Getting there...

The final animatic, with linetests starting to be dropped in.

Bron

Enter the Vector

Prior to the final render process, Paul Sinclair discussed with me the possibility of using a Vector render in Maya. He showed me how to change the settings in the render globals, and I was able to experiment with the vector render.

The Vector gave the drums a much flatter, 2D feel, which would compliment my film considerably better than a straight render.

For the final render, I used an area gradient with medium highlights and reflections, with a black hairline edge.

Bron

Work What Kat Did

Kat Downes was signed off for 30 hours on Pinny Gig. The following are overviews of the work she did:

Animation Assistant: When work become too much, Kat offered to help with inbetweening my key frames. This was a huge relief, and helped a great deal, even just to feel that a weight had been lifted.

Kat inbetweened shot 13 (picking up sticks before playing drums) first. This was brilliantly done, in good time with care and consideration. She also shot the frames into iStopmotion and arranged the frames so that the pauses were in the appropriate places. The animation itself was lovely and smooth, I was very pleased with the outcome.

Kat then inbetweened shot 2 (hands picking up sticks) and 24 (guinea pig sitting back and thinking.)

Concept Artist: The following images are pieces of concept work that Kat produced for my piece:






Kat offered her services as a concept artist, which I was happy for her to contribute to. Her naturalistic style made a change from my very simplistic, caricatured way of drawing.  

I was pleased with the outcomes, they are good support to my own concept work.  It's good to get additional insights into my character as well.

Uphill Struggle

On reflection, my film is big. Really big. Too big, really. Really too big. Really.

And suddenly, I'm not sure if I'm going to finish the film. There's not just the animating to take into consideration, but the Maya side of the work, then the cleaning, the inking, the colouring, the editing... it's a huge project to be tackling alone. In a way, I wish someone had turned to me and told me that it couldn't be done when I did my first animatic which totaled 3 and a half minutes. Plus there's 80 hours worth of group work to complete.

... help...

Bron

Final Script

This is based on the most recent animatic:





Nat wrote up the final script for me, using the final animatic as a guide line.

Another New Maya Trick!

Turns out there's a fair few funky things you can do in Maya!  Not only is there the wonders of FCheck, to see rendered frames play back, there is also Playblasting, which allows you to preview animation in real time, and save the playblast file as a film.

Above is a playblast of my drum kit, prior to final renders.  Some shots, such as blank sky or peculiar angles of cymbals mark shots where there is no drum kit in the shot.

This is still subject to change, and needs to be animated.

Bron

Animatic IX

The post summative assessment animatic, taking into account the thumbnails from the previous post. Another 10 seconds have been clipped since, thanks to Jo. A change has also been made to the part where the guinea pig is reaching for the cymbal. Instead, the guinea pig grows increasingly frustrated, keeping in line with the cheeky, troublesome, short tempered character he's evolved into.

Other changes include a title sequence and cutting the "double gag," as already mentioned in the discussion of the summative assessment overview.

The opening shots of the guinea pig are going to be done using two already animated scenes. Not much needs changing, so the frames I've animated aren't completely redundant.



Bron