Attaching clothing to my alien

I used the wrap deformer tool to attach my alien to it's clothing. I found this basic tutorial which helped me out.

Project Management

interior - was going to model everything in maya - changed idea to using psd images and importing them to After Effects instead. Originally i went to an operating theatre when it wasn't in use, to take reference images of the equipment used and the set up of a theatre. It occurred with the limited time we had that it would be extremely challenging to make loads of detailed assets for a module that didn't concentrate much on our Maya skills. I could therefore spend more time on learning and experimenting with After Effects as this is the first time i've used it. My original images i took was on my iphone and not good enough quality, it was then afterwards i'd decided to go back and take better quality photos where i need to consider the angles of the room and equipment. I needed to take consideration of my own camera angles i used of Jeff for my final shoot so i could place everything correctly for my interior of the spaceship.

With the new images that I captured on my canon 450d, I placed them into photoshop, cut out the layers, and then imported them into after effects. Making the assets 3D layers and creating effects

The two images below i used as a trial to see how this effect would work. The camera pans across the room, the assets nearer to the camera will seem like their moving more than the object further away from the camera producing a parallax effect. This then adds life to the 2d objects making them look 3d creating an uncanny effect where it could look slightly realistic but the viewer knows it isn't.

The Turner Prize

Setting up After Effects

Once all the footage has been shot, I looked through my shots and put them together in Final Cut to create a rough edit. This would allow me to get rid of any unnecessary film and would give me sight of how Invasion will start to pan out.

talk about footage

I would then cut the appropriate scenes on Final cut, separate the green screen shots, and import them as a tiff image sequence. In total i had 14 sequences. When setting up After Effects I created a new composition, edit the preset to HDTV 1080 25 frame per second.

Competitions

http://www.dandad.org/awards/student

http://www.ycn.org/awards

(write for PPP)
Why have i picked this comp brief to do
what am i going to get out of it
why would it be beneficial for me to do - link with swot analysis

dont just compare what i'm entering because of the brand, look at the actual brief.

Bradford Animation Festival (year 2)

Venessa Boyce – 15/8 2:30

CG supervisor Double Negative Visual Effects

Was one of the rare people new from early age wanted to do visual effects

Watched documentary at 15 on Jurassic Park

Graduated from Bournemouth

Got job as matchmover

Worked on Inception, Harry Potter, Total Recall and Skyfall,

Total Recall - director Lenny Wisewood

For Chris Nolan films (for example) there’s beautiful photography to reference with, with total recall there wasn’t much photography.

Very complex shots

Had to create two overcrowded cities, lots of big buildings, power and wealth. Forced to build up into the sky

No real city was filmed apart close up shots.

Had to adapt a lot of the film that was supposed to be based in China, due to the Chinese not liking it.

Apart from 1 lift that was made, everything else was made in full CG.

Had one year to do this

It’s one thing putting something real into cv environment

It’s Another putting cg into real environment  - two different challenges

(UFB) it was meant to be near classical

The director didn’t want glass skyscrapers due to the feeling of them being clustered together on big supporters. It should be magnetic cars hovering on magnetic roads, no trees, no animals, had to be quite serial. Roads and buildings needed making and designing

The car chase; full size cars built, hard to come up for a design for a city when your constantly going through it.

Looked at concept art, was too futuristic, didn’t want tech for the sake of tech. it wasn’t a near classical look he was after.

Pre-vis was useful, 3d storyboarding, directors are using it more today, not just for cg but is an easier way to work for camera moves and for actors to plan everything out.

Everything Double Negative do now works with pre-viz from ‘the third floor'.

Next stage asking director for specific notes from pre-viz. Deciding whats good and whats not. Director looking for negative space, likes unusual edges, nothing too straight.

Went and took references of buildings in London. Always start with photography, more info than concept art.

From these buildings the director like the pics of, they then went to build the environment

Take model of building, chop it up into bits, put into City engine

Constructing city engine

Generate building

Alter the lot shape

Select building and alter perimeters

Building updates dynamically with changes (wasn’t sure what city would look like needed something very flexible)

Designing interesting building shapes

Doing this manually would be terribly time consuming

Extending the process to city blocks

This was a new approach that’s now being used on the new superman

Started mucking around putting buildings in the sky, had to figure out a real shot to work on that could develop ideas in. Had to work blind in sense what final shots would look like from the car scene

Used the third floor pre-viz to help build set in 3D for car chase scene

Put buildings upside down, and underneath buildings

Lighting always backlit

Used very cheap rendering to figure out answers to questions like how quick are the cars going to be etc.

Stones of buildings look very grey scale even though they’ve been textured, so had to start building more interesting brickwork

Start to animate basics, play around with road signs, add more textures and coloures. Director wanted it to be more british, so added in road signs and speed cameras but director didn’t want it. Used holographic road signs instead.

Image from background, photographic background was from New York. Had to make sure their buildings was sat in that world.

Had to build loads of assets for a full City. Team of 4/5. Decided to use trees because City looked too dead.

Next stage, constructing the city, using lego. Putting it together.

Filming was shot in Toronto on an airfield. Director wanted a natural car chase. Made 6 mag cars and stuntmen. Double Negative didn’t have to worry about filming or adding cars it was already done for them. Someone manually had to cut out the cars. Replace reflection in the windows. Had to render CG cars so they could get reflections, and shadows. Lots of CG car involved in every shot

Mapping the roads of UFB

Had to map out the car chase from top of head.

When stuntmen had to make roads fit the movements of the cars.

Designing a shot: director left it up to Double Negative to decide where buildings would fit alongside the road.

Used a shot, and designed on photoshop what the buildings would look like with the cars. The director didn’t like it because it wasn’t backlit.

A month to go and the textures weren’t holding up. In general everything was looking not very nice and just very unfinished.

At this point gets quite difficult to progress, all elements starting to be in place but not looking right

Figuring out composition of image and layer and depth hasing, try get it into shot. Throwing in billboards etc ruined it and felt too cluttered. Took decision to strip back a lot of what they put in. Re-lit it so sunlight was stronger, relighting it helped catch a lot more nice edges, made puddles look nicer. That detail brings the city to life. The DOP added customary lens flare (not their choice) which they didn’t like.

Director was concerned there was a clear connection to the road so the audience would know the cars looked magnetic

Buildings were bigger than traditional buildings (3 times the size)

Took environment to speed past the car because the cars were too slow (30mph after accident on set, health and safety)

Ideas of tunnels, helped with speed element,

After a render they figured out the Tunnels were too dark, and cars were lit in sunlight. Bad compositing, couldn’t look realistic,

So put florescent light in the tunnels, punch more holes in tunnel to expose to sunlight, and changed the position of the sun in the environment

Storm troopers worked for police. Original idea was guys in robot suits and change their waists to CG.

Director was keen to go with the approach or real actors to act with something, and was able to direct them himself and would look more realistic than cg characters. So idea was to replace the stomachs, and would have been easier to make characters with cg.

Problem with cg design was quite easy to mistake guys in the suits for real guys in suits. Wanted to show off that it wasn’t a man in a suit but it looked too much like a man in a suit, very specific. Concept artist had to come up with a few similar ideas. Concept artist, rigger and modeler had to work closely. The man who created iron man helped out. Silhouette couldn’t change too much from original idea of character. Director wanted to be able to see through he spine of the man in the suit so it looked like a robot.

The rig would be driven by snapping the panels on the real and fake character. The idea was to replace the stomach so the cg showed and made it look less human like.  After experimenting with the full CG’s the director said it looked so realistic that they went with the full CG in the end.

Two different worlds and challenges, characters and environments.

Q & A

I don’t keep up with technology, plenty of people who know about software that’s not me, yes there are people that know more than her that she manages and has to supervise but its the nature, theres no pressure on me to know everything about the cg world. The role of cg supervisor isn’t job everyone wants to do, you lose getting stuck into the practical.

Working relationship with cinematographer Paul Cameron, there were conversations with him but wasn’t as collaborative was more like 2 separate jobs, he had his ways on shooting. Sometimes I don’t even know the name of DOP

Best way is always to have photography, if it was up to me I would have taken pics of a city and adapted it, felt more limits making it from scratch. More Cg involved in miniatures, I wouldn’t chose miniatures over visual effects.

Had 4 concept artists for the duration of the year, everything needed concepting. Concept artists were always being asked to come up with new things where as usually there’s one concept artist at the start used for only a couple of weeks

No consideration for motion capture as far as I was aware for the synths, was always going to be real costumes. I was worried CG wouldn’t work for characters and cars. The environemnt is harder to make in Cg

1200 shots used, 1 year to make.

My role is to fit right people with the task and to try make sure the people understand what to do and how their going to do it.  To create and make teams. Downsides you to turn into ‘Mr Manager’, and to have to catch problems before they become disasters. I like the problem solving part and have an over vue of operation.

No/Gloss Indie Film Festival

Game art machinima exhibition

The DFGA year 2 class ran an exhibition for our game art machinima module for the public to come and see. Each group displayed 3 boards of their development work, beginning drawings and final outcomes. We had two projectors show casing the playable environment for the audience to experiment with and the other showing everyones game trailers.

We had around two weeks to put our work together, create name cards, make a show reel, design posters, spread the word and organise the space. 

It was quite an informal exhibition, everyone was walking around talking amongst eachother discussing own work whilst guests and friends were felt the need to take part and immerse themselves in our environments. It was a pleasant feeling seeing the audience ingage in our games and questioning the skills and tools. Seeing everybodys work come together i felt bought a great sense of unity and togetherness as a class that i'd never seen before. 

The experience was insightful and helpful to future class projects and exhibitions. There is so much effort that requires skill and patience that goes into a module of this sort and it was good to see people appreciate our work. It means that development work we are proud of is never wasted after a project.

Thakray Medic Museum

The Thakray Medicic Museum in Leeds is the only medic museum in the area. I felt the need to go out and investigate more on the equipment used in an operating theatre, and with the museum showcasing a long list of materials used over the history of surgery, i would explore different types of styles of the equipment to broaden my ideas and designs.

I found this extremely useful for my design process as i want to make my scene look as realistic as possible, with hints of old school sort of retro style theme to add to the clumsy aliens that don't actually know what they are doing.

Operating Theatre

Walking through the Leeds General Infirmary in search of an operating theatre, I managed to get into contact with a Doctor who granted me special permission to have a look in and take photos of an extremely delicate and sensitive area of the hospital. Videos and photos aren't usually allowed to be taken in a theatre due to health and safety, with all the equipment having to be sterilized and hygiene being the hospitals biggest concern. I got changed into scrubs and managed to get a real feel for what an operating theatre looked like so i could investigate deeper into my research which will enable me to create a more realistic location for the interior of my spaceship.

Exploring the hospital, i stumbled across hallways and staircases that i pictured part of my interior to look like. Part of the hospital had that spaceship feel towards it. A wide variety of Large arches and big square hall ways to trapezium shaped halls with big windows allowing loads of light.