Some talk

Today I feel relieved. The long awaited voice acting is finished, recorded and sent to my great sound engineer/designer. The right talent Was found indeed, a great guy named Sylvain and he was excellent for the job (+ having all the necessary quality equipment at his house was a benefit)! And oh boy the whole thing sounds and feels much more different – just the way I was hoping it to be.

I cut the final raw-edited version couple of days ago and had it around for critizism. It was funny to notice how some of the audience were totally mislead by minor things which were missing, but were all clear in my head. I should’ve done that before – after doing something for 2-3 months you start to become blind to your own work.

Withering heights

It has been so fun that I’ve totally forgot to update Here’s a mattepainting for the walk in the field-scene. You can see the castle in the background. The grass is animated to wave a bit in the wind (which took more time to do than the whole painting!)

Table for five, s’il vous plait

Render out from After Effects.
Light, hands, dust particles, some shadows etc still missing.

Some background painting for a change

Here’s a still-in-construction -background for the Court around the table -scene. The middle and lower part is covered mostly by characters so I’m going to leave them unfinished, naturally.

If you click this picture;

and compare it to this older one :

..you’ll get the idea where I’m trying to reach for. More graphical and painting-like than real video on matte-screens. I’m planning to draw some lines on the characters by using Mirage.

Hall of fame

Voila! One day for the mattepainting of this hall and this is the result :

Busy, busy, busy

Been so busy with modeling and fencing with After effects that I haven’t got a chance to update.

Here’s some pictures of work stages :

Tracking the hand. This shot is before I added the animation to the whole fingerset.

Opening the door.

Very early concept of the hall. 

Brandon Lee

The landing animation for the crow-birdie starts to feel ready. I’ll finish the background later.

Here’s a screenshot from lightwave how the model looks now :

Safe and Sound.

Ok, time for more news!

I had this Lightwave eagle-model around and with a little tweaking I made it look more ‘crowish’ :

Yeah, I know. Still tweaking to do At least the wings must shrink shorter.
This chick will appear in the dream sequence. Here’s some quick test shots of the landing animation :

Oh, and for the stairway I’ve got you some stills too. That shot is quite ready but some coloring and masking must be done.

And more news! – I’ve got a sound recording studio (or at least some sort of) reserved! Just have to find the right talent now, but I’m sure to find some soon. The whole animation is basically one man’s V.O (voice over), and the language will be French. French language fits very well with the theme and the story, it sounds much more exotic still to many ears (unlike English) and it is just so damn nice Just take a peak of the intro of Amelie and you know what I’m talking about. Naturally the soundscape has a huge impact to the over-all feeling of any visual piece, but anyone who has been in a film/animation festival with international content knows what a difference language makes.

…and he’s buying the stairway…

For this scene I bought these blue beer containers to build a quick stairway. The cost was 22,20 euros. Fortunately you can return them and get the money back – thanks to Tommi for the tip.
Here’s the storyboard picture :

I changed the angle and walking path to make more clear that the reign is making their way through the castle’s dark and narrow parts.
I shot all the 3 walks seperately and combined them in After Effects. For the 1st and 3rd servant’s arms I attached a torch, which I quickly modeled in Lightwave :

The actors were shot with their hands in cover under their robes. I spent all last night looking for a good tracking software to track the motion and achieved something with my demo copy of Bauhaus’ Mirage 1.5. The result wasn’t pleasing so I went on and did it all from the scratch this time.
1st I made a reference picture to adjust the camera and see where the torch would be atttached to :

Then I made a scene in Lightwave to measure the walking path and angle :

After ~1 hour of tedious tracking frame by frame I got pleasing results. Just a film stream to show where I’m heading at :

Decorating the Digital Studio

Haa! Installed my dear Lightwave 9.0 this morning. The reason why I’m using lightwave is that I’ve been using it the longest, even being introduced to Maya in school, I find some stuff in LW much better. And of course, Lightwave is so inexpensive! I bought mine used, something like 500 bucks (440 euros back then). I bought it while working in NYC. Many might see the packaging really messy, but I kind of see some nostalgy from the good old DOS times in this configuring and playing with settings… You feel like a decent nerd or a hacker at least. In the other hand, some crashes while in a while are the major problem for making the user experience bad. Gotta check out the XSI one day…

But hey! I’ve actually got some real article pieces coming up! I played way too much today with the color customizing in LW. The default color scheme is just SO ugly. You basically can not change the background color but I got around it by making a Background Splash image. A cool gradient of the same resolution as my screen suits perfectly.

So here goes! (Picture should be self-explanary for LW users – click for the larger version)

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