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).

Production Door

Earlier in the year Joanna Standiforth was considering converting from 2D to CG. Because of this she comissioned me with the task of modelling and rigging her character ready for production. To do this I simply used concept drawings she gave me to sculpt the character in maya, the character was then rigged in The Set Up Machine II and then skinned by hand.

The modelling process was relatilely smoothly but repeated modifications where needed and the rigging process needed to be redone a few times because of this.

The final rig:




Incase any facial animation was needed at any point i made sure all the mesh was clearn and easy to modify.

The rig was effective and functional.

A managed to get the entire rig ready before she decided she would do the film in 2D due to time constraints.

Pre Viz : Sarafina's Bubble

For the Sarafina's Bubble production I was asked to aid in the previz work. They needed stronger clarity on a few shots that would take far too long to be hand drawn. The style they where aiming for needed to be conveyed so the animatic held continuity. To accomplish this I used the toon edge tool in maya to place a white line around all objects. The characters needed to be positioned correctly as well so i made a few scans of them, did some simple image correction and placed them on image planes in order to position them around the sets. This made for an effective and continuous animatic. Result:

Previz Work - Pinny Gig

The first work I was commissioned to perform was to aid the pre-production of the films Pinny Gig and Serafina's Bubble.

For Pinny Gig, I had to create a drum kit that could be used by Bronwyn Dowle to gain a better understanding of the enviroment and the set in which the chracter could perform.

Because many aspects of her compositioning where up in the air at this stage I made the drum kit so it could be easily manipulated around to suit her shots. Functionality included a rig that allowed the hight of each element to be changed simply by moving the head of the object down rather than scaling individual elements, this meant she could adjust the props to suit the character and the shot rather than force herself to work within a pre-set enviroment.

The rig also had to be very easy to use as Bronwyn was very new to maya early on in the year. Any complexities where hidden and I attempted to create an interface which showed only what she needed.



Bronwyn needed a fully functional base drum pedal for her animatic and film, so i rigged a simple IK set drivn key which made the drummed the drum automatically when the base pedal was rotated.