Rigging Masterclass: Day One

Today I started the 3-day rigging masterclass with Karen Halliwell. During today's session I followed her tutorial of how to create a reverse foot rig, weight painting and how to organise the outliner efficiently.

Above shows the final leg rig, which includes a knee control, multiple feet controls (including pivot points) and a global control.

The final organised Outliner for the rigged leg.

Shooting for Colour

Above shows the very simple set up I used: the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera on a tripod. I didn't manage to find a red hood in time, so I substituted with an apple and lipstick for the shot. This was the only footage from the whole shoot which came out as intended:

This is how the footage looked before being taken into any editing software:

I decided to create the effect in After Effects as it seemed like a fairly simple process, which required me to duplicate the footage and alter both layers individually. As the leaves were orange, I had to rotoscope the apple to ensure that the background became desaturated.

After altering the brightness and contrast of the shot, I altered the hue of the apple and lips in an attempt to make them more noticeably red. This works fairly well and gave me an understanding of how to create the effect, but would look a lot more striking if I had used red clothing to become the focus point.

An Improvised Compromise...

It would be my luck that the very weekend I finally have the Black Magic Pocket Camera that the weather has turned extremely stormy. As all of my shots need to be filmed outdoors, this means that I will have to compromise and either change my shots or film at a later date. After trying to work out a way that I could film indoors instead, I was inspired by a scene from South Park:

I could film the back plate of a city - perhaps with a few people running in fear -  and film the guinea pig against a green screen to scale them up to be gigantic beasts. This could be a possible solution for me, because I am the proud owner of 8 guinea pigs and a few of them would be very co-operative for cucumber. 

After discussing this idea with a close friend, the idea has snowballed to what may potentially become a short-term project in itself. It was suggested that I could recreate this renowned Jurassic Park scene:

If I were to create this scene, I would probably cut out a lot of shots to bring the duration down to approximately 30-seconds due to time and cost restraints. Although I may not even go ahead with this idea, I used one of my guinea pigs as a model to create a logo for the potential spoof:

Online I found the actual shop that South Park used for the dinosaur costumes, however due to the time it would take to make a costume, international postage and the Christmas quickly arriving, they would not arrive until next year, so perhaps this idea is for another time.

5 Ways to Become an Animator

1. Improve what you're terrible at.
2. Don't ignore the importance of your network.
3. Don't let procrastination and perfectionism paralyze you.
4. Make an exciting demo reel.
5. Don't depend purely on being a student at a good university on finding me a job.

Mock-Ups for Visual Effects

This afternoon I managed to book out the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera so I can shoot a range of desired test shots. In preparation, I have created a mock-up for each shot:

For scale, I want to create the illusion of a tiny person walking through grass. I may need to apply theory to make the shot more believable, such as making a small character move quicker. It may also be a good idea to select a relevant costume, such as a fairy or pixie, however this depends on budget.

I took photographs of multiple types of grass from different angles to see which worked best, which was extremely helpful when deciding which to use for my mock-up and will hopefully give me a rough idea of the camera angle and composition when it comes to shooting. When creating the image in Photoshop, I found it a lot more believable if the person was shown to be coming out from behind a blade of grass as opposed to standing in front of it, which appeared to look like a flat image.

I'd like to have a lot of control over the colour shot, so an effect inspired by the film Sin City felt appropriate. Both images were taken from Google images due to time restrictions and lack of props (I will need to find a red hood or coat). This shot should be fairly easy to create as I live directly across the road from a wooded area, which will be an ideal location - especially if I am lucky enough to encounter fog on a day in which I am filming.

For invisible shots I wanted to film the silhouette of a person in motion and then change the sky, however this may be difficult with the incoming winter weather, so stock footage may become necessary. I have managed to create a mock-up using an old photograph I had taken of some trees at dusk, but the sunrise was taken from Google images. I found that I clipped far too much detail from the tree branches, so I'll be careful of this when it comes to editing footage in visual effects software.

Filming in Action

I've lived in Cornwall for the entirety of my life and have been lucky enough to live near Charlestown Harbour. Throughout the years, it has been used in many major productions including Alice in Wonderland, Dr. Who and Saving Private Ryan. The harbour was recently purchased by Atlantic Production Ltd, who are rumoured to have the intention of increasing the amount of film work carried out on location.

Over the weekend, Take the Shot Productions were working on a Canadian television show 'Frontier' starring Alun Armstrong. The set up and process was really interesting to see, so it will be exciting to see what the future holds.

Moodboarding for Visual Effects

The 11 Second Club had a significantly closer deadline and, therefore, gained priority over my other assignments. Now that it has been completed, I can knuckle down on the other modules, which include post-production, animation technologies and the crew project.

In post-production we are focusing on visual effects and will be required to create three different shots to show scale, colour and invisible effects.

Scale: The purpose of this shot is to manipulate the size of an element - whether bigger or smaller. I have decided to attempt the illusion of a tiny person walking through grass.

Colour: For colour, I want to have a lot of control over this shot in terms of visuals. The focus point will be wearing a red cloak within a wooded area - preferably on a foggy day. The background will be low in saturation.

Invisible effects: After watching a breakdown reel for 'The Walking Dead' I was inspired to attempt a shot of a burning building, but it has been suggested that this type of edit is closer to a seamless effect.

Instead, I shall be attempting to capture the silhouette of a person in motion and then changing the sky to create a different atmosphere.

The next steps for me to carry out will be to create a mock up for each shot to help establish any problems I might run in to, scout for a location and complete a recce for the area.

11 Seconds to Completion

I intended to post regular updates on the progress of my animation for the 11 Second Club assignment, but found that I was constantly making small changes every time I worked on it, so a post at the end of the process would suffice. 

Honestly, there are changes that I would still like to make to the animation, but I was very conscious of the upcoming deadline and wanted to be able render and submit the footage on time. 

I find that the animation of both Rocket and Captain America is pretty loose and needs to be altered in a few areas. The lip sync also needs work, but I left that task till the very end.

Overall, I feel like my animation in Maya has improved since last year and this task has helped me in finding other areas which need improving, such as lighting and texturing. I'd also like to learn how to rig my own models so I could try using those for future work.