admit that it's really a good piece of work. Though the facial animation was not done, but for the sake of interim, at least we had something to show. Greg had sent me his character designs for his dog to be included in the rough cut for the interim the following day. I decided to catch a bit of sleep before resuming work at 5 am.

After I woke up, I started editing all the footage that we had shot and made a rough sequence out of it. I did not really bother with the audio editing and the noise reduction process because I really did not have enough time. I added in the beginning and the end titles. Finally at 8am, the entire edit for interim was done and all that was left was rendering. I had edited the footage in Premiere and imported the premiere project file in After Effects for editing the last part where the map comes in and the end credits follow through. Once I was done with the editing, I set the clip to render. Estimated time remaining to render: 2 hours plus plus. Thus I decided to catch a bit of sleep before going to school.

When I woke up, DAMN I HAD NEVER CURSED THIS MUCH IN MY LIFE. MY LAPTOP HAD GONE TO SLEEP AND HAD ONLY RENDERED 1000 FRAMES OUT OF THE 7000 PLUS PLUS THAT WERE SUPPOSED TO BE RENDERED BY THEN. DAMN! I panicked, as I had only an hour to get ready and leave for school. Thus, I decided to render only the last part which are the ending credits I edited in After Effects, and then import it back into Premiere and re-render it with the rest of the edited footage. This saved me hours of time and the rendering was done in less than 10 minutes. Premiere did save render times, but I had to compensate the quality of the end credits as it was rendered twice.

I reached school just in time and was just getting the footage on my harddisk when Wahidah announced that we were penalised for not being ready when told to do so. Well, just a bit of my opinions here. Yes, I do agree that it was my group's fault for not being on time. But we were definitely ready. We had done our work. We had our rough edit like what was required. We were meeting up to the expectations of P1. And I'm sure so were the rest of the groups that were penalised. But all we had left to do was just transfer the stuff to the school's computer. And we had not done that, thus we were penalised. Although I feel that Wahidah was right in a way, we did not know that we were the first group to present our work. If we had known, we would definitely have been ready before she entered the class. I feel that we have worked so hard for this day, and we had produced what was required, but our grades will be affected just because we hadn't transferred our work to the computer. I don't think that would be fair to us. But then again, this isn't up to me to decided. Maybe Wahidah did have her reasons, and I guess I do respect them. I just hope and pray for the best.

Interim started. All the Crewsader loved Snap's work. I feel that the editing was awesome, especially to the music. It totally fitted their theme. Good job Snap. Awesome work =) Finally, our group's turn came as we were the last to present. I guess it went well, just that we had to do some work with our audio.

Saturday and Sunday - days off for Crewsade before work resumes on Monday. Beware Crewsaders, as the worst of hell has YET to come to us. Be prepared. We can do it. This is just the hell of a beginning. Good luck guys, and GOOD JOB SO FAR! =)

Production Starts

Very tired. But fun and productive day today.

Day started off with Jem and I working together on the script. We had to cut down on a lot of stuff as to fit everything into the 10 minutes video time. We worked especially hard on the end credits, trying to choose the right words for the motion graphics by going to http://www.dictionary.com/ to look up for words that have that "medieval" or "epic" feel to it. It was quite fun. But it was definitely tedious to finish up the script and try to get it perfect.

We finished it by 1.30 pm, printed it and handed in to Wahidah to have a look. Then we went for lunch. After we came back, Wahidah sat down with us to discuss the script. She said this version was much better then the previous one. On hearing that, all of us became so relieved. Finally all that hard work and tediousness had paid off. However, she still felt that it was too long to fit into 10 minutes as there was too much content to be squeezed into 10 minutes. But overall, she approved of it and gave us the green signal for our shoot. Awesome!

Greg did not have DHC class today so he joined the rest of us directly after P1 class for filming. First thing on the agenda: do a voice-over recording for the end-credits. We went into the class next to P1 class for our recording session. Before we started, Greg put up a sign outside the door, "NO ENTRY! FILMING IN PROGRESS!" And on top of that, he used a masking tape to seal the two doors together. It was really hilarious. Funny guy man!

Anyway, it was really hard trying to get the recording done. Because Greg and his usual comical nonsense. Man, that guy is a really good stress reliever. We did about 27 recordings, through which he just couldn't help but laugh off in between, thus having to re-start the recording process. Also, Jem had set up my camera that I had brought today for filming and set it up on a tripod, recording all the behind the scenes and all the humourous comical stuff that Greg was doing. Oh, I can't stress how helarious he was. But in the end, after one and a half hours or so, we finally managed to get two proper recordings done for the part before the end-credits.

However, something unfortunate happened. The tripod on top of the table, standing upright, was left unattended. However, it was not stable and it fell and landed hard on Wendy's head. OUCH! That must have been so painful. So Wendy's scalp had turned red and she was in so much pain. Greg and I ran down to the canteen to get a bag of ice to put on her head. She even felt like vomitting, which really made all of us worried. But phew, thank God she was alright afterwards.

We wasted a lot of time by getting ourselves distracted. We entertained ourselves by having an ice-cube with the ice cubes we got for Wendy and the three of us teamed up against Greg. It was quite fun, but a lot of precious time wasted.

After that, we went up to the 5th floor studio to film Greg since he's in the scene introducing 3D Art Fundamentals. Oh my God, this was so damn freaking tedious. We must have taken more than 50 takes at least, with Greg forgetting his lines and bursting out laughing halfway. The poor guy must have walked up and down the stairs at least 50 times today. Halfway through filming, we realised that the shot that we had been working on was aproximately a minute long already. TOO DAMN LONG A SHOT! It was then we realised what Wahidah was trying to point out to us about cutting down our script even more. We were so so so damn frustrated. And I was so stressed out. Many a time, I screamed at Greg to be serious. Sorry bro, no hard feelings. Feel damn bad. Bros for life man, you did a great job.

Anyway, after realising our flaw, we decided to sit down and re-edit our script. And this time, we did it with proper timing. Each of us spoke out our lines throughout the script and approximately timed each other. Only when all was good did we resume on shooting Greg's scene again. This time, I sat down with him and helped him memorise his lines while Jem did the bloopers shots.

Oh, did I mention how awesome Jem was today. Simply cool with the camera. He seemed to have the exact cinematography in his mind and he did very good job with the camera work. The first few times, he tried using a tripod and panning. But it did not work out too well. Thus, he decided to use the hand-held technique. And my god, one should have seen how stable the camera was in his hands. It almost looked like it was shot on tripod. I handled the microphone and directed the scene. Wendy had already left because she wasn't feeling too good. Get well soon Wendy!

Finally, we were done with the shot for today. We were so high and so stressed. Personally, I feel that I was pretty impatient with the entire group today and almost ended up raising my voice at my fellow Crewsaders. I'm sorry guys. I know how equally good you guys want this production to be. And I even know how much effort you guys are putting into this. But no hard feelings people. Really appreciate all the hard work you guys are doing. Keep it up! Hope no offence taken from me =)

We finished packing up at about 9.45 pm, went to eat dinner opposite school, and made our way home by eleven.

We were pretty exhausted. But happy that our day went well.

*I must not stress out and lose my temper* =(

SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre Screening @ Singapore Poly

Yesterday, Greg, Jem, Wendy, Jake, Dion, Angie, Yi Chuin, Vivien and myself went over to the SIGGRAPH Electronic Theatre Screening at Singapore Polytechnic. I've heard a lot about SIGGRAPH conference originating from America and I was really excited about it coming to Singapore.

The entire two and a half hour session was simply AWESOME! We saw works of CGI artists from many countries such as USA, Japan, Germany and UK. The style of work ranged from conceptual to story-based to plain technical test renders. It was seriously impressive. All of us were blown away by the quality of their work.

There was this one particular clip which really drew my attention and gave me an inspirational push. It was from Scanline Flowline VFX. They did Research and Development on the fluid dynamics of CG water from test renders to completely photorealistic CG scenes. It was mindblowing. I could really see the process of their works from how they started off with simply making a fluid container and having the water dynamics tested out in that container, to applying it to large-scale scenes showing ocean water or floods in the city.

I just realised how intense the competition is in the CG world. Maybe not in Singapore because so many people are driven towards Manga approach or there isn't a very big industry here for CG filmmaking. But looking at an international scale, I think it's incredible competive. I mean, look at the quality of the work! The technology! The amount of effort put in is evident. So many people are able to do these complex animations and simulations. It can be very prestigious to have one's work showcased during SIGGRAPH, but it's a long way, with hell lots of obstacles, sleepless nights of frustrations and expensive render times. BUT, it can be done!

As far as our production is concerned, nothing to update. We went to Greg's house after the SIGGRAPH screening and stayed up the whole night editing the script. Script editing still in process.

More updates tomorrow.

End Titlles Blocked and Timed

Was busy making the above clip yesterday, thus did not have time to blog.

I did this to block out the timing and sychronisation to the music. It definitely needs some work, especially at the last part. I showed it to my group mates and Wahidah just an hour ago. Their comments were that certain parts were too fast and it's hard to register the words that were shooting out on thr screen. But otherwise, it was approved. So I guess we have to work on the font sizes and the background to make it look more epic.

As for the pre-production, we are still working on the script. We'll finish it off tonight after attending the SIGGRAPH talk at SIngapore Poly. Shooting will start on Sunday, as planned.

I'll be honest. I'm very tired. Shall blog tomorrow to give more updates.

Script Approved - Minor Changes

Today was basically a very "slack" day. None of us were in the mood of doing work, especially myself =)

Wahidah was supposed to read our script and discuss it with us when class started. However, sha had some cours to attend to thus she could not read it in the morning. Hence, she read the whole script during class time. This was when we planned out the minor deatils such as how we would handle our shots and keep them organised so that during post-production, minimum time would be wasted.

Wahidah also mentioned something about not to make our films too epic. If a particular thing could be achieved simply, then it's not advisable to spend so much time doing the effects or spending lots of time refining it. However, like Jem, I disagree with this statement. I also feel that freedom should be given to this. I personally feel that perhaps this is why Singapore's film industry isn't popular with the Hollywood industry - it's because of their "aiyah, do it the simpler way can already la" attitude towards film. I may be wrong, and I don't mean to defy Wahidah or any other lecturers here. But this is how I feel towards this issue. If we try something and explore with the technology more and spend a few more hours on it, then I think that simple scene could look really interesting rather than just plain simple. Oh well, let's see how things go.

After Wahidah finished reading the script, we had a discussion with her. She felt that the script was quite long and each of us would be having an air time of at least four to five minutes each, which I definitely agree. We missed out on the timing bit. She also felt that we did not bring out the "epicness" of the movie like the way our opening and ending credits show. I guess she's right on that. We really missed out certain important key aspects of our epic theme. She also pointed out a few other minor adjustments that we had to make.

After that, class was over. We really did not have much to do on as we were in line with our timeline that I had planned. All we have to do is get our script modified, send it to Wahidah for approval, and Bingo, we start shoot the following week. Everything goes according to plan.

Some words for fellow Crewsaders. Guys, no time for slack already. Everyday should and must be a form of accomplishment. We have come so far already. Lets not lose that positive energy that's flowing in our veins.

Wendy: Don't worry, you won't be feeling useless anymore. I'll make sure the amount of work will keep you so occupied till you regret :P Nah just kidding. Don't worry. Busy times will be coming up. Just don't get stressed alright. Crewsaders are positive people! =)

Greg: Bro, I like the determination you have to animate the 2D character that you've entirely designed yourself. Keep it up man. Obstacles and failures will come on the way, but there's always a positive side to a waterfall if you look at it from a different perspective.

Jem: Seriously bro, didn't know you had such good language skills. Awesome work with the script yesterday. You're the man! =) I completely trust you during production time to handle every shot carefully. You do have an eye for camera =) Good going!

Myself: Haiz, don't really know what to say. Take things easy I guess =)

Sorry, did not mean to get so wordy in the last part.

Good night for now.

Script Draft 1 - DONE!

Okay, so this is what I did yesterday after blogging. Just trying to get the timing right, but apparently I don't seem to be getting it. I made this to block out the animation and to see if the background works. The rest of the Crewsaders liked the background, but they (and I so agree with them) felt that the test did not come out properly from the background. It blended in with the background. So have to do something about it.

Anyway, about today. We worked on the script since morning non-stop while Greg and Wendy continued on their character design. Greg had to leave early. Thus after Design History and Culture, it was just Jem and I. We had dinner and then headed to the 3D animation lab to do our script. Jem's amazing man. With all the special angles and his language, it really helped us put together our script. He worked on the individual aspects of the script and I edited it slightly and compiled the whole document. We were going a bit crazy already with the stress and all, but both of us did it by 10.15 pm.

Felt kind of accomplished today. So far, we're up with our timeline. Nothing much to blog today.

Good night.

Script almost done

Tiring day, definitely.

We started out class at 12.30pm. Jem was running late, so Greg and I explained what we did yesterday at Greg's house. I explained to her the timeline and showed her Greg's character designs. Apparently, we already had chosen Greg's design. Left was Wendy's. She showed us what she had done and we finally chose one of her designs, which was a mushroom head with hands only. He was supposed to have a very sarcastic and aggressive character. Thus, a lot of emphasis would be placed on facial animation. Trust Wendy to do it. As for Greg, he got inspired from CJ 7, the movie and he designed a cute little four-legged creature which would be interacting with him. Greg spent a lot of today just focusing on character's designs. I told him to draw certain poses in different views which he thought would be seen in the animation. And so he did. Clever guy. Never seen him so serious while working before. But that was good. Very productive indeed. Good job, bro.

Jem came a little late and showed me the script for the animation that he did. It was pretty good and I helped him make a few changes here and there. Meanwhile, other groups were consulting Wahidah. Thus, we continued to do our work. Greg and Wendy working on their character designs, Jem working on the animation script and me working on the overall script. Everyone lost in their own world... never knowing what was going to come next.

Finally, Wahidah came to our group. We presented to her the same thing that we presented to Alan previously. She was quite okay with it. She had a look at the rough incomplete script that we did and forced us to think about why we chose to speak about a particular module. That gave us more things to think about, and we were lucky that we were still in the planning stage. After that, we showed Wahidah our timeline and she pointed out to us that the interim asessment was on day 15, by when a rough cut should be completed. However, we had planned our timeline in such a way that our post-production starts one day after the interim assessment. Guess lot of work to do now.

We stayed back in school after lesson to work on our individual scripts, meaning, what we each had o say in the video. Then, we would compile into one big script which would be used in our final production. Im going to work on the ending titles soon after I finish blogging.

Tiring day. Never say die.

P.S: Here's the opening introduction animation for graphics that I blocked out.

(In order) Me, Greg, Wendy, Jem

Finally some group pictures at last

Chinese New Year

A long and relaxing break indeed.

While all the Singaporean chinese are celebrating their festival with much delight, our group has been working hard behind the scenes preparing at the pre-production stage. Here's a quick update.

A rough timeline has been drawn up. Unfortunately, I drew it out on a A3 sheet, thus it's difficult to scan. I'll try to get it up here as soon as possible. Here's the basic outline:
Pre-production to be finished by end of next week.
Production to start two weeks from now and lasting till end of this block.
Post-production and animation to begin at start of the next P1 block.

Greg and Wendy have been working on the character designs for the 2D animation aspect. They came up with interesting designs and we already decided on Greg's design. Still have to choose from Wendy's designs. Jem and I met up at Greg's house for discussion on this matter. We decided on the animation sequence where Greg and Wendy will be interacting with their animated characters.

As for the 3D animation sequence, I will be modelling, rigging, shading and animating a lamp from scratch and compositing it with a live action plate. It will also be an interactive scene whereby I will be reacting to a lamp coming to life suddenly on my desk. This idea is not yet confirmed.

I did a test animation of a camera flyingthrough mountains. The rendering time was expensive, considering the duration of the clip. Thus, we have to be very cautious of our timing and management. We'll be installing the program in all our laptops and desktops and divide up the render jobs so that everything will finish rendering on time. Anyway, once the rendering was done, I brought the rendered frames into After Effects for colour correction. The colour correction had 3 processes before achieving the final look. Firstly, I added a vignette to add a burn out film look on the edges, after which I adjusted the contrast, highlights and saturation of the scene. I ended off with colour grading of yellowish-reddish to have a sunset feel. This is how it looks like:

Of course we won't be using this clip for our final project. We're still in the process of testing out what looks best and what doesn't. Also, I'm working on the script as we speak and it should be finalised in a couple of days.

Tomorrow, we'll be working on our character designs to finalise them, deciding who would be doing the voice overs and planning the voice-over script. Once that is done, we would probably record the voice on my computer using Audition. All this is aimed to finish by the end of this week, by when Greg and Wendy SHOULD be starting to animate their 2D characters.

It's going to be hard during production as we have Design History and Culture classes to attend to. Moreover, Jem would be busy with his other priorities as well which would make things a little challenging as he would be our main cameraman and the director of photography. I guess we'll manage somehow.

No more time to slack.

Judgement Day 1

This is the image I made using After Effects. Greg's dragon design is incorporated inside. Added the 3D smoke I was talking about in my previous post.

Yesterday was the worst day, at least according to me. After blogging the previous post 2 nights ago, I sat down to create Crewsade, Inc. logo animation for the into titles. I added Greg's design of the awesome dragon he drew and added all of the team mates' names on the wall and did a short looped camera pan to be played in the powerpoint slides for the presentation. Rendering took quite a long time, but it was okay. I rendered out the animation in .avi format since Alan once told us during DMFun that powerpoint does not read Quicktime files.

Next, I went onto making the rough animation for the intro titles following the Crewsade logo animation. I did not want to make it too detailed and complex at this point in time as I just wanted to test and block out the rough timing and synchronisation to the music which I was going to use. The only detailed part was the Crewsade animation in front. For the Crewsade animation, the music in the beginning was kind of slow and mellow, hence I wanted to make this subtle effect where it starts off with a black screen, then a light starts to flicker as the camera tracks in from far away and slower comes closer towards the logo. As the music starts to rise, the camera shakes as if some unseen force is there. When the music reaches the climax, a white light appears and the logo explodes. That's when the opening titles start with the motion graphics, which we plan to do it later. The rendering time was simply shocking. It took 4 hours to render, probably because of the Crewsade animation.

In the morning when I woke up, I viewed the rendered sequence. It wasn't synchronised to the music properly. That was so frustrating. Certain times when you are working in After Effects, you can only realise the true results after the final render. Thus, I quickly made some changes and set it to render again. I prayed hard that it would finish rendering just in time before our presentation starts.

When I reached school, I was pretty stressed due to the render time. Two hours had gone by and only 100 out of 950 frames were rendered. I tried the Crewsade animation clip in the class's computer, and to my annoyance and utter frustration, the computer did not have the codec to play my file. Oh well, no point cursing all to myself when the computer was not going to get the codec anyway right? Thus, I decided to help Wendy as she was working on the powerpoint slides to further improve it uch as standardising the fonts, font sizes, etc. In the meantime, my After Effects was still rendering. How irritating is that? 15 more minutes before the presentation starts, and it was not even halfway done. Thus, I decided to cancel it and use the previous one that I had rendered. I re-rendered it in Premiere into a Quicktime file and decided not to embed it into the Powerpoint slides.

Group after group, the presentation went on. Everyone did a good job in showing what they had done in the last 6 days. Finally it was our turn. I started out the presentation by introducing the Crewsade logo, moving onto our approach to the style, which was epic, talked a bit briefly about the entire concept and story in general and then passed on to Jem, who talked roughly about our pre-production process and our way of working with audio. Finally, Greg talked about CGI and VFX in our film and how transitions will take place. At the end of the presentation, we showed the Quicktime version of the opening introduction titles.

Alan mentioned that we did not cover the kind of content we will show in our final video. It struck me really badly that we had spent so much time the day before preparing a rough script and how easily we forgot to include that in the powerpoint slides. Jem, Greg and I explained the rough idea. Alan also mentioned that however we play around with the technology, we shouldn't neglect the content.

Later that day, Jem and I had class so I told Greg and Wendy to think of intresting character design for the 2D animation sequence. I personally feel that Design History and Culture takes up so much precious time which could be devoted into this project. But can't complain much. It's a core module after all.

That's all for this post today. Going to experiment with some 3D mountains now. More tomorrow.

Pre-Production Sketches

Greg and Jem's concept sketch for the Crewsade. Inc. logo. Other sketches included.

Greg's concept sketch for Crewsade, Inc.

Longest Day So Far

One day before the presentation, and almost anyone can imagine the pressure everyone would be under. Personally, I was quite stressed myself because we had so many things left in the agenda, and moreover it was one day before the presentation. I was really worried whether we could finish everything like how we had visualised.

The day started off quite early. Jem and I had design history and culture lesson at 9 and Jem happened to come early to school. He had created about two to three designs for the Crewsade, Inc. logo and we approved of the final one. The logo showed a dragon which was curved in the shape of a "C" and then the words "rewsade" that follow along after that. It was an awesome design in my opinion. That guy has got potential man. I told him to use Photoshop to digitise the hand-drawn logo later on in the evening.

Also, earlier in the morning, I was playing around with After Effects and decided to try and create the look and feel of the opening titles for our film. I made this smoke effect using particles. One thing good about most particle plug-ins in After Effects is that they are truly three-dimnsional when a 3D composition camera is used. In other words, when the camera is orbitted around, the particles appear with volume in 3D space. So did this smoke. This gave a very good advantage over using Maya or other 3D aplications to create and render out smoke. I created a wall and made it look like it was cracked by using track mattes and added the words "Crewsade, Inc." on it. Then, I created a red point light and typed in an expression so that it would flicker randomly. This saved a lot of time keyframing throughout the timeline. Lastly, I added a short camera pan around this wall. 4 seconds of animation, but render time was nearly 15 minutes. This is how it looks like:

My group members liked it, but Jeremy suggested to make the camera move in a more interesting way and I found myself agreeing with him. Jem has a really good eye for camera, and I guess he can be a good cinematographer or director of photography in the future.

When class started at 12, the first thing I brought up was to discuss the middle sequence, ie, the part directly after the opening titles lasting until just before the ending titles. This was a long, tough and tedious process and we nearly took almost four and a half hours to finish discussing this. But in the end, we did manage to come up with a rough skeleton of what our entire video will be based on. We discussed who exactly will be on screen and which point in time and also the way we transit from one scene to another. It was a little difficult to get ideas that worked all at once because we had to keep in mind that everything we shot had to be matched with our theme of epic. Jem did a great job here in contributing ideas and deciding on the rough cinematography of the entire film.

Moving on, we also decided not to use the zoom function on the camera at any point in time of our shoot. According to the research I did, some videos that I watched and personally feeling, zooming would destroy the feel of the theme of epic. Besides, zooming is a very traditional way. I may be wrong, but this is entirely my own openion. Anyone is allowed to beg to differ. Hence, we decided to track instead of zoom. We also clarrified whether we were allowed to output our footage with a 16:9 aspect ratio so that it would have a cinematic feel, and we were given a green signal for that. So far, Wendy was doing a great job in taking down notes. She would be in charge of doing the 2D animation sequence, together with Greg. I trust both of them would do an absolutely fine job.

Many a time during the discussion period, we got stressed and literally faced a blank mind. This is where Greg did his usual nonsense with his "group conflict" joke and really loosened us up. He's the guy who should be around when there is stress. He can really liven up the spirit of the rest of the team with one of his spastic facial expression. Good job bro, wonder what we'll do without a stress reliever in the team. Finally, we finished this process and went to the canteen to eat lunch.

Once lunch was over, we proceeded to the 3D animation lab to create the 2D map, through which our literal showcase of the "journey" will be based on, a compass, which would be placed on the map, logo for our title "D' Odysseus: An Epic Journey" and finally to digitise Greg's hand-drawn design for Crewsade, Inc. A lot of work, and we planned to finish everything by 8pm. Since there were quite a few things to do, I divided the work among us. I told Jem to make the compass. However, he had to leave halfway hence he decided to complete it when he reached home. Greg was supposed to digitise his design but he wasn't oo comfortable with Photoshop, hence he used Flash to create it. In my opinion, the end product looked simply awesome. Here it is:

One thing I realised about Greg - he works damn good when he's under pressure. His expression changes and he gets so stressed when he can't acheive a particular result, and then he would be all out to acheive it and won't rest till he gets that result. This, I saw in him today. Impressive.

Next, I told Wendy to make the logo of the film title in Photoshop. The logo obviously had to go with the epic feel, hence I thought that the best font to use would be something like Roman lettering. Hence we surfed the net together for the best font possible, chose it and did the logo together. Here is what it looks like:

Meanwhile, I was blocking out the rough outline for the powerpoint slides for tomorrow's presentation. Finally it was all done. The only thing left to do was the map, which I would be doing once I finish blogging. Also, the rough render of the piece of 3D animation of the flythrough through mountains would be done by me after I finish blogging.

Touchwood, all my team members are equally hardworking and all of them can clearly see their goal ahead in front of them. I really pray we do manage to get everything done right. Hopefully, tomorrow everything goes well.

That's all for today. Lots of work to do. More tomorrow.