Completing Com/Vis Project

After some time tweaking the lighting of my ComVis project, I am now happy to say it is finished.

ComVis / TBN comparison

Considering my ComVis project is a Z-space character's POV interpretation of my time-based narrative project, I thought it would be interesting to see the two videos side-by-side so I put this together in premiere.

Latest animation for Com/Vis project

This week, I have been working on developing the first version of my animation as seen previously -- I have now added movement to the characters, added lights, added a slight blur to the background simulating shallow depth of field, and smoothed the movement of the camera by adding bezier curves in the graph editor.

Experimenting with TV Paint

I have been playing with TV Paint; Using some video of Syd Barrett playing guitar, I imported this as a tiff sequence into TVP and added a new animation layer over the top, and 'painted over' the video, which has a really cool look when the video layer is removed. As a first experiment with the programme, I'd like to take this further at some point in the future.

Mapping out the Animation in AE

Today I have made a map of the journey my character would be taking if in 3D space, as a birds-eye-view sketch showing the position of all of the characters. The red line represents his path through them, and the blue symbols represent his point of focus. This is so I can keep a level of continuity between this and my 2D time-based narrative project.

From this I have also made a first pass in After Effects plotting the characters in and his point-of-view journey:

The next steps will be:

> Making the characters move.

> Adding lighting and depth of field.
> Smoothing the motion - adding bezier curves where neccessary.

Com/Vis - Project Development

I have been creating my 2D animation for my Time-Based Narrative unit, and it has helped me see which areas I would like to develop for this one. Having the opportunity to create camera moves in Z-space opens up many opportunities to tackle the animation differently. If I had been confident enough to do my TBN project in After Effects, I would have liked to show the boy's journey through the circus in POV. This would mean I could make the 'sideshow' characters a lot more intimidating and scary. I would also like to have paced it slower, or had the chance to stretch this section over a longer period of time. Therefore, I am going to do both of these things for this project to see if it would have been after all a better approach.

Com/Vis - Initial Ideas

Over the first few weeks of studying, I have been introduced to many new techniques, practices and pieces of software.

Our Communication and Visualisation module encourages us to experiment outside of our comfort zone so I have taken this time to take in these new ideas and see what will be the best thing to pursue for my project.

In this time, we two new pieces of software have leapt out at me: Maya and After Effects, neither of which I have used before. Both of my first animations using these programmes can be seen in previous posts in this blog.

Additional new things I have learned have included, among others;

Storyboarding and Animatics - techniques which I have used in my Time Based Narrative project's pre-prodution. I have also found a piece of software called 'Storyboard Pro' which I have been practising with.

Sequencing and Editing in Premiere - though I have used this programme for some 5 years now in my work as a video editor so feel I know this very well.

TV Paint - Another very interesting-looking piece of software which I'm looking forward to playing with.

Google Sketch-Up pre-vis software.

My initial thoughts on my project are that I would like to take my 2D time-based narrative project and see what I can do to make this in 3D, possibly using Maya or After Effects. More thoughts to follow...

First Animation in After Effect Z-Space

Yesterday we had a tutorial on how to use After Effects to navigate animation in Z-space/2.5D. This was particularly interesting for me given the direction I want to go with my project for this unit. My first attempt is below:

I am mostly happy with it but there are a couple of things which I would do differently in future; mainly that there should be more going on in the film to add foreground/background interest and emphasise the Z-space effect. Also, I think I should source some higher quality images. Apart from that I think it is a good first attempt.

First Maya Animation - Bouncing Ball

It was my first time playing with Maya today -- We started by making a 'bouncing ball' animation. Here is my attempt: