CVn

Technical Help in Production

Various people needed my assistance during production, Bronwyn Dowle needed assistance throughout her project as it demanded heavy use of maya which she had never used before.

As part of my hours with building her drum kit for production I showed how how to operate maya so she could get her work done.

Equally Joanna Staniforth needed assistance with shake and how to use the scripts i gave her. I also gave her image capture advice in order to get the most out of her inked drawings.

Steven White often needed production advice on rendering, compositing and rigging as well as the rig i provided for him. This allowed him to be able to output his work correctly for his production.

Natasha Adiletta needed assistance throughout the compositing stage, I gave her a thorough introduction to compositing and shake, this allowed her to composite all of her work bar the maya scene rotoscoped section mentioned below which i composited.

Production (Rigging): Steven White

Steve White is producing a showreel and needed a tortoise rigged and an engine (which fits inside the tortoise to be made functional). Close to the deadline I managed to pull out a basic IK rig and solve his mechanic problems for him efficiantly.
The animation and modelling has all been done by Steve White, i solved the rigging and specifically with the pistons shown in the engine.

Production

Production: Jack Brown

For Jacks project, he comissioned me to make a Computer Generated book to start the film. The result was created with a simple model which was shaded procedurally. A displacment map was added to give the 'dirty' feel required. Jack's own artwork was used to make elements of the textures on the surface of the book. The book was rigged and opened with a simple set driven key system.

Sarafina's Bubble Production

For the film, a series of dynamic camera shots where needed. Maya could not produce an adiquate render quailty in the time avalable. Instead basic models where used which could be rotoscoped around. In all four shots where done, three of these shots where needed to be cut intoeachother in post production, however i treated the sections as individual tasks. The end result (CG animation by me, rotoscoped by Katharine Downes, smoke on train scene by Ashley Meyer:

Production Door and Pinnygig: Paper Removal, Inking Preperation and Background Compositing Scripts

For 'Door' and 'Pinnygig' a keying system was needed to convert the original image captures into something that gave a clean black on white line image, on which color could easily be applied to in photoshop. The images also needed alpha channels around the characters so they could be composited over desired backgrounds as a sequence rather than frame by frame.

The scripts I produced in Shake greatly increased quality and production speed of these projects.

The script took the high resolution raw images:

Then it cropped waist paper so the image was the correct 16:9 ratio, then applied a series of corrections in order to create pure black and white images which creates imagery.



The image was then inked and the eyes colored green so that the pure white could be isolated and removed, and then any background could be composited under the image


Here is a breakdown of the scripts made:




Aspects of the first script where made by Dean Wray but where not idea, I use certain aspects of his script to generate a bespoke solution for the projects.
(the log lin node was his design).