Testing out the first scene (Farnham - Croydon)

The 'establishing' first scene involves a wide shot of a dusty and dirty street of Croydon. Zoe walks from right to left down this street as heavy pollutants billow out of chimneys in the background.

The whole scene must be believable showing how urban Croydon is.

When I come to design and animate the bright and colourful forest scenes later, this will make a fantastic contrast with theses polluted scenes.

The chimney smoke acts as moving footage, I am carefully making sure I meet the assessment requirements

I even added in a little train running past at the beginning - little subtle things like this really bring the busy streets of Croydon to life - though, I have to be careful I don't distract the audiences attention too much!

Zoe walks across the screen. I have not animated my puppet yet as her legs/arms etc still need adding, though I think I've worked out the timing and the composition.



^This scene includes a lot of my own photography, I did not want to pinch loads of images off Google.
This is because I can observe the buildings themselves in real life and shoot certain specific camera angles.
(note: the scene will cut directly after she exits scene)

However, I am living in 'leafy' Farnham, a town not known for its big industrial concrete masses.
By planning my efforts on 'Google Street View', I set out to find the shots I needed to make my composition.
I found a few back alleys around the back of Iceland in Farnham. By shooting various different camera angles etc I pretty much had a good library of 'Croydon' street photographs.

The little concrete strip at the top is
 the wall of a multi-storey car park, in the clip above this
is  a railway bridge

The composition looks good, though now I need to add in a sense of depth. Therefore, I need to chop some parts up furthermore and create a virtual camera. Some buildings need cleaning up and the shop signs look a little 'stuck on' so I need to blend those in bit more.

Smoke!

I started compositing more layers of my rotoscoped smoke and created this rather smokey looking scene. This is far too smokey for my film, though it gave me an insight into smoke creation if I ever need to animate a fire?!

Rotoscoping - Smoke

One of the assessment requirements is to have at least one background containing moving footage.

I have decided to use the smoke coming out of the factory chimneys as my moving footage.

Due to living in 'leafy' farnham I am unable to easily film smoking stack chimneys myself. Therefore, I resulted in looking up stock videos of chimney smoke.
I found a great little video on YouTube of a smoking chimney. The quality wasn't bad either.

After successfully downloading the video I set out to use the rotoscoping tool on After Effects!

The idea was to cut the smoke away from the rest of the footage. This way I could then overlay the moving smoke onto my desired composition. 

 I have imported the footage straight onto After Effects, as I scrub the play head the footage plays. Time to do some rotoscoping.

I've clicked on the 'Rotobrush' tool, this enables me to draw a green line across the area I want to rotoscope. 

The green line does not have to outline the smoke, instead, it just has to act as a basic guide for the rotoscoping reference. 

Once the green line has been drawn a pink outline has been automatically placed around the smoke. The computer has cleverly worked out, with the help of my green outline, that the contrasting smoke wants to be rotoscoped and separated from the sky behind!

As the playhead is scrubbed, the pink outline follows the smoke footage and sure enough it appears to have worked! After a bit of tweaking using the the 'rotobrush' tool a smooth reference is achieved. Now the moving smoke has been isolated from the rest of the footage.

 The checkerboard display shows the transparency behind the smoke. After a bit of tweaking, feathering and motion blur, the smoke moves seamlessly upon its own layer.  

This can now be placed onto a separate composition. Using layers I can now compose this upon my Croydon street scenes. 

I placed the moving smoke onto a new composition and quickly cut out some steam towers

 Here is the final test footage:

This took under 2 hours and I am really pleased with the outcome, this is definitely going to be used in my final film. The smoke could still do with a bit of tweaking though.

Many thanks to Alex for helping me out with this, a good After Effects session this afternoon! 

Time to make a film..!!!

After Effect Puppet Testing

A few weeks ago we learned how to animate a 'puppet' design on After Effects.

We were provided with pre-made designs as a hierarchy of layers consisting of separate layers such as upper arm, lower arm etc.

The individuality of each layer meant that each limb could be manipulated by a means of rotation and transformation.

By parenting each layer together with 'children' several body parts could not only be manipulated separately but also together in a well structured organic motion.

We then used the puppet tool, which I had previously used (see below) as an experiment on my 'Zoe' puppet. This gave me a very floppy 'un-organic' motion which looked a bit odd!

However, this puppet tool will definitely be useful!

From this, I can see that for my animation which involves a walk cycle using layer is much more appropriate!

Storyboard

The theme of my film will be the journey Zoe takes on a regular basis.

The film begins in a busy, urbanised street of Croydon (hometown of Zoe). As she walks through the street many subliminal messages are present. e.g. on the bus an advert for fantastic Mr. fox is visible - Zoe's favourite film.
Zoe's 'favoruite phrase' will be on a huge 'billboard/poster'

The basic outline of this story is to show Zoe's love of forests and wildlife in comparison to her hometown of Croydon.
This creates a fundamental  rural/urban contrast where the unnatural 'blocky' characteristics of Croydon are contrasted to the mystical forest.

As Zoe enters the forest the mood of the film completely changes, bright lush colours form this magical place. - Peaceful and quiet. ..

As Zoe continues through the forest the colour of the film turns to orange (autumnal colours - the trees go bare as the crunching sound of leaves is heard beneath the feet of Zoe.

At the end the whole screen fades to night time where a full moon is visible forming 'Zoe' typography.

See below:

I have reviewed this storyboard to see if it meets the brief:

• Favourite colour - orange(autumnal colours) - used in forest scene. 
• Favourite/special place - Forest
• Word or phrase - Yeah, yeah' visible on poster in Croydon
• Favourite past time - Walking through forest
• Soundtrack - Fantastic Mr.Fox soundtrack used in forest 
• Typography - in the form of the title page at end - moon. 
• Background with moving footage - Steam billowing out of steam tower in Croydon. 

Character Design 01

After researching and analysing the recent 'British Gas' adverts, I have decided to construct my 'Zoe' character in a similar simplistic puppet style!

Over the past week I have been busy constructing and designing character designs in photoshop.

I have used different images off the internet to create fabric texture etc for the character.

The body of the puppet will be in a cut out style and the head will be a photograph.

Different photographs of the head position will be captured and used as 'replacement heads' for different expressions etc.










(Above) Tall/upright character design. I used an image of brown fabric to cut the coat out of. Each cut out section represents one layer on Photoshop.

Once I had cut out all the shapes from the various fabric images, I used the Blending Options' tool to create shadow, as well as highlights and further texture.

<-I am really pleased with the character design to the left. Here the character is much more squat and I feel has a much more likeable appearance. This design still needs tweaking (Feet need to be worked on and hands need a little more refining) I used a filter off 'Photoshop' called Cutout' to make the head look a little more cartoony! I am unsure whether to use this filter or keep the head 'raw' with no effects.

(Below) I composited one of my character designs onto After Effects. I wanted to see if these designs could be animated. Using the pin tool I located several joints which allowed me to move the shapes in an organic nature.
I pushed the puppet tool to the limit and made some very strange poses!

(Below) Creating the body of a 'Zoe' character.