All done!

FINISHED! argh what a relief, although I really enjoyed all this crap towards the end when it got busy. I enjoyed seeing the film come together slowly into a finished piece. We had quite a few problems today in terms of sound and all that. I was meant to meet the sound guy at 12:30 in college to get the final sound cut from him but when I got into college I saw what he had and there were still a few adjustments for him to make. While he was doing this I went upstairs at about 1:30PM so that me and Luke could encode the film out and burn it to a disk however I left one of the files we needed at home on my hard drive. I quickly drove home and picked it up and by the time i got back in it was about 2:15PM....because I hadnt slept the night before I got very worried that the 4PM deadline was drawing near and we still had not burnt our film onto a disk and the sound wasnt ready for the final cut! and then to make problems worse, by the time the film was finished encoded it was about 3:50PM and the college computers wouldnt burn it onto my disk for some reason. In the end we had to burn it on Ian's laptop and finally handed in our film slightly later than planned.

I enjoyed working on this film and ofcourse there were some times better than others. If we had more help from some of the other group members towards the end of the project myself and Luke would not have had to work through the night days on end trying to get this done. But to be fair many of the things we needed at this stage were areas which they did not have much experience in.

Over the next few weeks me and Luke plan to polish the film for the degree show. Also I am going to light the truck scene from scratch that Rey gave me so that it can make its way back into the film (we had to cut it out for the submission because it didnt look good)

Almost there

it's nearly 8AM on the day of the hand in and me and Luke sill have a bit left to finish off. While he is finishing off photo-shopping the background plates I am finishing off the lighting and rendering f or the remaining scenes. All is looking positive for us to hit the deadline but I am just concerned about the folders we are meant to be handing in - to be honest I really havent had my mind set on finishing those instead I wanted to finish the film but I will be doing those while these shots are rendering.

EDIT: it's now 09:36AM and Luke has just fallen asleep on the sofa - what an arse. While hes asleep I will composite the shots in premiere and cut them together. I have arranged to meet James Murray (the soundman) in college about about 12PM to get the soundtrack off him. He has been working on it since tuesday which was his deadline

Renders

ONE DAY LEFT - and today will be a long one. These are the shots I have rendered so far - I feel that my choice of using background plates and rendering the character on a separate layer has really helped us out in terms of render times. All the shots below were rendered in the Maya Software renderer only

Light rigs

I'm currently working on the lighting setups for some of these remaining scenes. In very few cases I have been able to copy a lighting rig from one scene to another but even when i did this i obviously had to make a few adjustments on the backlighting and so on...

These are a few screen shots of some of the lighting rigs I have created:

Interior of barn


Inside of coop



Generic chicken laying eggs



Pulling Bar


Main chicken lighting Rig



Eggcounter lighting



Hoover Shot

Lighting and animating

There is still a bit of animation left and also I have to light many of the remaining shots! as a relief Luke will be doing the secondary on the remaining shots and he will also be working on photo-shopping the background plates I have rendered to tweak them. We asked Rey to finish off working on the exterior shot of the truck coming over the hill a couple of days ago - he also said he wanted to light it. I saw a few tests over the past few days and it wasnt looking too bad. The only problem was that he has made the intro scene a bit too creepy and horror like and didnt really suit the film anymore. However he done some very nice smoke on the truck but it really needs some more tweaking. Today he brought in a render he done of the sequence and unfortunately it wasnt looking to great and he admitted to it. After thinking about this with myself Luke and Rey I suggested to them that we take this shot out and think of a different way to introduce the film. They agreed with me because one of the only reasons we kept this shot in the film in the first place was that it looks nice but infact it has actually become the opposite. We will however work on this shot in the 2 weeks we have for the degree show and I will light the scene myself.

Anyway these are of the shots I have completed of the last few days:

Chicken flirt



and heres a render of it when I lit it:


Scared Chicken



And here is a render after I lit the scene:


I really like how this came out, i tried to exaggerate the blue coming from the sky in the background to complement the orange light of the fire from the boiler. Also I placed the fire itself very close to the character and got it to physically emit light so now there is an orange glow to the scene and also the reflection of the fire in the chickens eyes.

Lighting

I only have one more shot to finish tweaking with the animation and then my sole priority will be lighting. I have already lit the majority of the scenes I just need to look at them one more time for continuity in the lighting in sequence - for example preventing one shot being much darker or lighter than the previous ones when they shouldn't. This is one of the shots I am looking at:


Gary has really let us down with the animation, we were relying on his help to finish the animation in time so we could give it to our sound guy in time. He Failed to do this and stuck me and Luke with a whole lot of extra work which has now slowed us down considerably.

Compositing hoover shot

I have rendered out the sequence of the hoover shot that was animated by myself and Luke. I have been working on the compositing of the layers - I have decided to have one character pass and two background plates to give the look of the shot a bit more depth.


And this is the rough composite - The wood will need some colour adjustment and I think the character is casting too much shadow. I will come back to this shot once I've finished some other bits so I can come back to this with fresh eyes