Doing something useful... Actually pays off...

So, my design for the diary is actually going to be used :)

The only changes that needed to be made were to use an FXU (student union) logo instead of the universities...

A damn good find...

So, whilst stumbling through the urban wasteland of the internet in the search for textures (for the Sims no less, don't knock it Georg, it gave me an idea of what UV unwrapping was and texture painting before i'd even heard of Maya) and came across this gem of a website that is too good not to share.

http://webtreats.mysitemyway.com/

And the best thing is, it's all free:

"All royalty free stock icons, clip art, images, brushes, custom shapes, layer styles, layered PSD’s, patterns, textures, web elements, themes and other design resources on this website are free for use in both personal and commercial projects.

You may freely use them in software programs, iPhone skins, scrapbooking kits, web templates, Themeforest themes, websites, print on demand sites such as Zazzle, blogs, etc. No attribution or backlinks are required, but any form of spreading the word is always appreciated!

You may redistribute them within projects such as those listed above, but not by themselves as is."

Doing something useful...

Ahha, my poor blog probably thought it was going to be safe and get a well deserved rest over the summer, but I'm afraid not...

I've decided I'm actually going to have a productive summer, do something useful and actually create some work. Sadly I haven't got round to that yet, however I have done something useful the past couple of days. I (along with countless others) got a message on facebook from the new Student Welfare President, Tim Port, asking about designs and volunteers for work towards Fresher's week etc. I decided that I would put forward a design for the front and back covers for the 2010/11 student diarys (a copy is given to each first year): "This can be of any appropriate image (preferably something that reflects Cornwall or Falmouth and must fit onto the A6 cover)" aaaand here's what I've come up with (oh and because it's A6, the previews will probably be HUGE):

FRONT:

BACK:


Whether anyone else will actually have a go at creating a cover is beyond my knowledge, but hopefully I shall find out if my design is any good, (I emailed Tim it earlier today, so am waiting to hear back). In case anyone was wondering (which you probably weren't, but shall be informed of anyway...) the textures are from scans of a load of paper (digital collage... the actual bits are very odd shapes as they're leftovers) I nabbed from the Art rooms at school during one of my projects in Sixth Form. I loved the paper and kept it for an unknown future project, I really want to use them for something animated, either background or character clothing, but I need to come up with any idea before I can do so! Hopefully I'll have an idea before the end of summer, but I'm going to Spain next week though, so hopefully it'll inspire me in some way :)

Finished Formation! (UPDATED)

I went hand the DVD with all the files on for the Formation project, told Derek that Denzil had commented on the final thing with his thoughts, Derek then suggested that we made the improvements Denzil wanted.

So here it is, for the (hopefully) final time... Formation (Mark II).

Final Post of the year!

Well... it's the final post of my academic year, and my 50th blog post! The blog will live on (hopefully through the summer too...)

So... here's the completed Animal Firm. (I couldn't figure out how to upload a PDF file, I believe you need an account of somesort somewhere). Each picture will probably be huge, so click for a massive preview...

Animal Firm

I've just realised that I haven't actully done much Animal Firm updates since showing my resource images. It's pretty criminal (aharhar...) that I haven't mentioned it in a while, but rest assured, I'm going to provide a massive picture dump to prove my progress. For those who don't know, the Animal Firm brief was to create a set of gangster/mobster animals in their own world, hence my *hilarious* pun earlier. We have to create a production bible (in pdf format) for the concept tv show/film based in the world we have created. I still need to write up the back stories for most of the characters and give them proper names, but here are a few things I've got so far...
My main gangster, is a chihuhua (which I always have to look up before I attempt to spell...), the ironically named Mr. Big:



The character on the left is called "Toothy Joe", and the one on the right a (currently un-named) bouncer for "Club Tropicana", ran by the Peacock above.

I've created the environments by using the Sims 2 (like I did for the background project), so that I can save my sanity (my perspective goes crazy when I try to draw a building from scratch...). Each of the buildings are created on rough sketches I drew beforehand, without using the game they'd probably stay in the same condition... box rooms with horrendously misproportioned objects and characters in.

The Club is based upon the old Art Deco cinema in the town I come from, (and to some extent, especially the colourscheme, from Grand Theft Auto Vice City and hooray for the crap perspective, despite using a photograph for reference!).


The club's interior:


Some W.I.P's of the characters in the environment:

Aaaand, a finished one:

I think I'll leave it at that for now.

Production Report

For this project, I worked along side Jake Jones and Rozi Barnes, our final idea for the formation title sequence is very much based on the initial ideas from the original brainstorming session with other students and the pitch we gave that day. The three of us wanted to work in the cut-out style that we had pitched to Denzil, so we decided to work together as a group to continue with the idea, we emailed the student we worked with from Penwith College though he never got back to us. We took the strong visual elements and ideas we had formed in the quick pitching session, refined them and then added new ones that were more successful.
None of us had any preference of who would be director or producer, we only assigned these roles (by pulling names out of a bag), because Andy preferred us to. Despite having these roles (Rozi - director, Jake – producer), we worked as equals, one asking the other two for opinions or advice on changes and new ideas as our ideas and techniques evolved throughout production. Jake created a blog (http://flyformation.blogspot.com/) that would enable us all to upload project updates and I created a file sharing account on Box.net that enabled us to upload symbols and files we’d need that could be accessed on any computer over the internet, it also meant that we could share files that were to big to send over email.
We knew the concept of the style we all wanted to work with, but it wasn’t until Rozi, who had a really strong mental image of what the finished style should look like, had completed the storyboard that we found a style we could all work to. We chose literal cut-out shapes that had a distinct look, but were simple enough in construction that the three of us could work on them separately and still create components that worked when put together. Jake and I used the storyboard images to create the animatic and some of the cut-outs from the storyboard were used in the final animation. I created an animatic of a fly, used to test the wing and leg movements in Flash, which I ended up using as a template for the final piece.


The animatic was used as a planning tool for the actual animation, Jake and I spent a morning editing each section to the length we wanted it to be in the final version. I then used this second version of the animatic as a template to divide the animation into workable sections, then figure out the exact number of frames each should be, (doing more maths than I had done in a long time during the process). I then drew up a table with each section and the frame rates so that the group could follow it. The workload was divided between all of us, mainly by personal preference (Rozi had said from the beginning that she had a strong idea of what she wanted the lab to look like, Jake was more keen to develop his ideas for the smoke and flyman – which turned into a flywoman for the real thing – so they worked on the desired sections), but also by workload: I worked on more scenes, because they were shorter and less complicated than the scenes the others did.


In theory, creating the table meant that we could all work separately, including at home, but the animation would still fit together as we were all working from the same time scale. In practice, we differed from it slightly: the beginning section had to be longer to read the word ‘formation’ and look the correct speed; other, unsuccessful, scenes were edited or removed to compensate for this, such as the countryside scene – which was supposed to be 80 frames long – which was removed as we weren’t happy with the final result. This lead to me extending the exterior window scene which came beforehand, this meant the narrative still worked and the animation flowed better.

(BELOW is the edited exterior window sequence. To begin with the shot was static, just the window and hint of buildings, it was edited so that the camera panned slightly to the right, revealing more buildings and trees, hinting the area is of human occupation, while the flies flew left.)


Working on the scenes as separate files meant that things would be easier to go back and edit if needed, which was beneficial as the longer start meant that we needed to go back to cut unnecessary frames and shorten overly long sequences. In addition, it was – again in theory – supposed to ease the strain for the computer of working on a long animated sequence. But in reality Flash still crashed or froze frequently: I kept a tally whilst working on this project (which I kept updated on my blog), the grand total came to 26, After Effects faired no better, failing 8 times within the first four hours of piecing the final animation together. I think this is partly because of the large aspect ratio we were asked to work at (1920 x 1080), which meant that Flash couldn’t handle the large textured background we wanted in each shot and lots of symbols had to be resized in Photoshop before they could be brought into Flash without it throwing its toys out of the pram.
One of the largest problems we came across was when it came for us to export the finished files we had worked on in Flash as videos to edit together. Due to the large stage size, picture size and number of different layers for each scene (including a separate layer for every fly, which got a bit manic when there was around seven different ones, each with their own individual Motion Tween, flying around the screen at once) it became a bit of a nightmare. The exported videos became ridiculously jerky so that the action would jump around statically every few seconds rather than flow smoothly like it was supposed to. To evade this problem, we exported each scene as a sequence of .PNG files, (the choice to use these rather than another image format was due to the fact that the .PNG can export an Alpha Channel, which we needed to allow us to add the textured background Flash had hated). This then allowed us to composite all of the scenes together in After Effects, with the background and later sound. However, the large aspect ratio gave us problems in exporting the final animation from After Effects as well. Denzil had asked for the final file to be rendered as an Uncompressed Quicktime file, which came to a massive 1.8GB so the computer could not handle playing anything after the first few jerky five seconds. I then tried various different forms of render outputs, a smaller mp4 (standing at a much more respectable and reasonable 64MB) played the animation in its entirety, but at about half the speed. After sending a slightly panicked email to Denzil asking his advice and acceptance of a different size – he suggested using either an MP4 (which I had tried) or an MP2. The Mpeg2 worked and played at the correct speed, however when we added the sound clip, a piece of copyright free music that Rozi had found, it rendered the two out as separate files. We were able to resolve the problem, by exporting the finished animation and sound together, as a HD video for Windows file, which is the one I have uploaded to Moodle, my blog and to YouTube for Denzil and others to view.


Left: Original .PNG file. Right: Still from the final animation after compositing separate elements with alpha channels together on After Effects.