August 31st, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
As I mentioned before these past couple of weeks have been devoted to compositing my shots and editing them together with the audio track into a final film. I’ve intentionally been rushing to finish it by the start of the week (the actual deadline is 11th September 2006) due to reasons I’m not at liberty to explain for the moment but what it means is that I’m now at a point where I’ve to decide if I want to continue tweaking and possibly incur a large amount of extra work or just leave it as it is, kick back and enjoy the rest of my time here in Bournemouth. The perfectionist part of me prefers the former. I do have a bit of time to mess about with it so I’ll probably do it. Worse case scenario my adjustments don’t get incorporated in time (or ends up damaging the film) and I just hand in what I already have. Anyways here’s the situation so far:
I found a more interesting and appropriate font for the title and credits.
Just for the sake of it, I’ll go into a bit more detail about how I composite the various passes in Shake. A typical shot requires that I render out 1 pass of the sky, another pass with just the background elements and another with the foreground elements (Mr. Knox, Kid and the bench usually) then finally an ambient occlusion pass (sometimes I render the ambient occlusion pass separately for background and foreground). When the bus is in the shot it might require an additional pass specifically for the bus. I usually only utilise the Blur (or Defocus), ContrastLum and iMult nodes to end up with the final look. I only had to render out Depth passes for the first and last shots mainly because I had camera moves in them. I also had to tone down the ambient occlusion effect (20% mult) otherwise the darkened areas just make the shot look like it’s indoors. I didn’t eliminate it entirely because it does give the shot more depth even though it’s very subtle. Here’s a sample breakdown for Shot06:
Hopefully I’ll have some more interesting news concerning the project next week. See you then!
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August 15th, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
I managed to get the first-pass animation integrated with the sound and music (both first drafts as well) in time for the crit of Thursday. I received some productive feedback from my tutors and coursemates of both the animation and audio aspects. The rest of the week was then devoted to tweaking the animation and rendering a couple of shots. Unfortunately there wasn’t much else to it. I’m just glad I haven’t lost my momentum and experiencesd any symptoms of burnout yet.
This week starts off with more rendering of shots. My plan is to render out all the shots in the appropriate layers (background and foreground mostly), composite and edit them all into the full film then review at what needs to be tweaked in terms of timing, animation and rendering. That way I can make the necessary adjustments if time permits and only re-render the affected layers/shots. FYI, I’m using Shake and Premiere Pro for my post-production needs. Here’s a screenshot showing how I assembled one of the shots in Shake:
That’s about as complicated as it gets - so far. Here are some familiar examples with the newly-created compositing effects:
On the one hand I feel the backgrounds could use more blur/DOF in some of the shots. Otherwise the whole shot might look quite flat and bland. On the other hand I don’t want to patronize the audience by telling them what to look at with blatant areas in and out of focus in every shot. Also, I still need to decide if I want to experiment with Ambient Occlusion as a way of enhancing the look further. Decisions, decisions!
Anyways. See ya soon!
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August 5th, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
We did the sound recording at the university grounds and in the studio on Wednesday. As I suspected, getting my kids to perform on cue was an impossible task (the old adage about working with kids and animals rings true). We did manage to capture the runs, bench-climbing, jumps and snatches of dialogue needed for Kid after some repeated coaxing. In comparison, Mr. Knox’s vocal recording went so much smoother, with my sound designer’s roommate tackling the role with gusto.
I also managed to complete the first pass of all the shots in my film. Already looking at the edited playblasts I can pinpoint some timing issues and numerous tweaks to be made in the animation. There’s also the task of refining all the facial, hand and cloth animation. Add to that the texturing, rendering and compositing tasks still to be done and I’m wondering if the remaining 4 weeks is going to be enough.
I am so looking forward to hearing the animation with the first draft of sound effects added in!
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