Six*2

Styleframe in-progress, thought I'd throw it up anyway.

Still a bit to go on this one, working on blending, highlights etc.

Six*1

A fully-fledged stlyeframe!

This is just how it sounds - a prime example of what the final film will and effects will appear. Please click on the image for a full view.

Six*0

Some work on the 'money shot'. Building sketches and impressions etc.

 

Five*9

Some WIP on the dream sequences. First two are from the pyramid-based dream. First is obviously a progress on the character style of the camels, the second is a colour guide for the sequence.

The two below are WIP for the Leprechaun-based sequence. First is a colour guide to the leprechaun figure. The second is the final design for the ute, which will be mocked up in 3D (as a reference point for the animation.)

Five*8

More work. Some rapid examples of crowd/environment interpretations.

 

 

The above (final) image is an example of how an entire environment may be transformed.

Five*7

Got a bit slack again. Catch-up posts on concept, then some posts on styleframes! Some further sketches on possible Inner's as well as mouth shape and style studies.

Five*6

Some more concept work as it comes. Some very sketchy, some more refined - so is the nature of the beast.

Click on the second image for a proper view. These are for one of the dream sequences based off some really creepy nightmares that I use to have when I had just started high school. I lived out of town so I would catch the bus home, during primary school the bus would drop me at the bottom of the street but in high school it dropped me at the end of my driveway. The driveway is a decent length so the dream would start with me getting off the bus, cross the road and start up the driveway, then I would be stopped by a leprechaun that would jump out of a bush and try to give me coins. I wouldn't take the coins and then a old holden ute would suddenly scream up the street and veer off, hit the leprechaun and then chase me. That's the point where I would wake up. Weird I know. So for part of the dream sequence intro I was going to include snippets of this. I am taking the approach that it is alot easier to make the sequence in it's entirety and then cut from that when cutting the film. So I have the storyboard and the style, so that's on the way. I figured I may as well start it now and get the ball rolling on the dream sequence early. All 2D except for the ute - will make a basic 3D model as a reference point and use that for angles etc for the illustrated version.

Another dream sequence - a pyramid taking off into space. This relates to several things; my interest in ancient egypt, my intrigue with the notion of other life in the universe and also a dream which I had once about who built the pyramids? Personally I like the Stargate theory of aliens but that's just me.

WIP sketch of the monster train. Trying several different approaches, with several key similarities. I really want the train to appear to be a mixture of organic and mechanical - like the 'monster' has been born of a machine. This particular sketch is obviously a clown approach. Personally I don't have an issue with clowns but I know that alot of people are quite scared by them. Mind you, they can be rather fantastically creepy in films.

Octopus Moon WIP - an octopus stuck in the moon. For one of the dream sequences. Click for larger view (& the notes).

Some concepts of what the transformations between real and INNER will appear like. Initially I had the idea of having the INNER's appearance flicker in, which I still may include in some way but I think that there is a far more visually appealing way to approach it. A few ideas that I have had since then is having the INNER's appear through several different means - a violent transformation that appears more like a mutation that a subtle overlay. Other approaches include a tornado-like effect reminiscent of the transformations in The Mask. Also, I have thought of using keyed footage of ink drops and splatters to reveal them in a very fluid way. I plan on using a mixture, but the majority will be the mutation and tornado-like effects.

Five*5

Worked through the Particle Shadows tutorial over at VideoCopilot. I figured that it could provide one approach to creating the shadows for the  INNER's in an efficient way. I'm right, but it will take tweaking. It was a reasonably quick tutorial to get the basics of the technique down-pat but it took a fair while to play with the details so that I could achieve the right volume to the shadows.

This was the raw result of the base tutorial. The objects cast the shadows correctly and according to plan, but there were issues with some of the shadows being to close to the ground in the sense that they were far to dark in comparison to what they should (in reality) be. I played with the settings further and improved on the issue but it was by no way resolved. I kept going and it frustratingly refused to improve to any degree that I would deem acceptable. Then I had a thought, which was something that I should have thought of at the beginning;

Yep. The objects had collided/passed through the floor plane which had created said abomination. So very frustrating that I had not thought to check earlier - I would have saved myself some serious time. But we learn from these mistakes. When creating the emitter I had tested and checked it thoroughly but forgot to recheck when continuing with the tutorial, when I made changes to the emitter. So I tweaked the settings on the emitter and moved the emitter higher and you can see comparison to a couple of attempts and the final attempt in the following video. The shadows aren't dark enough in my opinion, but I think that has more to do with the render than anything..

Five*4

LADYTRON - TOMORROW (OFFICIAL) from Neil Krug on Vimeo.

Found a high res version of Neil Krug's music video for Ladytron. Can't believe I forgot about Vimeo. Anyway, thought I would throw that up.

And now we have some more concept art, which I am slowly getting uploaded to here. I'm still scanning all the various sketches in so when I finish that I'll be putting them up all in one post. Possibly just as a pdf to download, that may be easiest. Still have a fair bit to scan so that might be a little while yet.

The final image is one of the final styles. I will be putting up more sketches of it later but as I finish this particular styleframe for it I figured I should put it up. I'm refining the shading more, so that will be up tomorrow.

Five*1

Bridge Comp Test base track from Dane Kirkland on Vimeo.

Bridge Comp Test 1 from Dane Kirkland on Vimeo.

Bridge Comp Test 2 from Dane Kirkland on Vimeo.

AE Motion tracking WIP.

Exploring motion tracking in After Effects. The base unaltered track that it gave is the top video. As far as a stable track it was rubbish, but that's to be expected when you haven't tweaked the settings what-so-ever. Mind you, it kept it in the general area of the tracking point reasonably ok-ish so that was enough for me to work from. I linked the position of the comped character through the use of an expression to link it with the tracking data. That way when I changed the track layer the character's position would be automatically updated. Sure I could have copy and pasted the relevant data but this was just far more efficient.

The second video is a more refined track, but as you can see it still slips here and there, particularly with the larger camera movements.

The final video is that same track again, tweaked further - with touch up's done by hand. It was a bit painstaking to do it this way but still worked out pretty well. It's still not perfect, I'm going to continue to play with it to see if I can get it perfect - but this isn't too bad as far as it goes I don't think.

I have done a few other tests which I will upload as well, but this was the best one for this particular example. So after this little exercise I've realised that the challenge of tracking into unstable footage for the length of time planned and the complexity of what I will be doing would be... well suicide. I'm pretty sure it would be doable, but would not look as good as it would if it were stable footage. There will still be some handheld footage in the film, but the rest will be shot on a tripod and manipulated into appear as though it is handheld. I've thought of a few different ideas on how to approach this (keying, plugins etc) I think the route I will explore further is using handheld footage as a direct base for simluating the movement. Using the same technique that I did in the examples above and applying the tracked movement to a stable piece of footage. I'm yet to shoot any stable test footage but I've quickly mocked up an example using the movement of the footage above on a still image. I think as long as the footage which is to be used is of a higher res than the final export it should work. Tests will confirm this of course and it may mean double shooting everything that I want as handheld, but that's alot less time-consuming than the alternative. If not, I'll use a mixture of the techniques. (Video eg follows, ran out of my daily vimeo quota =p)

Five*0

3D WIP Compilation from Dane Kirkland on Vimeo.

First of many posts detailing my pre-production. Some WIP of my efforts to learn more about 3D as I head further into the project. I will detail my rigging exercises in another video.

Initially I was intending on the INNER's all being 3D. But I've since realised that my 3D skills are not up to the task and at the end of the day I prefer 2D for animating. Regardless I will be taking what I have been learning and applying it to modelling various elements within the film - but not all of the them will be 3D, the majority will in fact be 2D but I am intending on creating a mixture as well.

I have some mockup's which I have been working on which I will be putting up soon.

I'm happy that I have a decent understanding of modelling, uv mapping and texturing in Maya now. As well as a basic idea of how the sculpting in Mudbox works as well.

The models in question were done as a part of another project, which itself was an exercise in learning Maya for use in my MAP. I have been doing a number of projects for competitions and keying all the work towards what needs to be done in the pre-production stage of my MAP work.

Four*5

A couple of tests. The program tests are definitely taking off - Maya and After Effects mostly. I will be posting a reel of test examples either late next week or the week after, stay tuned for that one!

Playing with AE particles and Maya water.

Other updates while I am at it; Storyboard/Animatic is coming along nicely. Hopefully if all goes according to plan the storyboard will be completed by Tuesday and the animatic not too far behind it.