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.