At the start of this week, I had felt really overworked and rundown so I had started to take a step back in working.
My main goals over this week was for us to have all of, or the majority of, our preproduction elements done. Thankfully Tori went ahead and set up a Trello board for us, this isn’t something I have used before but it is used to help keep us organised and track everyone’s progress towards our film.
There was one element that I found a bit annoying when working in a group, and that was sharing files. I had planned to go ahead and finish my part of the previs when I wasn’t in class, but then discovered that someone else was currently working on it so I couldn’t do that. We set up a system that you had to message in when working on it and upload the file once you were down, to avoid anyone’s work going to waste.
Sound
I went ahead and looked at some sound options that we could use, that I thought fitted the whimsy and tension of the first half of our animation. I mainly looked at songs from games that I have seen.
I also went on SoundBible (https://soundbible.com) for some sound effects, like for our pressure plate click, rolling for the ball and some ambient sound. I downloaded these to hopefully add to our previs once it was done.
Previs Progress
So I will be honest, I’m not impressed with my groups work up until this point. I hadn’t been receiving a lot of work from them and when I had asked for any updates on their work it was largely ignored. So I decided that I had to take a look at the previs file, I had wanted it back a lot sooner so that I could finish my part and hopefully work together as a group on it, like streaming our work over discord. However, the file was in use and no one joined calls, so I was quite frustrated and when I got the file back I found myself very stressed out with what I had seen.
I had been a bit worried as I was informed that the runtime was double what it should have been, and there was a lot of shots added, mistimed and it just didn’t look right. I started to get really scared and overwhelmed that I would have to go back and fix this myself. The whole scene had been blocked out, but it looked really rushed and choppy and the camera work wasn’t like how we had our storyboards (it felt like my group just veered off the track and did whatever they had wanted).
After class on Friday I had decided to try and get my section finished off. I had joined a call when I worked on it, in case anyone wanted to hop on call and help me out. I was thankful that Joyce joined and had went about helping me, then after Eoin joined and we got to talking about our work so far and adjustments to be made for the rest of the previs. I broke this down into parts, or shots essentially, working on one character at a time and gradually adding smaller details, I was advised to not add too much to this since it was just previs so I did tone it down like avoiding adding in the hops of the characters to keep in the consistent sliding.
Pass 1
Pass 2
Added in the head/torso/baseplate rotations and tail movements.
Pass 3
Eoin commented on the lighting so I adjusted this and found it worked a lot nicer. We discussed later scenes and what could be cut and adjusted to fix the mismatch and it really helped with my stress level. We also planned when this would be finished and Eoin decided to work on the timing on Sunday, and if I am able I plan to join this to help. I know this isn’t perfectly timed out, so I will note done any particular issues that we can tackle as a group as we start production.
UPDATE: Eoin started to work on the previs on Saturday, due to a change in his work schedule and I was able to hop on and help him with some elements.
Also note, I don’t know how these have happened but we continually found these ‘kinks’ in our graphs, where the handles would stretch far away and result in some really unnatural and unwanted movement, So we had to go back and make sure we fixed all of these.
Storyboard Update
Since we had settled on which character was going to trip, I decided to update my storyboards to represent this better.
Layout Sketches Update
Our layout had been adjusted a bit, Eoin had thought that my design had looked a bit consecutive and thought that more floor space would work better, and looking back on this he was right. So, I wanted to draw out the update version on these ( while on call with Eoin he had mentioned how the Boba cup wouldn’t have worked for the effect we wanted and I agreed so that is why this is a different design to what we decided for our previs.
Character Update
I also had started the process of sculpting my character’s model, this will be majorly displayed in another post but I can put the turnarounds I made for that task here.
Rig Research
I wanted to get ahead of learning a bit more about facial rigging, since I thought it would be nice to have some nice movements and expressions on our characters to really sell them and their personalities.
This tutorial is very simple and isn’t perfect, but I could see how this could work a bit easier for our group as it doesn’t involve the complexities of weight painting and armatures
This video is a lot more extensive into using a complex face rig. It explains how to pair it correctly to the face, any issues that could arise as well as where weight painting could allow you even more control. I think I like this tutorial a lot better and could see myself trying to mimic this for personal projects if I can’t use it for this short film!
Overall, this week was quite a stressful one, but towards the end my group members were a lot more receptive to trying to give me som ehelp in the work. I think that if we try to keep communication up and follow our schedule we shall be able to keep up a good pace with the work in case any issues end up arising. I think that if I just try and focus on my own work instead of looking to do others that I should be able to at least keep myself on track and then look to help others if and when I have time.