Week Nine

Here are the two finished shots that had to be done by the end of the term.

Here is the video animatic for episode 2

Week 8

The floor that the animation degree show has been give is on floor 8. I have been finding bits of information from Rob who has been working on getting the degree show up and running and making sure everyone has somewhere to show there work. Me and Russell hope to have our poster around the college and have our final year film playing around the building also if possible. There is still a lot to sort out.

Week 7

We have been told that we have invite employers to the degree show that we would like to work for after we have graduated. There are a few companies i would love to work for in the future but they are based in America and other places in the world. The first company i would love to work for in the future and who i have been a fan of since i was a kid is Industrial Light and Magic. They are the people behind Star Wars, Transformers, Pirate of the Caribbean just to name a few. They were also the people behind creating and inventing the 3d computer system like Maya, 3dsmax. They also were the first company to do a full CG cartoon called The Adventures of Andre and Wally b. It was created by the lucas Computer graphics project which was then named Pixar.

Week 6

This week i have been told we have to create a group website for our final year film. I have created my groups website using weebly which is easy to use and gives great results for creating your own website. I have chosen to use their free domain which is your website name .weebly.com. This is the link to my groups website smokingelephant.weebly.com

Here are a few screen shots of the website, its still work in progress as we still have a lot more work to do for the final year film.

Week 5

This week i had formative with Mike where he checked my work and how im getting on with my final year film. He also told me what we have to have done by the 16th of March and i feel that im on the right tracks. Me and Russell have both done some animation this term more Russell than me but i have been set certain scenes by Russell to animate. My main purpose is to get the renders looking right and modelling the scene. I have done the majority of the modelling but Russell has also helped along the way. My main goal now is to find away to animate the grass in the scene to give it more realsim. I was going to use dynamics but the was taking far too long to process on my laptop and the renders why taking a very long time to. So i found a way to animate the grass paint effect from a tutorial online. Under the grass paint effects settings there are loads of different parameters you can play about with that animate the grass for you. This save so much time on the processing done by the computer and its done in realtime as well. The render times dont seem to be that bad either.

Week 4

This week we have been shown how to use the render-farm by our tutors. I personally dont think we will be using the render farm as our scenes dont contain anything that takes a long time to render out. Most of our animation is all stop-motion the only CG we have in our film is the environment the characters are set in.

Week Three

This week we have been looking at render layers and how to create them inside Maya. Once they have been rendered out you bring them all together to make the final image inside a composting program such as Nuke or After effects. I have been working on a scene inside maya which involves me integrating CG with live action.

Week Two

This week we have been getting important information on the technical standards our final output has to be. That means the broadcast students or technical staff will run our films through different tests making sure its fit to broadcast. We had a lesson with the course leader of broadcaster who showed a powerpoint on how he wants the final output file to be. Then we went to the broadcast room where they had loads of fancy equipment and showed us exactly what tests our films were going to be put through. This has giving me a big insight and made me think a lot about our film and how it looks. The reason is you cant have a certain red or you cant have to many flashing images at once ect. Lucky enough we havent got any of these issue to worry about in our final year film and we only really need to worry about the output file.

I have also been working on the 3d Maya scene modelling our jungle environment and been playing around with different render settings.

Week One

During the first week we have been giving a brief and the assessable criteria. We have to first setup a blog called professional skills and keep a track of what we are doing week to week. For this project we have to create a showreel which will be used at our degree show. This will show off my best work for employers and give them a sense of what im good at and what path i want to go down.

In total there are 22 shots for the smoking elephant film, a timetable has been created to help plan our work and make things run smoothly.

This is the timetable my group leader has given me to follow.

Here is my individual contract.