Major || Progress Report 12 - The Re-Submission Post

(unoptimised)

Reflective Statement

From this project I can acertain the skills that I need to work on most urgently. Compositing for one is an important skill, I know about compositing in photography using photoshop but not so much in the process of creating films. I'm also not amazing at sound design; the least I know is that silence can be considered sound design and that music can help to set a mood, after that point, my foley is especially lacking. I think my presentation has improved in regards to my art book, and posting once a week suits my work ethic pretty well, as it gives me time to think about what I am posting. I still need to work on my time management though.

Major || Progress Report 11 - The Submission Post

Reflective Statement

From this project I can acertain the skills that I need to work on most urgently. Compositing for one is an important skill, i know about compositing in photography using photoshop, but not so much in the process of creating films. I'm also not amazing at sound design; the least I know is that silence can be considered sound design and that music can help to set a mood, after that point, my foley is especially lacking. I think my presentation has improved in regards to my art book, and posting once a week suits my work ethic pretty well, as it gives me time to think about what I am posting. I still need to work on my time management though.

Also I am personally not satisfied with this post as i have gotten so far already with the story and animations (90 per cent done, just missing key scenes), I will definitely finish and upload later this week. Signing off.

Major || Progress Report 10 - The Pre - submission Post

Outside and animations are complete now. Just waiting on conductor to finish with the renders.

Sorry for a brief post, I'm focusing on editing what I already have mainly. The purpose was to keep everything up to date anyway.

Major || Progress Report 9 - Random Easter Content

The Outside scenes have started production, after adding a matt painting in the background and a lot of testing. It may need a few more looks as the ground looks too flat and the matt looks foggy, but this will be rectified soon enough.

Found out that my progress reports were wrongly numbered and fixed them. Wooden textures and others were re vamped and added to my growing material library which I am developing to replace old data. An old hard drive of mine got corrupted, so I lost a lot of archived data including my old projects on this course.

Here's a quick snip made as a sample of my animation progress. Over the final three weeks I am planning to finish all my shots in maya and move onto editing fully rendered scenes. 

Major || Progress Report 8 - What's to come

exposure

Once again I've been working a lot on animation this week. As I was doing this I was thinking a lot about the universe around the main character and how they ended up in their situation. The idea was that this was a character dealing with computer addiction as a result of social seclusion and neglect on the side of the parents/guardians. But it was odd to me that the main character was completely unable to leave to the point that the door had become some symbol of escape, plus the idea of psychoactive episodes leading up to leaving and convenient thunderstorms, though attributable to overactive imagination, could be indicative of something bigger unfolding in the world besides the plot.

Environmental storytelling can lend a lot to animation and how much a story can be read into. Doing it well can also improve its re-watchability. Whilst I already have a few elements of environmental storytelling around like the plane and the photo for example, the nature of what is really 'outside' remains mysterious. We already have some indication the of the nature of the outdoors through the presence of rain and the sky outside through the window as well as through the content of the photo. Despite this, the mentality is almost like the main character is completely unable to leave the room to the point that the room seems more like a prison. Perhaps this concept can be built upon in the ending?

Major || Progress Report 7 - Just making progress

The render above is taken from a portion of my animation. This week I have been very focused on getting my various parts of animation blocked out and ready for later in depth articulation. So far I've begun the bedroom and Blank Space scenes. While I've been doing this, various cameras were laid out in a scene with one animation in it so I could chop and change if necessary. The main objective is to get the animations as smooth and transitionary as possible, keeping the idea of visual storytelling in my head.
During my renders I noticed an issue with UV seams appearing white while looking at a longer distance, which also appeared in the render. Looking online, i researched that it might have something to do with the colours showing at the edge of my map. I went into Photoshop and added a black background to solve this.

Regarding the computer display, I put on a random test image from the internet and stuck it onto both the diffuse and transmission ports. If I could do this with a video, it would be even better.

Major || Progress Report 6 - remodelling, lighting

I finished re modelling the hair. I changed the eyes too, but might change them back if it looks better. I felt the blue gave the character a more innocent appearance.

I tried a few test animations over the past few weeks, and as I was moving on to animating the actual scenes, I noticed that the character was too short to effectively get up on the chair. In the render you may notice I used the original character model but the scales between the new and old are the same. It may be that I have to exclude the scenes where Squareeyes gets on the chair, and just not show the lower half of the body to make the scenes less comical. Besides this I have also been working on lighting my environments, learning about light linking, rim lighting and kicker lighting has been really helpful in doing this.

In the next few weeks I plan to begin animating proper and do this for the next 3-4 weeks, and in the remaining weeks I will edit the scenes to a satisfactory standard using the old sounds from my animatic. I aim to have the final animation be about 4 minutes long.