Final Product

So, here is my final prequel scene... !!! Meet Miss Fia. :)

Progress....

AHHHH

Compositing Progress

My goal is to ultimately get this piece as polished as possible for my grad panel, but also to use as a piece in a demo reel, etc. I want to get something finished that is to the quality I want. I feel like right now I am 50% through it. I have spent the last week pretty much using every bit of my spare time to edit it, so I feel like I could get it done by Wednesday. Things are starting to fall in place now and it feels more secure, even though I know I need to still work hard, I know that it is ultimately going to fulfill a goal if I push through.

Today I developed how I am puppeting my hair (it involves it being on 2's, but using some of the default interpolation in After Effects, so I have to stagger it). Right now I am not happy with how it looks but with a bit of tweaking I think it will be fine.

Other than that I want to add some ripple effects, which I wish I had worked on earlier but I will just have to deal with working through it when the time comes. (most likely.... tomorrow.)

Mocha

I got a lecture about using the computer to my advantage so I have been trying to wade further into software I skipped over because I didn't feel like I had the time to learn it. I know the basics of After Effects but I usually prefer to do things manually (much to the sadness of my recurring tendonitis). I have to track a lot of things for this shot so I looked into tracking, and finding that the default tracker in AE was not very sophisticated, Daryl-Lynn suggested I try Mocha, which also comes with AE but is far more intuitive in tracking planes and shapes. Fia's nose is my track point for all her feature and hair so I spent an afternoon dicking around in Mocha and trying to get it work. Once it did, the results were very satisfactory, and if I had spent this afternoon doing the tracking manually, I know it would have taken me three times as long.

















Some helpful tutorials I found to help me get started on Mocha:

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/stern_eran/03_RG_CornerPin/video-tutorial
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaTsJAG6dMQ
http://vimeo.com/3107078

James also lent me his handout from Brian Charles' motion graphics class. I am hoping to take that next year.

"These boxes are here to HELP YOU"

Beginning Compositing

I've started to composite now and getting my layers together. This is what it looks like so far-













The background is a painting with a water effect on top, and the body is made in flash, blurred and track matted over some paper. More on the water effects later - James and I tried out some different methods to get a water effect in the camera room and it was an interesting process.

New Shoot!

I had another shoot and it went swimmingly (har har har). I'm pleased with the results. I had to adapt some of my technique to get it done, but it really turned out for the best in that regard. I had wanted to do replacement arms using 3D created templates, but it really got too finicky. The 3D aspect was great with the Pupurun project but the arms were so small it wasn't worth it here - I ended up just making the arms quickly by cutting strips and folding them.

They could have been more finessed, but I really wanted to have something to at least try out. I have been reading about Yuri Norstein's thoughts on animating and one thing from him that stood out to me was that he explained that spontaneity is important in art - that over-analyzing the process will strip the work of its original quality.

I have seen that in my own work, like in painting, where I have over-worked the image and lost a lot of its gestural quality as a result. What was more important here was the motion of her arm surfacing so as long as it was in the correct position I decided I would be happy with it. Martin also suggested to me earlier to make a few replacement heads and have my cardstock and scissors on set so I could do quick fixes and that helped very much - in the end, it allowed me to finish the scene with her resurfacing, because I just ended up making a few more heads to replace with at that angle. The black hair on her head was still wet paint when I shot it! I reused my already made arms to fashion the front crawl/doggie paddle off screen. So that was my lesson in spontaneity on set!

These are the arms I made and some pictures of the set.

























































































































This was the first test of the arms alone -



And this is the footage I shot - the paper around her head is to diffuse the light and will be masked out after.

Fia Drawings

Some concept sketches for Fia, and design ideas. Where she pushes the bicycle is an idea for how to portray her adaptability and creativity, when finding the bicycle is broken.