Rough cut Previs, no grading, final comp, effects or animation

Rough cut, with no grading, final comp, effects or animation.
This is to give a good idea of flow, shots, any picks up required, additional shots, camera changes and length of animation segments.
From showing this to Phillip Vaughan and also Sang Yu, the next steps are:
1. Animate the lens flare in the opening titles, so that it 'disappears' when behind the branches
2. To use live action footage of a church yard, rather than a still image. Now that the Previs includes mostly moving shots, this particular shot stands out.
3. Concentrate on accentuating the close up camera angles on the ice man...and to use Tilt Shift - good example here....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSmgKRx5pBo,
 as we did with Toy Scandal, to create a definite 'scale' to the icemen
4. To include blurred out, abstract, sunlight images behind the closing shot of the water blob, and to have it as a macro shot.
5. To add, light wrap, and effects in the final grading, to reduce the appearance of 'studio lighting'.
6. To shoot some live action branches, with water droplets dripping, rather than trying to model CG droplets, dripping from the shot, which is purely backlit branches.

              

Macro shots ideas

Great run through of my updated Previs, showing the scene shots in sequence and rough mock ups of how the CG elements work with the footage. I wanted Sean to take a look, before I show the rough edit to Phillip Vaughan next week, so that I have all the info/tips/solutions to any potential problems in place, before I show Phillip the rough edit (pre-animation and comp)

Sean pointed me towards this film by Thomas Hogben, with reference to macro shots; so that the ice men's world is clearly different in appearance to the 'real' scale of the world that my character inhabits, Sean suggested that I have all the ice men, water droplets etc to be macro shot. Malcolm Finnie also suggested that where I have branches with dripping ice, I could actually film these in my back garden, rather that animating drops in Maya.
Next step will be to research some macro images as backgrounds, that can be blurred etc in After Effects.

LIGHT AND SIGHT - An Interpretation Of Light from Thomas Hogben on Vimeo.

Water droplets in Maya

Scene setting in Maya - using water droplets and backlighting

Scene setting and final shot set up

Scene setting and inserting the final shot set ups into the storyboard, so continuing edits can be made and the final footage from the timelapse and winter scenery, shot around Dundee in January can be framed in the shot.

Image directly below shows CG grass stems in Maya, with an image plane behind, of the landscape I filmed. I'm now using reference (left) of how water droplets form on stems and will recreate this in Maya (right).

Once all of this is complete then I will animate the melting ice men and then get everything into Nuke and begin comping it all together - including lots of light rays, God Rays and lens flare.

Dressing to shot

shot_10: Dressing to shot. I've deleted most of the tree and have just left the branches that appear in shot. The icemen have been removed and I will put some ice highlights on the branches...

This will save time on rendering

Green screen shots for the water droplet scene

Green screen image for the water droplet scene

Scene setting for shot 16

Scene setting for shot_16.

Left: Rendered shot at 50%

Right: Perspective panel showing the image plane and IBL.

I've taken a screen shot of the sky footage and have created a jpeg file, with just the sky, for the purposes of rendering refractions. I've eliminated all the hills, grass etc for this shot, so that the perspective on the branches works.

Next step:

To replace the sky image with a screen shot of the green screen footage.

In this case, the image with the hand and finger pointing.

Left: Prelude clips of green screen footage

Right: Perspective panel