Week 14 - Lighting test

This week has been interesting to say the least. Apart from the huge amounts of stress trying to get audio files, see another blog post for more details, this week has been focusing trying to get the lighting and atmosphere right for all the scenes.

One of the key aspects of lighting for Suffragette Molly is getting it to look warm especially for Bradford’s room. Originally the main lighting was going to come from the fireplace, but upon suggestion from Sean, small gas wall lighting now fills the room. Adding these lights have improved the room greatly and have added so much atmosphere, with not only its historical look and appearance, but has emphaised the woody nature of the room.

Lighting is an important part of any animation and with Suffragette Molly is no different. The last couple of days have mostly comprised of testing after testing with renders from various angles. Some have worked and some didn’t either being too dark or too bright. I had to get that balance right. This balance did take some, playing around with the light intensity and adding some lights to further emphasis the mood and atmosphere required. At the moment, I think I do have the balance right with Bradford’s room, however, slight variations may change to suit the atmosphere of the interior.

Yes, I did have some problems with Bradford’s room, however, the most difficult lighting task I have had so far is within scene 4 as Molly arrives in 2113. I bordered up the windows and placed and area light hoping I would have streams of light coming through the gaps. At the moment this has not happened, so more testing and lights will be required.

The night exterior lighting has been fun, with many up and down results. Upon suggestion, I have placed light outside (the same as the interior lights) and this has made an incredible difference. It has created a warm, touch to the exterior of the building. The hardest aspect so far has been trying to get the atmospheric lighting right for the overall scene. The scene is during thunderstorm, lighting and rain everywhere (this will likely happened in After Effects), and to get that feeling right, it needs to feel dark and scary, but still have enough light to be able to view important aspects like the house and trees. I am still working on this, but I reckon I am close.

As I draw nearer, I hope to start the proper render as soon as this week, with scenes that don’t have any lip syching. Once I can get (or I should say if), the files with all the sounds, this should take me around a day to change and then rendering can begin on this. It’s coming down to the wire, I worried I may not get all the renders done in time, with half the film rendered by the time it needs to be handed in two weeks’ time. Worry is settling in, but I must remain calm so my energies don’t run out by the end of this long marathon. 

Week 13

Worry and panic is setting in. All the animation is complete and I believe while it’s not 100% and I can always go back and fix it, and in the time I completed (Seon having done the modeling), the final result is OK. I realise that on most production the sheer length would be done by a multiple number of people, so I should be proud of myself.

This week, final voice recording of Jess as Molly occurred. She did such a great job and can’t wait to hear them cleaned up in the next day or so. Unfortunately during the session, while I did direct her, I believe I was far too quiet, and the sound guys took over. I think the reason for this was nervousness, intimidation, being overwhelmed and lack of experience. When looking back at this, I am quite ashamed and embarrassed that I didn’t speak up enough and direct Jess enough. I put this down to lack of experience and I hope next time I will be better. My main concern is that some of the lip sych and an animation will need to be modified as to reflect what Molly is saying and how she performs it. I believe that I have left this far too late and I can only blame myself for this if the film fails to be finished in this department.

This week, all the animation has been wrapped up, (including final tweeks), however the focus was on Doctor John. With him only being in two shots, the rigging and painting was conducted as fast as possible. I was trying it keep his animation simple, but keep a little bit of eccentricity in his performance. This was achieved by a lean back and forward within the same sentence.

Finally, apart from the above, this week was to finalise the final draft copy of the film within premiere. I few changes here and there myself and instructed by the teacher, and I believe the final film will flow well and garb people’s attention.

The main focus now is on lighting and rendering, this is my main concern (along with changes in the lip sych) as I believe I will run of time and the film will not be completed by the required deadline. Generally, all of these problems stem from my lack of time management, management and task allocation skills.  I hope things improve in the next three weeks. 

Week 12 – A Difficult week

As the project is coming towards the end, so to, are the difficulties! The week has really been up and down, partly my fault, partly not.

Let get back to that later. This week has all been about finalising all the animations for Bradford, which was quite easy as he is stern and sitting down throughout. However, the most difficult component was the texturing. It wasn’t so much texturing it, but what came after that. As previously with Molly, Bradford texturing went haywire and had a mind of its own once in the animated form. To try to fix this, I went back to the original, deleted all its history, placed the texture and redo the weights, this time NOT taking 7 hours but about an hour and a half. While all seemed fine, I had trouble with the eyes, positioned in some strange locations. Having to do it again, problems persist, but after some frustration, a solution was worked out. How I got to this solution I have no idea as I believe was the same as earlier in the session. Having redone the texturing, playblast the shots again with the new textures.

Playblast was interesting during the week. While most shots worked great, however, there were some that crashed every time it was completed. After doing a number of tests, I discovered it was the sound files I had that caused the crashes. Upon discovering this, I playblasted the shots without sound and tried my best to match it in the layout developed within Premiere, with mixed results. This isn’t of much concern as these are only temps and I hope to have a full mix and sound by next week.

Now for the problems, the biggest being the lack of communication or mis-communication from my end. Not getting into a lot of details, I provided details to the teachers in charge and one thing lead to another to a point were communication broke down for a few days. I hope everything now is OK and we can move forward.

The last thing to go wrong was on Sunday, losing electricity for some six hours. While I am quite ahead of things (in terms of animation and layout for hand in next week), my plan was to start texturing objects along with various lighting test, which has now been put back a day or two.

Generally, I know the end is near but it feels such a long way away. Dr John animation needs to be finished and shouldn’t take too long as he is only in two shots. But my main concern soon is rendering, lighting, texturing and post production, which I hope I can finish, so busy times ahead.

Week 11 – Lip-Sych Bradford and thoughts of the week

This week has been quite productive, mostly focusing on the lip-syching using all the temp tracks with my animation movements. In order for this to work, I will attempt to get my actors to sound and get the pace as close as possible. 

For the lip-sych to work, I listened to the speeches over and over again, trying to work out roughly where each word falls on what frame. Once I had an estimate, I wrote down where each word started and finished. After having a list of numbers, I went back to the animation filming reference to look at Jess’s various mouth shapes. While these may not be exact, I have roughly tried to get these shapes according to the rig. I also wrote down and draw these shapes to refer back to. From my notes, I would start the animation using the GUI system I created earlier by first placing the open and closed position of the mouth at two frames before the words are spoken. Although at first I felt it wasn’t working and panic set in after I placed in the keyframes for the lips moving forward and back it looked far better. I felt I needed to exaggerate the mouth movements to allow the audience to see my characters talking. During this stage a bit of twecking was at times required.  Lip-syching is an aspect of animation I quite enjoy actually. I can finally see the character/s at last working to how it should be. 

With almost all of Molly completed, it was time to move onto Bradford. It may have taken some time but I finally received the file on Saturday. The model was impressive, but Seon had some trouble with the rigging which I slightly modified. Due to his nature of his movements as the rig was to be simple (and also time constraints) so instead of having a IK/FK for the arms, a simple FK is being used. In order for this to work I removed some aspects of the facial rig, nose movements and cheeks, along with the joints for expressions. This choice was simple because as Bradford is a Victorian upper class aristocrat, he would be very limited in his expression and the only expression would come in the eyebrows. As previously mentioned earlier, weight painting was a nightmare. This was conducted a number of times, but after almost 7 hours straight, the rig and weight painting was completed to a point where the animation could begin. The animation for Bradford will be limited to mostly facial expressions, but I am intending to do some movements to bring him to life. 

Due to time constraints also, one of the characters, the Butler that I had modeled up earlier in the year was approved to be used. I had the same problems that I had with Bradford, but the time spend was shorter due mainly in the fact he is only standing and has little scene time. 

Generally, I have been up and down with one positive thing, the ability to get all the animation and lip-syching done in time for our week 13 presentation (in one week’s time). If you had asked me a few days ago I would have panicked, but now having finished lip-syching both Bradford and the Butler (with animation), and only Dr John left I feel that I will get his lip-syching and animation completed on time. What I am worried about is finalising the texturing, lighting, rendering and post to be conducted over a space of three weeks. I will worry about that next week after all the animation is completed (which I hope it will be by this time next week). 

Until next time when I hope everything (animation wise) will be finished.

Good night