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.