Final Update: Film is finally finished

Well, it's finally done. The film has been put together; all of the shots Amy and I composited have been compiled and sent to Sultan and the others, the sound has been put on and checked and everything is looking as good as it could do at this point, all things considered.

Final Film on Vimeo

I forgot to put Hilary and Chalotte's names in the credits, unfortunately, so I don't deserve any awards this year ;_;

Maybe I'll get it right in the future.

Post-Easter Update: After Effects & 3D cameras

At the end of this week, I can safely say that while I love what you can do with the 3D camera, I'm absolutely terrible at using it effectively; a lot of the shots with 3D camera movement have something that either looks jerky or out of place, the actual camera movement doesn't flow nicely at all, the audience has barely any time to see some of the backgrounds in the film, and because the animation was done without the intention of using the 3D camera, it just ended up coming off as out-of-place.

the good news is I now know not to make a mistake like this in the future and plan my projects more efficiently, but I'll be damned if I'm pleased with what I've done.

Post-Easter Break: Colouring Final

Finally finished adding all of the hat bands to each of the shots that Amy coloured, it took far longer than I was expecting it to. I also realized that the briefcases in a few of the shots were missing, so I went through and finished those off as well.

Now that all the shots are mostly finished, we can actually start on editing and compositing the shots in after effects! Amy's going to be tackling scenes 1 and 3 as those will require the least amount of work regarding background movement, while I'll be tackling scene 2, which while being the longest scene in the film, also has the wackiest camera tricks in after effects, so I have a feeling it'll take me a while to sort it out.

Good thing we have a deadline extension 'til the 20th, otherwise I'd be crying by now :^)

Post-Easter Break: Colouring 2

Almost finished with Shot 12.
At the beginning of the week I started off with just this on my plate:

Now I have all of this to add to it:

Amy's done pretty much all of the other colour work as of now, the only thing that's missing from each shot is the hat-bands that'll help the londoner do his expressions, and those should be done within the next few days anyway.

Things are looking bright so far.

Post-Easter Break: Colouring 1

It's the first week back, and I'm being pretty slow with the colouring. So far I've only managed to get one shot out of the 4 done that I need to. I'm chocking it down to laziness, so next week I'll have to pull my trousers up and muscle down harder so I can actually finish shot 12.

Here's a screencap of shot 8 coloured.

Easter Break Update: Cleanup

This has to have been the biggest faff of the entire project so far. What started out as something I thought would be nice and easy ended up being a massive pain not only due to the tedium of the task, but also due to the fact that my rough animations had been drawn absolutely terribly;

the londoner's body kept on changing size, he went completely off model in half the shots he showed up in, and 3 of the animations hadn't even been finished yet, so I couldn't finish off some of the shots.

At least I learned to be more thorough with the cleanliness of my animation process in the future so that I can avoid ruining the day of the unlucky sod who gets to cleanup my work, whether it's me or someone else.

Easter Update - Finalized Animatic and all updated shots

I decided that It'd be a better idea for me to compile all the finished shots into a finalised animatic that would be watchable as a final film, albeit a tad janky and missing one or two key pieces of animation.
The main reason behind this was to give the sound guys something solid to work with over easter.

All I need to do for them now is go through the film and compile a checklist of sounds I'll need from them.

Here are links to the final animatic as separate scenes and in full.

Scene 1 Final

Scene 2 Final

Scene 3 Final

Final Animatic

There are parts I would like to figure out in much more detail, but for the time being I'm happy with it as it is.

Blue Pencil Test

I finally got off my ass and fixed shot 8, compiled all the other shots into a Blue Pencil Test (secondary animatic) and made a bunch of scenes using the shots. The film used to be just over two minutes with all the extra animation, currently (including all the unfinished animation and based off of the timing in the Blue Pencil Test) It'll be exactly 1 minute 50 minus the credits.

Here's links to the separate scenes and the BPT itself. The black frames in the film are either missing animation or parts of the film where there's no animation, so they're included in the total run-time of the film.

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Full Animatic V2

bird rig wing smudges

It took longer than I expected to get the wing smudges and the tilted body done for the bird, but here they are. The only parts I'm missing now are a few extra torso and arm pieces for the Londoner and one or two more frames and poses for the bird.

Rough sketches for layout work in painting.

After shot 12 was changed, I realised that I'd forgotten to do rough concepts for the new layouts in each shot. Here's a few ideas about what sort of shots I'm going for;

Next pair of Rig parts

I wish Blogger would let me upload PSDs to show off, but unfortunately I can't do that, so all I can show off right now are screencaps.

They've all ben structured exactly like the front rig parts, the only difference being that there's less detail on each of these versions as they show up less and don't show off as much of the body/ detailed parts of the Londoner's outfit.

Tomorrow's job will be going through each one of my shots and finding what bits of animation I won't be able to do using the rigs, then making extra body parts that correspond to those bits of animation.

The best part about how the files are structured is that if any of the body parts don't work the right way in any of the shots, it's very easy to make new ones to replace or add to the original batch.

The only thing I'm slightly unsure about right now is how well I'll be able to rig the character and how I'll go about swapping body parts out, but I'm 100% certain that I can solve that problem by checking online or asking the tutors, so it's not a major issue.


It feels good to be productive again.

Making After Effects Rig parts in Photoshop CS6

Given how many shots I wanted to do with the Londoner facing the camera, it made sense for me to focus on making the parts for his rig first.

There's a lot of moving parts to the rig, and I had to split his cloak into three parts in order to maximise the ability to make it flow when I put the rig together.

Likewise his face has a lot of moving parts; there's not a single static piece of geometry on it due to how many shots that his face is included in.

For all the shots where he's fallen/ sitting on the floor, however, I think I might have to draw out separate static leg poses and warp them in aftereffects. The good news is that there's only one or two instances where that happens, so I won't have to draw in many extra frames.

In total, I have to make about 2 more rigs for this guy, one for the side view and one for the back view, both of which are less detailed and show up in shot far less often, so I won't have to be as nit-picky as I was with this one.

After that, the only rigs I have left to do are Rear, Side and Front views of the Falcon and then I can jump straight into putting the final animation together in After Effects.

Ideas for animation style

This is horribly horribly late in to the project, but Sean showed me something recently that got me thinking about how to make my life a whole lot easier in terms of animation;

After effects tutorial on Mesh Distortion and Head turns

In turn, this reminded me of the style of animation adopted by Vanillaware in most of its games; making puppets in photoshop and then animating the frames in aftereffects;

Vanillaware Trailers

Muramasa Trailer 4

Muramasa Trailer 1

Given that most of my film is already roughed out so I already know exactly what sort of animation I'm going to be doing in each shot, I won't have to waste any time figuring out what parts I need for each puppet, and painting each puppet will be a day's work at the most

Admittedly this will probably take about a week of messing around before I can get it spot on, but the time I save on drawing and painting each character frame by hand and the knowledge that I'll gain about aftereffects from doing this will be invaluable, so It'll be well worth doing as far as I'm concerned.

Revised storyboard for Shot 12 and last few pieces of animation

I'm starting to finish off the bulk of my animation. Shot 12 is taking far longer to get roughed out than it reasonably should have done, and at this point I think I'll have to leave out perfection just to get it done. However, the good news is that it's almost finished, as all I have left to do for it are a few pieces of animation that can easily be duplicated, the finalised flight sequence and the lead in to the painting, then the rest of my work will be a mixture of adding anticipation to shots that lack anticipation, tidying up the looser shots and doing cleanup/ colouring, and getting the backgrounds done.

anyway, here's the revised storyboard and a link to the flight sequence.

Flight Sequence Part 1

Flight Sequence Part 2

Next batch of Animation and brief message about plot

Hilary came in to give us crit today, and as a result we worked out between us that aside from all the animation needing to be tweaked so that each shot had more anticipation, we figured out that shot 12 was far too complicated to read well; it was supposed to show how free and unconstrained the Falcons in London are, but it comes across as a convoluted and very vague history explanation.


As I wanted to avoid that, I decided to make the following changes to Shot 12 in particular;

1. Instead of flying through multiple eras with different design choices, the Falcon flies through a modern representation of London, stylised to look like graffiti.
2. Instead of animating separate characters like a smog skull, a spitfire and a pigeon, the Londoner's design would simply be taken and re-used on monotonous actions like stamping paper or walking down a street while the bird flies past.
3. Instead of animating the backgrounds by hand, I'd draw up about 3 or 4 backgrounds and move them around in after-effects.


I should have a rough storyboard for this new shot structure done by this evening so that I can start working on animating it next week.


In the meanwhile, here are some of the last few rough shots along with some animated segments from the original idea for Shot 12 before I decided to make the changes listed above.

Shot 14

Shot 16

Shot 12: Skull

Shot 12: Spitfire

Rough Character Shots Batch 1

I took a pretty huge break over christmas, but to get myself back into the groove, I told myself I'd go through the film and do the rough character animation for each shot within the first 2 weeks back so that I could start on timing shots out properly and cleaning them up by week 3. I also wanted to test out some background animation in aftereffects towards the end of the second week back, so I'll probably upload those with the rough bird animations.

Anyway, here's the first bulk upload of shots I did this week;

Shot 1

Shot 2

Shot 3

Shot 4

Shot 7

Shot 9

Shot 18

I'm doing the rough shots as they're ordered in the film, skipping out ones I've already either started cleaning and re-timing or are ready to start being cleaned and re-timed. The only reason shot 18 is in this batch is because I got it done it before christmas and forgot to upload it.