As part of my ongoing reflective practice, and following our lecture on the three C's of Cinematography, I have been studying and reviewing movies....from all genres, tones and styles...
This week I watched 'The Heat', which is a buddy cop comedy with Sandra Bullock and Mellisa McCarthy...
The editing is great. Very fast and the story moves along at a great pace. McCarthy has not only been given some brilliant and coarse dialogue, but her delivery and sarcasm is hilarious.
It was interesting to note that the stereotypical 'beauty' (Bullock), when portrayed as uptight and rigid, became less and less attractive as the movie progressed.
And conversely, the more McCarthy's character delivered ferocious come backs and took absolutely no nonsense from anyone, the more attractive she became...
I believe that confidence is a key factor in attractiveness.
I had some great feedback during my one to one with our external examiner Han Ter Pak and Brendan Body this week.
I can see that it can all feed into and form part of my ongoing reflective practice.
Brendan said he'd been thinking of an idea to incorporate into my final film...... a seed that drops from the flower, that the child offers to the ice people....and that seed, in turn, grows into the flower as seen in the final frames of the film....
As part of our ongoing reflective practice, I've also been reviewing and making a transcript of the interview I held, with Steve Sweeney of Barnardo's Rollercoaster Service in Dundee. They help children deal with bereavement.
This week we are to present our final conference ideas in the lecture theatre; and our conference presentation includes all of our findings and objectives to date. It's been interesting to review my interview notes and to see that the valid points that came from that, can tie in with Brendan's idea and my ongoing ideas...
I am going to do some 3D CGI tests, as part of my practical research methodology, and will experiment with CGI sunlight shining through back lit ice.
I am particularly drawn to the idea of the ice people having a sunlit spot in their forehead and heart, as visual metaphor to represent 'spirit' and an ongoing connection between the bereaved and those that have passed on.
This visual idea will also incorporate the 'four tasks' involved in 'mourning', as noted below in my slide, that Steve Sweeney mentioned during the interview....
Great fun today animating the primary animation for the lip sync shapes, and then the secondary animation for the pacifier...
I was able to copy paste the previous key frame for the pacifier and adjust it slightly on all three
X, Y Z axis, using the graph editor and also by eye, to make it jiggle around and move in and out of the rabbit's mouth; independent to the lip sync shapes (Pacifier in Outliner, Perspective view and graph editor circled in yellow above). Key frames are indicated by the red lines, shown on the timeline, along with the green wave file of the audio.
The blend shapes for the mouth lip sync and facial expressions are great...plenty of them and lots of options for animating...
The three following clips took about 45 mins each to animate and lip sync....
I expected that changing from using AutoCAD to Maya would be similar to say, driving an automatic car for years and swapping to a manual gearbox...
No.
Welcome to Formula One racing!
And today.....I found that I was actually 'driving' (animating) without thinking about which labyrinth of menus I was in, which interface I should have selected, which drop down menu I happened to find myself in, which attribute channel; lambert; node and hypershade vortex I needed to be in, what layer activation should be on, which general editor tab I needed to be in and which audio import command I should be using....
I must have done some of it automatically and Maya wasn't the threatening, mysterious myriad of complexity that it usually is...
I feel like Sigourney Weaver's character 'Ripley' in Alien, when she climbs into the Power Loader and says to the Alien "Get away from her you b****"!"
So the past couple of date nights have involved dinner in, then pudding and coffee at restaurants we've not been to before, and topped off with Game of Thrones Season 5!
So a few visual images of inspiration that have come from this - all with a backing track of fantastic Ceilidh music on Radio Iplayer, from Dundee last Sunday...
Interesting that if my inspiration were part of a colour script over the past two weeks, it would have a fairly limited range of Ice Blue and Warm Orange....
Colour script link for more info! http://pixar-animation.weebly.com/colour-script.html
The View of Dundee from 'The View' restaurant in Wormit and some interior shots from Avery & Co in Dundee....
the coffee was a work of art itself... I commented on how impressed I was..."years of experience" was the answer!
Game of Thrones - Season 5. Always intrigued by how limited the colour range is, in some of the shots...
So UV mapping and now Lip Sync....a new vertical learning 'curve'!!
Maya interface, showing our Pre_Vis camera set up for Shot_23. Baby rabbit in the foreground with irate and provocative trolls in the background!
Yellow circles and arrows indicate timeline, and audio playback options in Maya....
I made a few tests of the lip sync, some worked better than others, but all seemed to be either slow, or not make much sense with the mouth shapes...
Katherine gave me a good tip....'record your mouth making the shapes' and copy that...
Surprisingly my mouth didn't make any of the shapes I thought it would...
This clip is just 23 frames long (we are working on 25 frames per second), so the clip zips past and it's difficult to distinguish the sounds.
I ended up with two basic shapes ('w' and 'oo'), and a final mouth pose that I hope looks defiant!
Here's a few notes I made about the process; that tie in with the image above....
Process to import sound....
Open scene number.
File >
Import audio >
Right click on timeline and select sound >
Select audio from sub menu >
Select playback time as 'real time' >
Select blend shapes (facial expressions and mouth shapes) and set them as key frames, in time with the audio track.
So that it's convincing, it's a good idea to key frame the mouth shape, a few frames before the sound emerges....
I then used the graph editor to snap the animation and remove any Maya smoothing....
So our Jeremy Kyle project 'Dark Toy Story' hahaha is coming along really well....all the models are now finished and textured and the 3D character turnarounds look brilliant....
We did some additional work on the Pre-Vis and added on some extra frames at the end, to provide a less abrupt ending to the story....
The sound will be refined as we progress and the levels will need adjustment, as the clips are taken from numerous different shows....
It's been great to see people's reactions so far, to the storyboards, animatic and Pre-Vis.....the humour is really coming through....
We begin animating and lip syncing this week....new learning curve here I come!
Wow - what a learning experience with UV mapping; which I have to say I really enjoyed, once I broke through the pain barrier!
I spent yesterday tidying up the layers in Outliner and naming them, so it was easy to see what was what...
And made sure there was no duplication of the topology....
All looks good and I also learnt the difference between Blinn (a level of shine to a material's appearance) and Lambert (matt material)....
so the outer walls of the Dollshouse had a Blinn finish, to show the plastic effect, and the interior walls had a Lambert material....the textures (wallpaper) were applied in the UV texture editor - which came into its own, when selecting multiple faces to change to a Blinn material....
Here's a few render shots of the final look....I quickly created one direction light, which points straight at the dolls house, to simulate sunlight...it's a rough mash up for now, just to make sure that the textures all come out in the render....really looking forward to seeing it once it's lit properly!
Maya interface, showing the model area, hypershader, UV texture editor and the render view.....the workspace is pretty busy....time to get a second monitor at home I think (haha)
Great talk by Cam Kennedy, as part of the launch for the new Masters Comic course at DJCAD....
STV were there for the launch and both Katherine and I held up cardboard cut outs of superhero's for the photographers....
I was sat in between Banana and Superman!
Cam Kennedy was very funny, straightforward and highly experienced. A real privilege to hear him speak at length and in detail about his career..
Here's a few snapshots of the presentation so far....I will include a bit more information about my interview with Barnardos Rollercoaster service in Dundee, in the next couple of weeks; prior to the final conference presentation on March 31st....
Love the buzz of presenting 'live' and great feedback from Jeanette Paul, with ideas about seeing if the counselling service at Dundee University, or the DUSA may be interested to utilise this film, once it's made.....
So, what was taking me about 8 hours (no joke) to UV map one room, floor etc has now been reduced to 10 minutes!!!
And, the rotation Axis when trying to 3D orbit the model, sometimes was far away, so everytime I tried to rotate, the model would whizz off the screen. Before smashing the screen to pieces I found a forum, full of exasperated modelers screaming obscenities at Maya.....hahaha...
Turns out I just needed to hover my mouse over the object and hit 'F' key.....lol
Ha! Maya....I'm getting to know you!
I followed the tutorials given to us by Sang plus the youtube link below...and really began to get my head around the UV texturing process in Maya...
A few images below showing the various stages...
Applying a checkerboard, including numbers, so I could see the orientation of the UV map elements, when they are placed into the 0-1 space.
Then taking a UV snapshot, saving as a .png file and sending to photoshop.
Then, in Photoshop, opening that .png file and placing textures (in this case 'cream plastic' and 'twee wallpaper' in a layer underneath the .png UV snapshot.)
I can then scale and tile the textured images so that they cover the area of the relevant UV map.
Then I save that out as a .tiff file and open Maya.
Then, with my UV Texture editor open, I select the objects (double checking that all pieces are visible in the UVTE) and apply a lambert material.
In Maya I then assign my .tiff file to that lambert material and it worked!!!
