More Updates

So we are progressing well we have around one minute and 15 seconds of footage now, and now we have re jumbled our film it is more understandable and have been cut down from 42 shots to around 29 to 30 which will really cut down production time, also the plan is once all of the shots are completed to go back though the movie shot by shot and just add any overlays or tweak and needed leaves falling just to make the jungle environment and the situation feel more alive, we also need to just make our character rock a little and swing so it seems more like she is stuck and suspended above ground. Also we will be running most of the shots through after effects so that we can do any tweeting movements and such.

Background Process

ok so i finished off the backgrounds and i have to only create maybe another two or three to be completely finished with them, so here you go you can check out the backgrounds below. The colour palette in themovie is now very unified and allows us to tell a simple but interesting story, we hope to transform these scenes into moments the audience will remember, keep watching there is still many more updates to come.

Motivation

I dedicated this weekend to researching more into jungle flora and fauna. I collected a huge amount of reference material and decided to create more backgrounds for the movie. I believe the material really helped the production value. i am still working on them at the moment but when they are completed i will give you guys a sample. in other news we have around 50 seconds of completed animation, we still have a ton of work to do but on the good side we are almost 1/3 of the movie completed coloured, animated and looking sweet we just have to crack on.

Hanging in there progess

so very close to finishing shots 3 and 4 just a few colour fills and line adjustments then they will be ready to cross off of the list. here is a screen shot of around the finished look of the shot. As you can see there were many changes the background was popped out with detail and the lighting has been adjusted to feel
true to the situation. Lets hope this will fit in with the mood and setting of the rest of the film.

with another weekend approaching to update you guys i have created another background to fit in with a shot where our character spots her captain dead on the ground. This is now completed and leaves only 1 background left to have them all completed. Animation wise I have finished the shot I was working on (see above) adding another 16 second to our completed animation giving us a grand total of 37 seconds of completed animation. Flare is almost finished her shot and with that completed we are nearing the minute milestone. As we have heavily weighted ourselves towards completing the beginning of our movie, we feel that floating around and completing various smaller shots will keep us fresh and invigorated with the project.

Update on progress

After a weekend of solid animation, and an assessment yesterday, we received some good and some
negative feedback which we will take into account, there are a few changes to be made here and there but overall we are heading in the right direction both animation and time wise.

​We have nearly completed shots 3 and 4 and will be moving on ahead to the next two shots, we are very behind on our own schedules but i am sure if we keep working at this pace we should be ok for our final assessment. once we complete the shots we are on i will upload a few screen caps and maybe a little taster of how the animation will overall look. hopefully you will enjoy seeing it move and when we have the sounds in that should really bring the atmosphere to life.

Work in progress animation

Flare and i have been busy bees over the weekend cracking on with our movie, at the moment we are working between Shots 3 and 4 which are each about 12 to 13 seconds long. The decision to work between 2 shots keying in rough and then alternating between shots while the other person comes in and black solid lines over the red rough seems to be working both quick and effectively, example below. when the keys have been inserted in black we are able to go through and in-between quite quickly, this is still quite time consuming as most of the actions we have so far are slow moments the in betweens really cant be too wobbly or inaccurate or it would stick out like a saw thumb. whilst working with these shots we have found that we are able to derive quite a lot of emotion and acting from very rough key frames, and are able to impart enough emotion to tell what is happening without needing a face or any final line what so ever, we are basically attempting to show whats happening blind and doing so this allows us to work purely with body language without leaning heavily on facial reactions. Also over the course of the last few weeks we have become aware that our deadline is creeping up at an alarming rate with this in mind we have cut out a few pieces of our main characters equipment and have taken more of a simple approach to her appearance. See image below.

Compared to the original design her equipment has been exponentially downsized her belt, braces, extra bits and pieces have been removed to speed up the animating process. But whats great is that if we have extra time during post production there is nothing stopping up from creating a layer above our line and colour and adding the other equipment in. Speaking of colour moving on to my last point of the post, the colouring stage is being tackled along with the animating mainly so when a shot it lined and coloured thats one more shot finished we dont really need to keep coming back to add colour etc. and really the process takes no longer than 2 hours to fully colour a 12 second shot which is great. mainly due to the wonderful colouring tools that TVP has to offer its users. When the colour is added we have many other tricks up our sleeves the help composit our character and background as on there own they seems very separate, but with a little love and dedication we are able to really pull them together and add a nice atmosphere to a scene. On the right is a screen shot of what a coloured still looks like at the moment there is as i said before much left to be desired but once the finishing touches are added it should be fine. Finally Flare and myself have really been pushing each other to get this movie to be the very best we movie we can create, we are sparing no expense ( which at the moment seems to be sleeping around 2 hours a night if we are lucky and pulling extended work periods) not that i am complaining we love animation and everything it en tales. We just hope that when its finished everyone is able to enjoy it as much as we are working on it.

Up to Date

well i think that about sums up everything we have so far, we look forward to letting you in on the production in the future and hope that you are willing to keep up with our movie, feel free to comment or send us a message in the contact section.

Inspiration

There is a very big part of our film we have not spoke to much about and that is the fact that our movie is still a psychological piece and should feel like the action in the movie is going on within her head, there are times within our movie that our character lapses into a hallucination where things are not what they seems and the jungle although docile will become a very brutal enemy and affects her in a very physical way. to really get into her head we began to look at as we said before Alfred Hitchcock and many of his inspirational pieces, we also wanted to keep the viewer hooked below you will find a few pieces that helped inspire us and really brought out the best in our piece.There is a very big part of our film we have not spoke to much about and that is the fact that our movie is still a psychological piece and should feel like the action in the movie is going on within her head, there are times within our movie that our character lapses into a hallucination where things are not what they seems and the jungle although docile will become a very brutal enemy and affects her in a very physical way. to really get into her head we began to look at as we said before Alfred Hitchcock and many of his inspirational pieces, we also wanted to keep the viewer hooked below you will find a few pieces that helped inspire us and really brought out the best in our piece.

Previous Animatics

As I have almost fully caught up with where we are up to now, I would like to take a minute to look back at the previous animatic versions we had created, just to show how much our movie has grown and changed, at first it was a very simple piece (which in essence is good) but considering that there was no tension building or escalation of ticking clock we revamped the idea for a while completely Taking into consideration all of the feedback from people around up, we attempted to fit everything they wanted to say as well as our own goals and how we felt about it, it became very convoluted and compact with dense information that really didn't help raise tension at all and instead worked against us. We did however keep key elements by the time we began our most recent and complete animatic.

the version on the left is the earlier V1 animatic, which contained only a short section of base information, and the version to the right contained a more final look and feel with sounds and musical composition to go with the feel of the movie. But when we had our critical reflection session with our class before the Christmas holidays, we were given very good feedback that allowed us to strip away a lot of the information that we believed yielded no glory for us. and we began again using our original and simple story and made the situation revolve more around her has a character instead of incorporating the captain so much.

Scheduling

Once we had found our basis in animation, and things were running smoothly, we had reached our production stage, we began to block in animation and reached the 20 seconds mark, this was dated February 5th, we have a very tight schedule to stick to, to be able to finish in time by April 17th. Our sheduel is to animate around 3 full rendered coloured and illustrated seconds a day (not including weekends) which would allow us enough time to reach April and still have time to edit and attach sounds and voice overs during the editing stage of the project. There are a few other things to take into consideration when working on the movie that may stretch the production time, and I mean that the acting has to be right, it would not be if rushed though it just to get to the end goal to soon.