Wednesday 2 May 2012

Ticked Off is wrapped! (Mostly...)


83,760 frames composited. 
621GB of hard drive space.
16 months.
3 destroyed laptops.
3 equally destroyed brains.
1 degree film. 

Come see it at the degree show! 18th-27th of May. 


Wednesday 25 April 2012

Future shot

Just realised we've yet to show off the future environment, but then we decided to pretty much keep it that way. However, here's a little sneaky peak. I wonder what he's so worried by? ...


Tuesday 24 April 2012

Poster Design

Salutations.

Apologies for the lack of updates, but the past month has been pretty hectic what with only 6 days until deadline. In the grand scheme of things, production is going pretty well. Just wrapping up some final rendering and compositing before doing the master edit and colour grade.

Thought I'd post our finalised poster idea, inspired by the recent boom in minimalist poster design.

The colours are a bit off, thanks to the horrendously calibrated mac monitors... but the design is there. Hopefully everybody will get the symbolic representation of the cogs.

Feedback is welcome!




Wednesday 28 March 2012

A mid-shot... shock horror!

Figured I'd show you guys a shot that isn't a ridiculous close-up/lens flare and explosions... so here's a couple! We'll probably use one of these as one of the 4 still frames we need to submit for assessment.

The time machine effect looks pretty cool when it's all moving, but we'll probably keep it on the DL for the time being.

Some of the colour grading might be slightly off between these 2... still tweaking that, things like the sunlight etc. I reckon I prefer the 2nd one with the golden tint, any feedback on that actually?

Anyway, enjoy!

Kieran





Friday 23 March 2012

More explosions, huzzah!

Finished the other main disintegration shot today, this one was a lot more challenging because I had a camera move to deal with... but it was good fun. Plenty of flares and blur to keep me entertained. The camera dolly gives you a much nicer view of the colour bleed effect which you don't really get from the pillars shot, which is nice.

I'm becoming increasingly concerned at the After Effects render time on my deteriorating laptop, I estimate it'll take around 2 days to render the final film. Poor little guy. So again, some stills will need to do for now. Sadly you don't really get the direction of all the shards form the stills, so it's a bit messy... but in the video it makes a bit more sense.

Here's the flowchart for this comp, which'll help explain how much is going on. Each node represents a layer, all of which have various active effects. I count 190 layers.



In other news, we're slowly losing our minds.

Enjoy,
Kieran






Friday 16 March 2012

Eye candy!

Greetings, we're far too busy to update the blog properly these days... so here's some pretty stills to keep you interested. We're keeping most of the finished renders under wraps until the degree show.

We've started with a lot of the close up shots, now moving onto animating the wide shots.







Thursday 16 February 2012

Second Shot Completed!

2 down... 43 to go.

I can only post up some stills again, as the final 8 second render is going to take around 6 hours to render from After Effects :( It's got around 80-odd layers in total, my poor laptop just about melted.

This'll give you a rough idea of the disintegration effect, the bleed effect is animated which doesn't come across in the stills so well... but we'll probably save the final render for the Degree Show.

Enjoy,

Kieran.




Tuesday 7 February 2012

Blendshapes! Woo!

Whilst blowing stuff up and adding lens flare I've been working on the character blend shapes, I don't think I've actually posted up any. So here's some quick facial poses, I've still got some more to fix up as well as adding in corrective blend shapes for the jaw joint.

We're almost ready to animate, which is exciting. Here's hoping the expressions all blend together nicely.

EDIT: should be noted, the actual lighting/rendering of this image isn't anything like the final thing. There's no ambient occlusion or anything, just a quick 3-point light set up. 

Thursday 2 February 2012

Rendering, Finlay Pearston

hey guys here the latest in the way of documentary videos that give you an insight into the drudgery of making our short film. this particular upload covers the rendering process's used, the different layers and why we chose them.

hope you all find this clear and interesting, and if you have any questions or comments please leave a comment bellow the footsge as we are always in need of useful feed-back.



Cheers

Wednesday 1 February 2012

Newest Comp Test

Greetings!

Here's the latest frame from the film, not quite final yet. We still need to add in some props, the upper books and tweak some textures... but we've got the new and improved final final master new project V2 all set up, and I don't think we've actually uploaded any images of the room with the textures applied.

The comping is a bit mental on this one, tried out pretty much every effect and technique we'll be using, but the final comp will be much more selective. Not quite as crazy sci-fi as this one. Still, gives you lot an idea of how things are going, I included the old comp test too so we could compare how they look next to each other. 

In other news, we're rendering our first ever finished scene right this second! We've not started character animation yet, we're just starting with the few scenes that don't have him in it such as watch close ups and jazz. Exciting times. 

Peace!



EDIT: Here's the first final frame of Ticked Off, Huzzah! I was going to do a comp breakdown, but I'll just do a before pimpage/after pimpage instead. 

Before pimpage:


After pimpage:


The joys (read; cheap tricks) of compositing.

Tuesday 24 January 2012

Disintegration Effects Test

Salutations!

I come bearing gifts of lens flare and explosions. These are some quick tests I've been working on for the disintegration effect. Some of you may remember the wireframe effect test from last year. Unfortunately, the logistics of doing this effect are stupidly complex. We couldn't actually find a computer powerful enough to convert even the simplest scene we have into wireframe, so I've had to try and develop it a bit more.

We're pretty happy with the way it's looking so far, and I've got a decent idea of the compositing and effects pipeline. The room test in the video below has around 60 layers in after effects, and the final scene will have at least double that, which is daunting, but the principles are the same.

It's not perfect, I've got plenty of things to sit and tweak, but at least we know it's do-able.

This is all done in After Effects, we only rendered one frame of each prop out of Maya.

As always, best viewed in full screen HD here and any feedback is appreciated. Enjoy!

Friday 13 January 2012

Wanted - Animators!

Salutations, and happy new year!

Do you like animation? Do you like time travel? Do you like free money? Well today is your lucky day! Ticked Off has two thirds of these things especially for you! We're looking for talented animators (2D and 3D) who are interested in 3D character animation for the film, details below. 

We're lucky enough to have had considerable amounts of interest from a lot of people, but this is just more of an official call so we can begin organising the team. We're on schedule to get rocking with the full time animation at the start of February, by which point we'd like to have the additional animators all prepared and ready to roll. 

We're in a slightly bitter-sweet situation in that we've not actually got enough work to give to everybody looking for some, and the only way we can really think of solving this is to essentially let everybody do some test animations, and pick the ones that we think can benefit the film the most. 

I know that probably sounds really big headed and patronising, particularly because the majority of you are better animators than us! But the alternative is handing out animation willy nilly which will only add to our ever increasing stress levels, mainly due to the logistics of dealing with such a large amount of people. We're only really looking for around 4 additional animators. Naturally, when the proverbial shit hits the fan and we start losing our minds... we may very well spam the reserves with emails begging you to help us out, but we'd like to keep it to 4 for the time being. 

Basically, if you're interested drop me an email at: kieranjduncan@gmail.com along with a contact number. We'll then send you the rig in it's current state, and give you 2 weeks to familiarise yourself and play around with the character. One of us will be available to demo the rig in person for those that need it, particularly if you're new to 3D. Ideally, after the 2 weeks we'd like some playblasts or renders of any test animations you've done. The tests don't need to be anything specific, basically just try and show off. 

After that we'll have a look through all the tests and get in touch with the folk we'd like to help us, then organise a meeting where we can give you the finalised rig, divvy up the scenes and give you a bit of direction. 

We really appreciate the amount of interest, it's quite humbling to be honest. We're pretty excited to see what we can all produce in the final leg.

In other news, the film is coming along relatively well, we've got our semester 2 game plan in place. We had to do some minor timetable adjustment but in the grand scheme of things everything is on track. Sort of. The Fear is breathing down our necks.

We've been lucky enough to have a BAFTA award winning sound designer and musician offer his services to us which is really exciting, we're already fleshing out some ideas for the sound direction and score. Stay tuned for some updates on that front.

Not much else to report really, just been cracking on with the colossal to-do list.

We look forward to working with our shiny new potential animators, and can't wait to get a big animation piss up sorted after we all start back.

Sláinte!

- Team Ticked Off.




Wednesday 11 January 2012

Modelling Blog Post- Finlay Pearston

hey guys this is a rough over view of the modelling process and techniques that we've used of this film. hope its clear but if you have any questions or comments please leave some feed back.