Storyboard Final!

I have so much footage so I didn't include every frame/shot that will be in my film. But this gives a basic idea of the narrative and style. It's also a good guide for me to start editing.

Editing stills from the footage.

I've already filmed my footage as my friend came over to Wellington for the weekend so I took that as the perfect opportunity. For my storyboard I'm using stills from the footage. I'm touching them up in lightroom a bit. It's good because it's giving a feel for what the footage is going to look like at it's best. I took so much footage it's ridiculous. Editing will take a long time so it's good I've got the filming out of the way now.

Music!

I got permission to use the track I was really hoping to have! I emailed the producer but they're a well established band so I wasn't expecting to get the rights for it. So happy as I have my heart set on using this for the interview. It has the right fibe and the music builds up perfectly at the right moments.

http://thenewdivision.bandcamp.com/

Inspiration 211

I'm not fond of the over editing style or the interview in the begin. I'm inspired by the close up make up shots which match the music. I will try to replicate this in my own work.

Trying to get the walking animation right

Well these are my attempts at colouring in and fixing up the walking animation. A very time consuming and tedious job. Had it done before the Monday interim hand in which is good. I'm glad the shading turned out good.

Interim and other happenings

Thought I better mention that for the interim I was working on some other minor things also such as replacing the gears so that they can be animated and redrawing with wire in my 'smooth style'. Here are a couple of screen shots.

 I started drawing this a long time ago in the first break for the second level. Just thought I'd post this here to remind myself to revisit this.

For the Monday hand in I need to have the character's walk cycle coloured with a drop shadow and a possible jump animation depending on how I go for time.

The main feedback at our presentation from tutors:
 - Bring the scene to life such as

•  sign lighting up
• wires swinging
• music reacting to low power
• visual cues
• lights on the characters
• character shadows

This was the main constructive feed back. We also got a lot of good feed back which was reassuring of our work so far. Looks like I'm going to be having a very busy weekend.

Evil robot character concepts

 My original concepts which I presented to my group. We liked number 8 best. I tried rendering him a couple of times but just wasn't sure what to do for his shape/form so I couldn't understand the perspective.

So I went for number 2 instead and blocked out his colours and put basic gradients on him. He's inspired by Wheatly from Portal2.

After shading him I presented him to Chris who suggested I add bolts and show the "T lines" on the edge of him to suggest symmetry. 

This is the final result. He's very clean, clinical feeling which adds to his evil vibe I feel. His red light eye and lines also show this. I already have a few ideas on animating him. 

Project 3

Need to start blogging for this project. I'm in Chris' group and the basic game design concept is a space station, the player is a robot and the core mechanic is giving and taking away power from things while the player's energy itself goes down (recourse management).

The image above is a painting of Chris' character that I redrew as the resolution was too large and when shrunk down to the games size became very low quality. Close up my drawing looks very pixelated because of the low resolution but once shrunk down it looks nice and smooth.

The next step is to download a program called Spine to animate a walk cycle and turn it into a sprite for Stencyl.

I'm currently designing enemy robot characters and thinking of concepts for the next level.
Chris and I's art styles are a bit different. Mine is more of a smooth style while he incorporates pixel art aesthetics into certain elements. Luckily he's open to the idea of different art styles for this project and is encouraging me to bring my own style into it. I did get him to teach me some of his techniques on photoshop so the style can stay consistent if need be.

Final Film!

The final project. I'm super happy with how it came out! I got so carried away filming so many different scenes that I've had to cut so much footage out which I'm not pleased about but it's all part of the process. I left the night time footage, honey shots and bird footage out completely as it just didn't fit the mood within the 2 minute time frame.

I've really loved this project and have found a passion in filming for it. I love photography so I felt the filming process came naturally to me. Everything was filmed on manual mode on my DSLR and 3 different lenses of mine were used. Film is essentially photography but several frames are combined to make a moving image so I tried to think of each shot as a photograph while filming. Just need to start doing some more brave editing techniques. This is definitely a piece I'll consider putting onto my portfolio and I'm excited for project 3.  

Coding

http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/28900

http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/69675

http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/56428

http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/20348 - don't like as much

Two more experiments - slow motion and reverse.

Two smoke experiments

Just thought I would share my experiments on my blog. Not sure which one is better.
I have slowed the footage down and reversed it. Makes for a very interesting smoke effect. I added ambient music to one of the clips to make it more interesting. I won't be using this track on my actual film it was just to make it more interesting for now.

Inspiration

Shot some really nice footage yesterday using mostly my 50mm lens. Using this video as inspiration as it reminds me of discovery.