Tuesday 16th June

Today we went through btiw that needed to be completed in order to finalise the film. Daryl was putting together all the scenes he has redone tweaks to, for example the animation to the trophy at the beginning, a few RAM shots where his eyes texture was a little corrupted. We also lost a few files to the chair animation. I went in to Maya and have redone the chair animation again, this time with toon lines, which the previous version didn’t have. The old version was also the old version of the chair, so it was probably better that we couldn’t find the files.

Here is the animation..

Daryl helped me with this to ensure my timings went exactly in time with his 2D animation.

Today I also started creating the new intro sequence. I’ve said this before, but I left this to the last minute as we already had an intro complete by Sam Harvey. As we have just under a week left to finish off the film it gives me plenty of time to to it. In fact I finished it tonight.

During the day I re created the television model in Maya (i modelled it a week or so ago but completely lost the file). Luckily it looks identical to my previous model as I am using the same reference. I textured it and gave it blinn textures for subtle light shining. I then started texturing the wallpaper for the background. I went online looking for some nice old wallpaper textures and found this..

I played around with it in Photoshop to make it look better and suit our animation more.. I envisaged a nice green wallpaper with the similar pattern as this texture.

This is what i ended up with..

It is very similar but is of course the green colour I chose and also a hint of orange for the tiled pattern to fit in nicely with it. If I have more time again I may go over the pattern and make it look even more unique and possibly a brighter tine of orange/gold.

Daryl had also created a newer intro sequence with Sam’s logo. I liked it, but unfortunately It had low quality images blended into it again, I recreated it so the images on the background blended nicely with the white.

I then started compositing the intro together this evening. I put the wallpaper and television layers in After Effects first and put the original clips for our intro behind the television layer so it looked liked it was on the screen. I made sure my 3D model had a completely hollow screen so it would make this part of the compositing easier.

After putting all of the footage in, and tweaking the title sequence so that the logo masks out to show the main set, I started doing effects to make it look like a television screen.

I already learnt how to do television grain from the effects I’ve done previously. The same with the television lines so this didn’t take too long. I tinted the entire image black and white and animated it so that it became progressively full colour and scaled the entire composition in whilst it did this. I also gave it a high contrast as a television set of this nature would most likely give. I also experimented with a thick white scan line that goes down the screen a couple of times, again to show off this being an old television.

Lastly, to finish this scene off i scaled the background wallpaper at a different speed than the television to give the illusion that the television is in front of the wallpaper and blurred the wallpaper the more it zoomed in, so to focus the attention more to the television screen.

And finally I added lights to the scene, mainly the background wallpaper, but also some subtle light fluctuation coming from the television screen itself as it it were really projecting light. I then tinted the entire composition to make it look slightly dull. This not only made it slightly more realistic but also gave a nice tone difference compared to the film which is a light brighter and a lot more fun.

Here it is...

Here is a video showing short clips of some of the different types of layers used in the making of the shot...