Progress

Moving a little slower than I want this week, but not falling behind.

By tomorrow morning I'll have 4 scenes left out of 7 and 6 shots left out of 12. Some of this is because a few shots are being annexed and a couple are being dropped or possibly replacing others.

Shot X means its the only shot in the scene...

Scene 1
...shot A still needs characters
...shot B still needs characters
Scene 2
...shot X still needs characters, rotoscoping of background
Scene 3
...shot X still needs characters
Scene 4
...shot A will not be used (or it may replace both shots A&B in Scene 8)
...shot B will be done by tomorrow am
...shot C was annexed into Scene 6
Scene 5 does not exist (numbering mistake by moi)
Scene 6
...shot X will be done by tomorrow am
Scene 7
...shot X done
Scene 8
...shot A still needs characters (or will be replaced by 4A)
...shot B still needs characters (or will be replaced by 4A)
...shot C done

All scenes have the background and props composition in, strictly characters from here on out.

Done does NOT include effects animation and stylizing. This summer I will stylize the film, and add the effects animation to Scene's 4 and 8 then.

Wyatt's numbering system.

When working in Maya, Nuke, AfterEffects or just about any other program, I rename my file with each save. This way, if I fuck up, I can backtrack to the last good version.

Just how many backups do I save...well, I number my files...aaa, aab, aac, etc.

This gives me a few benefits, first and foremost, they aren't confused with frame numbers. Second, I can separate out variations with the prefix...baa, caa, daa, etc. And still have 676 (26 letters times 26 letters) combinations of the second two letters to number. I doubt I'll ever need 676 backups, but you never know. Third, it's geeky.

Progress

Out of 12 shots in my film, 2 are complete fro my defense.

Out of 7 scenes, 1 is complete.

These are pre-stylized. I'll have style samples to show the committee, but the film itself will get some fixes and tweaks and be stylized over the summer.

Magic Bullet Misfire

Part of the magic Bullet Looks 1.2 program, looks offers offer a 100 default looks to style footage...from bleached bypass to "car commercial." I'm hoping it offers me the chance of dialing in non-corrected corrected film stock...so I can give a shot or two the look of indoor footage shot outdoors, or vice-versa.

http://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/magic-bullet-looks/



Misfire allows tedious control of the random elements need to make digital video look like an old, poorly handled reel of film...

New edit, new plan

Well, chopping day was successful. The plan for a while has been to stylize the digital short to look like an old reel of film, with splotch, scratches, poor color etc. and spliced film breaks to allow jump cuts to aid in shortening the running time.

While working on editing, I push that idea further. While trying to approach how I may approach cutting between different camera positions, I came to the idea of making the whole short look like an old screen test. It works well with the contain, and allows wider tolerances of which shots can be edited against each other. One of my advisers, Eric Hanson, even suggested the idea of making the camera moves look shaky, amateur and often off-mark.

To add the random film elements, I'll be using a variety of ways to give as diverse a look to end "shot" of film in the movie...Tinderbox's Old Film in After Effects, Magic Bullet's Misfire in AfterEffects and even compositing in stock footage of film scratches in Nuke, which is the problem I am using to composte Chester, the backgrounds, the props and the animated characters together.

Compositing

How does all of this go together?

For now I compositing in a program called nuke. The Chester Green Screen footage, the props, the backgrounds and the characters all get pulled in separately and then are carefully connected. When one item has to pretend to overlap the others, a mask has to be rototscoped out to eliminate the item in front.

Characters

Color Mockups

Rendered Still from Scene 006
Pre-stylized frame from Scene 008

With props and backgrounds

I thought I had posted this already.

This was before "Chopping Day," so it's 4:30 minutes, but it may help to post this before I post the edited version.

Character faces

The faces are animated by swapping out the textures and rerendering out certain frames before compositing. They way the toon shader works, I have to have a normal and shadow version of each texture...

How does this layout? Well, it's based on a UV map that Anthony generated out of Maya for me to use in Photoshop to alter. Here is martins' expression of concentration with the UV map turned on...
Some others...

My animation process with the characters

The process startes with the performers in their MoCap suits, I have photos and Sean Cox and myself in the suits with the markers, I will post one, but you'll have to wait...

From there the capture data gets cleaned up in Vicon IQ


After the data is cleaned up, it is export as a C3D file, and the capture marker data is imported in motion Builder, where the markers are matched up to an "actor," something resembling the Michelin Man and the action is double checked.

Then import the character data from Maya, and drive those characters with the actors (which I can then hide). Then i plot out each capture tack I am currently working with, for each character, where it creates the keyframes from my skeleton. After this, I use MotionBuilders story tool to blend that different motions from different takes together into one continuous action.
I can then plot this animation and have a single take to export as a animation-only FBX file for importing into Maya. An extra step that became necessary was deleting the character geometry and leaving just the skeleton. I don't think this was supposed to be necessary, but io had importing problems in Maya if i do not do this extra action.
Importing the animation in Maya becomes a two program problem due to a version control error. I import each character into a new Maya 2008 file and then import the animation FBX. I use Maya 2008 because the FBX import support is vastly better than in Maya 2009. But at this point, I have to save the file and move everything to Maya 2009 becasue soemthing in the character files make the render settings in Maya 2008 useless.

Hand animation is not captured with the MoCap data, instead I have the hands rigged to animate in maya. This rig holds up prefectly, so far, even with the move from Maya to MotionBuilder back to Maya and then maya 2009. Once I have my bodies where I want then, I go through a keyframed the hands
Faces? Next.

Aston and the Michelin Man do Hamlet

Sorry, no sound, but since when was Shakespeare famous for his dialogue anyway?

This was a test for driving the characters with mocap.

Chopping day

Today, my rough cut goes from 4:30 minutes to 3:00 minutes. That's I'll I plan to do all day, over around 12-13 hours. It's going to be a long process, but I want to be down to my final edit before I take the time to handle the character animation.

Character Development, Part 4

Ah, the new shoes and the finished models.

After this they were rigged to use in MotionBuilder, which is where the characters meets the Mo-Cap.

Finally, we are at texturing. I wanted something old school, but wants to make sure the colors aren't too dark or light...

Character Development, Part 3-D

Anthony's next round of revisions were (was?) the first modeled...More notes, am I ever satisfied...
Some notes aren't represented visually. We had the discussion of 4 or 5 fingers on the hands, whether to use clothes or not, and finally on the shoes via e-mail. I found the above shoes too blah, so we opted for sneakers...and no clothes, Donald never needed pants.

Character Development, Part 2

Then we trade a few notes and revisions ...Begets this from Antony...And more notes...

Character Development, Part 1

In an effort to post as much of the various documents I have accumulated in the process of making this short, I'll start with character development. My characters were designed and modeled by Anthony Aguilar.

First I provided simple sketches...


And a lot of influences, some of which were posted here...
http://chesterthesis.blogspot.com/2009/04/character-influences.html

From this, Anthony sent me back his first preliminary designs...

Hmm, digital files are huge.

I've been working without a backup for a solid week, so now I'm taking time to do it. 246 minutes to back everything up, approx. 265GB.

For a while I was going back and forth between my home machine and my school computer, but now the sure size of the project makes it easier to just work on campus all the time.

Edit: Opps. Backup halted about 30GB short. Have to finish it up.