Week 44-46

Rigging with Nico Sangrajka

Almost three weeks of rigging. It started out fine, and I felt like all was going well, as more and more where added to the rig I slowly felt I like I lost sight of what I was doing and why.

2½ week weren't really enough and I could easily have spent more time adjusting the rig, painting better skin weights and adding even more blend shapes, giving the animators a wider range of possible expressions.

- a couple of screen shots of the rig -

1.& 2. of November

Film Analysis with Stig Kulset

We where treated to a couple of different films starting out with "Blue Velvet" followed by "The Piano", "The New World" and finally first episode of "The Singing Detective".

This was all films I had never seen before and it is always nice getting new experiences, I especially liked "Blue Velvet", the best out of the four. By showing us "The New World" Stig was playing a mean trick on us - that movie is simply awful, the worst part about it was that he knew this - and still made us endure almost 2½ hours of movie hell.

But all things aside it was actually quite nice with a little break from the trailer project.

Week 43

Environment modelling with Jericho Green

This week we started modelling the final props, settings and environment - replacing all the blocks with the finished and much more detailed models, getting even closer to how everything should look in the end.

We also looked at what had to be done in 3D due to paralax, and what could be done in 2D - like mattepaintings.

I spent a lot of my time this week on one asset, the car that I've modelled and UV'ed - I would have liked it to be even better but my modelling skills are still improving and I didn't have more time since we had to move on to other stuff - so maybe I'll refine the model later. For now this will have to do - and since we do not see that much of the car in close up I think it'll be just fine...

The car is modelled after a VW beetle, since all the characters are insects.

- a screenshot of the car i did-

Week 39-41

Modelling and Texturing with James Stone

We modelled our characters, UVed them and textured them. From the beginning the idea was that we also should model all of our props as well - this turned out to be too much, but we managed to make some of them, the rest will have to wait for later.

My character is Jules, the Austrian guy from the movie - we couldn't really figure him out in the design process so he is bit of a mixture of a ladybug and a wood louse. I've tried to make this character my own, even though I didn't do the final design - and I'm quite pleased with the final result.

- some screen shots of Jules -

- another concept done in Illustrator -

- a quick concept/environment design I did in Illustrator for the trailer project -

Week 37-38

3D animatic with Cyrille Caron

Here we start to take our 2D animatic into 3D, trying to figure out how to best frame every single shot. Deciding on what camera angle, focal length etc. we want to use. All of this is done using very simple build characters and sets, since the focus at this stage isn't on great animation or beautiful light settings and so on, but more on the actual layout. I think we went through three or four versions on the animatic, small changes that had to be made from one to the other; here you can see the first and the final version, even though we have already talked about some minor changes that might need to be made, things like tweaking the timing of the sound etc.

At this stage all the wünderfull animation was done by the CGA part of the group, later when the proxy models have been replaced with the finished 3D models - the animators will help us out and hopefully make some awesome animation - making this great trailer complete.

- The final version -

- A background Image I did for the final shot, digital paint and collage done in Photoshop -

- first version of our 3D animatic -

- a couple of screen shots of the character, Catherine that I "modelled" for the animatic -

- Some screen shots from the first version of the 3D animatic -

- the final image, rendered using Illustrator -

- the concept sketch of the fisherman -

week 35-36

Story Boarding und Character Design mitt Uwe Heidschötter und Christian Puille.

And since that is about as much german as I speak, we'll continue in english. It has been a couple of great weeks, with plenty to do. We had to figure out what story we wanted to tell, and which images we would use to tell that story. Then we had to draw the story board, design the characters, and finally make an animatic.

- the 2D animatic for our Jules ét Jim trailer prj. -

- color script for the trailer, the images where later used for the animatic -

- some rough sketches I did for our character designs -

2nd Year

The Trailer Project. A group project that will last the entire third semester.

Each group is given a classic film they have to re-artdirect and the create a 30 sec. long trailer for it. For this project we will also be working with the animators, as they will animate our characters for us. I am in group with Nikki ( http://n-starostka.blogspot.com/ ) and Fie ( http://a-tholander.blogspot.com/ ) and we will be working on Francois Truffauts "Jules ét Jim", it's a story of two best friends who falls in love with the same woman, Catherine. Since the movie is rather slow paced and with a lot of talk-talk-talk, we've decided to make our trailer more action packed, taking some of the more interesting scenes out of their context, cutting them together into something that hopefully looks a bit more entertaining. Furthermore our three characters will be modelled as insects, with a somewhat flat looking background, like sets on a stage.

- i taught i taw a putty tat -