SOUND LOCK!! (Animatic v17)

Sound is LOCKED and it feels so good!

 

Now, I have a confession to make — I broke the rules of Picture Lock. In the past week, I took the edit of my film and revamped it pretty heavily (aka I shortened a lot of the shots) and the whole film is now 30 seconds shorter!!! And on top of that, the sounds are all different! I know, right?

 

With such radical changes made to my film in such a last-minute time period, you HAVE to check out my ~latest animatic~~~~

 

Woo!

 

Also, the music track is finalized and in the edit as well, and if I don’t say so myself — it’s a fabulous piece of work! Created by DJ Irias, I couldn’t be happier with the end-result.

 

Anyway, right now I’m focused on finishing all the animation of my film — I’m devoting tonight to getting all the 2D animation clean and ready, and after that, all I’ll have left is a bit of lighting, and a handful of little animation-bits I need to fix up before my final Thesis Review arrives on May 8th. AAaghh!! It’s all so soon! But I think I’m on schedule…

 

Anyway, yeap!

 

And as always, there is MORE TO COME! (but not that much more… we’re almost at the end!!)

Finishing Things Up: SCHOOLYARD

So, in the next 4 weeks, I need to do the following:

– Finish up all of my animation

– Light all of my scenes

-Render all of my scenes

and then of course composite those renders into my animatic, which will then no longer be my animatic but rather my final, polished Thesis Film.

And it’s interesting because while that list is numerically small, each of those 3 things are very very long tasks.

But luckily I took a huge chunk out of the first one today! (and a bit of yesterday too)

And by that, I mean — I’ve been animating new material like a motherfucker!

“But Max, I thought you’d already roughed in all your animation!”

Ah yes, imaginary voice in my head, that IS kind of true. But not really. Because by that, I originally meant that I had roughed in all of my IMPORTANT animation. But what I’d neglected to animate until today was the characters that are going to fill out the Schoolyard location of my thesis film. And I’d been putting that off for two reasons:

1) It’s not important and it doesn’t support the story

2) I knew it was going to be really difficult.

But it had to be done, and last night + today, I did it all! Well, I roughed it all out. Tomorrow I’m going to finalize it all. But that will be much MUCH easier than finalizing the animation of the more important shots of my film, because these Playground shots are all going to be in the background of my shots — they’re all gonna be far away, unimportant, and nondescript. So really, the animation can be relatively shitty, and no one will notice! As long as there’s movement.

But unfortunately, creating a schoolyard full of kids posed several challenges at once. Not only did I have to create 25 (yes, 25 — and I may do more) new mini-animations, but I also had to make sure that those kids were all not overlapping each other in space, AND that the entire composition as a whole looked good.

But having a scene with 25 character rigs PLUS location rigs all referenced into each other = a surefire way to crash my computer. But luckily, I understand the power of COMPOSITING, so that I can render each mini-animation separately, and then mix them all together later.

But getting the initial comp right was in of itself a challenge. Here’s what I originally was working with:

This was me animating the characters and putting them together into the Schoolyard Composition that I already had made long, long ago. And as you can see, this schoolyard looks mighty barren. Also? The school BUILDING itself was way too big! And at first I thought “should I just put in more kids?”

Luckily, however, I realized the perfect solution — move all the Schoolyard objects CLOSER TOGETHER!

But unfortunately I had already animated all these kids…. And moving the schoolyard elements (the playground, the monkey bars, the slide, etc.) would shift them AWAY from the animations… uh oh…

But luckily, I have MATH on my side! So, what I did to avoid fucking everything up, essentially, was I took note of the ORIGINAL X, Y, and Z location coordinates of ALL of the schoolyard elements (I didn’t move the ground or wall however), and I then moved those elements to their new, closer positions. I THEN took note of the NEW positions of all the elements.

THEN, I went into Excel, and computed the DIFFERENCE of the values of the new and old X, Y, and Z coordinates, so that I then had the exact amounts I needed to move each character in the schoolyard whose animation depended on the physical structure of a schoolyard element.

And let me tell you…

It worked out OK.  Now, that re-locating and re-calculating process alone took ~3.5 hours. But it would have taken over a day if I didn’t do those calculations. So I’ll be praising the lord tonight that I know Math! Thank you, Gunn High School! Looks like some math/science skills come in handy for art majors after all. 😉

Anyway, as you can see in the new composite, it’s much better looking, but I’m going to sleep on it now and look at it tomorrow and decide if it’s still too barren-looking or not. And if I wanna add some more characters, then hell, I’ll add some more characters. Ironically enough, ANIMATING this stuff was the QUICKEST part of it all!

But for now, I’m going to sleep, because once again I’m making these posts at 2AM. Later, y’all!

More to come. 🙂

PICTURE LOCK

Welp, here it is! Picture Lock is TODAY and this is my Picture Lock Animatic! Also known as Animatic v16.

 

What’s great about this animatic? I am done editing the timing of my film, and when everything happens is when it will happen in my final thesis film.

 

What’s terrifying about this animatic? I am not allowed to edit the timing of my film anymore. AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

 

But luckily, I have a very simple mantra that helps me deal with the terror of not being allowed to edit my film anymore, and that mantra goes like this:

 

“Whatever.”

 

So without further adieu, check it out! Phantoms In The Dark~~~~

 

More to come 🙂