Shake that Thing!

Pictures from the Shake process.

First image: Pen inked, cleaned and shot in through the line tester. The inking and cleaning was done by Claire Burn.

Second image: Shaken script one.

Third image: Coloured by Jo Staniforth, with white areas green so that they can be colour replaced.

Fourth image: Shaken script two. The final result, with alpha channels.

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As Quickly as it Began...

... it was over.  Without even realising it, all the 2D animation was finished.  Kind of an anti climax, really.  All that's left is the After Effects and the titles and poster to drop in from Chris Moles in First Year.

There's still plenty to do with Maya, but I feel considerably more at ease now.

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Shake a Tail Feather

To make colouring easier for Jo (and likewise to make Jo's colouring easier for me) we were required to put our work through two different Shake scripts.

The scripts were written by Laurie Priest, and made very simple to use.

The first script increased the contrast, and made the lines picked up in the line tester matt black. It also made the backgrounds perfect white, so that to colour the characters, all that was needed was the paint bucket tool in Photoshop. Anything white, however, had to be coloured bright green.

After the frames had been coloured, the frames were taken back into Shake. Anything painted bright green was then colour replaced in Shake to white, and all background was turned into an alpha channel.

This makes layering the final film together much simpler, and makes the colouring process far easier as well.

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Getting there...

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

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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.

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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