wk 7: Another thing

Oh and yes before you say it the voice over does sound strangely like Mr Bean! This was not intentional but during recording it sounded the best out of all of the styles of dialogue I made.

wk 7: Premier and dun !

As it goes I have been collating my avi's as I get them in premier pro so there wasn't much left to alter! Under the advice from Chris I did not compress the avi's from max, I left them uncompressed so that Premier can do the compressing, unfortunately that left me with 7 gbs worth of avi's as you can see below. Because I had to split the files up for rendering some of them are in four rather large parts!



Firstly to get my avi's and mov's into premier I went to file/import (Ctrl+i) this imports them into the pool which then allowed me todrag them onto the timeline for arranging.

Sometimes I hadn't left enough room either side of an animation and instead of re-rendering alonger version I used the cut tool (c) to trim a bit off the end to copy and repeat making the animation longer.



For smoother transitions between shots I creating a black jpeg 640x480 to fade between images. By holding Ctrl and clicking on the line that crosses each clip I can add points and drag them to alter the opacity of the fade jpeg to give the effect of fading to black. There is probably a simple effect/pre-built transition to do this but I prefer the good old botching technique that I use for all aspects of my life!

The same technique can be used for adjusting the volume of the sound. Also The panel above the timeline line allows you to finer adjust these nodes using the same principal of creating points.

I have spent the day recording the voice overs, soundtracks and sound effects and after all of this I can proudly say VOILA! I have finito'ed. The finished file is unfortunately a good 600MB so cannot be uploaded, but the story that I had in my mind was meant to be humourous and I believe that I pulled it off perfectly with only a few set backs!

Having said that I may yet add another 2 second shot to smoothen out the transition of Drew falling down the hill because it is still a little rough around the edges.

Thanks to the uni mac's I endured around 522 hours of rendering instead of my laptops dual-core 2030 hours of rendering! So I just want to say a really big thanks to Apple for creating such an amazing machine.
I also want to say thanks to Autodesk Backburner for creating such a simple way to manage a rendering farm. Maybe next semester I will actually be allowed to use it!

I have really enjoyed this module and can honestly say that it was the best module ever, which allowed me to produce the only bit of work that I am proud of during this degree! The reason I have finished 9 weeks early is because I have rejected every other module so forgive me for not posting for a while whilst I catch up with my other modules!

See ya laters taters.

wk 7: The distraction

To orchestrate my distraction I thought about having another human waving at Drew or calling his name, but I wanted Drew to be alone in his dream so to emphasise this fact I chose to have an animal distract him in someway. Below is my thought process, I wanted a bird originally and I also wanted it to empulate Drew but I couldn't get the design right so I tried other animals, after failing at this I then went back to the bird idea and finally got a likeable bird design and so decided that Elory would whistle a distraction at Drew.



My next post will show my process in Premiere pro.

wk 6: Elroy wanna a cracker

After viewing the beginning of my animation in Premier Pro I found that Drew randomly falling off a cliff wasn't coherent enough and needed a distraction, thus I invented Elroy (thats for you Lisa!). The idea being that He flies in and distracts Drew in a distractingly distracting way ergo leading to Drew's tumble. It is only a side bit to my original storyboard so it won't appear on it when I post it because I've already scanned it!

Below is my fully meshed and modelled Elroy. I tried to keep his styling in line with Drews which I think worked. I didn't really want to mess about with boning another character as bipeds keep giving me gyp, but being an idiot I thought I'd do it anyway! Elroy not being 100% human needed some modification to his bones hence the twisted nature of the biped below but I assure you it fits quite well!



Due to the radically altered biped the envelopes on the Physique were really playing up, but me already having similar problems with Drew meant I overcame them pretty quickly and below are all of the envelopes.



After consulting top designers and specialists in the field of 3D bird modelling (my Dad and Mum) it turns out red works better and I agree as he stands out more against the sky, so Elroy is more of a Macaw now, even though Macaw's can be blue as well!



Because General lighting has radically changed my scenes, turning it off produced quite a nice shot I thought almost a Photoshop Cutout filter there!



One last decision before we make flight that is the mouth. I say mouth snd not beak because Elroy has many human features which I think link him to Drew but also provide a humourous factor to him. When Elroy tweets I wanted it to look like a whistle So I think the best two mouths are the top left and bottom right. (The yellow mouth represents the bottom part of the beak) I quite liked both but as far as looking like he is whistle the bottom right won in the end!