Final Major Project: May 2008

When we came to the point of making Final major project I started intensively to think about things that could be done and could be learnt with the framework. On the briefing day Steve Searle suggested me and Christopher Meredith to work together as we have same passion for 3D graphics and animation. Chris rejected this idea, as he wanted to work on his own project doing some special effect. Despite that I and Steve came to agreement of making animated short film. For myself I saw a great opportunity in such cooperation. I’ve been carrying an idea of making animated short film for a long time, but due to the workload I simply had no chance to work on it in my spare time. Finally I got the opportunity. We decided to think about the story during the holydays and to share our ideas via email. I really wanted to make something that would bring some advantage, rather then making something unreal just for the sake of using CG and making special effects.
More than one year ago I drew my attention to the huge amount of plastic bags hanging on the trees all around the UK. At that time, I though it could be a good idea to make something of it. I wasn’t really sure what exactly and in what form. Final major project brief gave me a good impulse to think about it more intensively and finally make something of it. I shared this idea and vision of it with Steve. To my surprise he said that he has been looking at these bags for a while. I took it as a sign that we have to go for this idea. We carried on bringing some other ideas in but they we’re not that appealing.
After holydays break I met Steve and brainstormed this idea, we drew sketches and storyboards getting ready for the Interim Crit. On that day we got some response to our ideas, as usually it helped us to develop it further. Using of the Celtx application helped us a lot to put all things together and share them when we were out of the college.
When we came to the point of actually building the assets we decided to split our responsibilities. Steve started to work on the city and I myself started to develop the characters. During the studio development sessions we always tried to sit next to each other what helped us to communicate, comment and support each other. Despite of prescribed roles sometimes we would swap the work to give a fresh breath into it. I think this trick worked very well and kept project development, especially on the times when we both felt exhausted. In this way each of us has worked on the every aspect of the project at some degree.
Working on the characters took my understanding of rig much further than it was. Again I’ve used Digital Tutors to refresh my memories and highlight something that I didn’t draw my attention on. Once again I appreciated video tutorials; I think it would be great to have some of them in the library available for checking out. Also we referred to such highly appreciated books as “Animator’s survival kit” and “The Animation Bible”. Skills I’ve learned doing the last personal development project helped me a lot and saved time. I wish I would plan my learning through out the year in that way. It would definitely help me to learn things in more strategic way. But it is only possible if I knew all the briefs I am going to get during the year, which is not the case.
Building the assets took us a lot of time, which we tried to plan as wisely as we could using Google Calendar. To save some time we always tried to render things during the nights and over the weekends. For the Final Crit we rendered SD quality footage and made a rough cut in After Effects, I have used this cut for working on sound design in Soundtrack Studio Pro, program which I have learnt and enjoyed working in since Lego Mindstorm project. Again Final Crit took our vision of things a bit further. We were advised to look again on the timing, lighting, bump mapping, close ups and sound. Considering other people opinions we focused on the finalizing our short film, by that time we had only one week left till deadline. Since then we tried to manage our time even more rationally. Test renders showed us that we could go for not full HD 1280x720 quality, which instantly made a big difference to the visual aesthetics of the animation. Also we came back and altered some animations and added some more camera shots including close ups and required accents. As we had a lot of over lighted objects we had to look at lighting more carefully, creating separate lighting spots and linking them so particular character helped us solved this problem quite effectively. Though there is no limit for perfection and time restrictions would be always an issue.
During the project development we kept doing research and leaving opportunities for alterations. Also, we always asked to comment classmates and tutors to what we doing. Most of the responses and advises were quite wise and were taken into account. This is really effective way of getting out of the dead points in the development.
I think Steve and Me made good team work together, helping and supporting each other. Both of us quite happy with the result, though think that some of it could be improved – shading, camera depth of field and particles. Of course it is coming down to the time. This project showed me some weak points of my professionalism, which I will try to take into account from now. I am definitely have to work on my storyboarding skills which doesn’t fully reflect my vision of things, as a result it caused some misunderstanding between me Steve. Despite that we always used to discuss such issues and tried to get to consensus. Woking on this project helped us to improve our time management, teamwork and technical skills plus it was a good fun after all. In my opinion it is a good idea to work as a team because it gives you ability to set up higher goal than I would do working on my own.

Kirill Nagornych
Design for Digital Media, Year 2

Mt first intention was to make a smooth bind for the characters, it came out quite well, but took a lot of time. Chris Meredith suggested to make a rigid bind for the models, it would make it look much more like cardboard. And it worked well, we very like how the cardboard cracks on the binding places, it started to look and behave more like cardboard.

One of the ideas for solving the bending places was splitting up the model that it wouldn't have any skin that would bend but just a gap. This idea was rejected as it didn't fit well to the conception of the cardboard man.