Cyborg Concept 3

This is a key piece of my concept art development because I have gotten to a stage where I can draw a more in depth detailed picture of what I want the character to look like which means I have gone through enough stages to get to a point where I am happy with how it looks and can then move forward from there. I am happy leaving this piece to speak for itself as it is only one step from being a UV map for the model which I am indeed thinking of doing to save a little time and I am also thinking of using a different method of UV mapping which is used in the industry to see if it more efficient in the long run (I will probably do this in a later blog).

Green Screen Filming Day 2

These are some shots I took while in a lesson learning about how to green screen, I tried keeping in perspective the roles that each person would be doing in the actual filming of the actors when it came to it and decided that I would be best as a team leader trying to keep people organised and telling people when to shut up and when to move fast, the other roles were things like filmers, equipment movers and things like that, this is why I stuck to my own role and kept everything going smoothly on the day of filming which I think I did not too badly.

                                         
                                                            Spartacus: Blood And Sand

A thing that I had a little look into when it came to green screen filming in the industry is the amount of green they actually use in big scale productions, I found that there were screens as big as houses in some of the production of spartacus, I knew they did big screens but i really didnt know how big until I saw this. This made me think about my own work and how I could have done with a bigger screen when I filmed because of the movement in some of the action scenes I did and how they had to be cut down a little and made shorted clips just because the green screen wasnt big enough.

I also learnt about the camera angles and shots used in action films and how they use panning and zooms to give certain feelings to the shots, things like dominance and cowardice can be incorporated better when used with certain camera angles and movements and I have been trying to incorporate these into my own video.

AE Lesson 5

This was the lesson where we learned how to make a couple of simple after effects particle effects by making speratre compositions and then nesting them together over and over until we are happy and then adding Effects from the menu to give them a more lifelike randomisation feel, then finally comping them all together for a finished simple usable result.



This is the final result I am happy with, it has a very nice finished feel to it which I like and this is because I decided to add a white background to imply that the particle effects were in a scene being filmed which again gives the impression of realism. I was thinking of the PIXAR lamp when I thought of a few of these processes as again that animation is very simple but is based in a light environment with no actual effort involved in creating it but it still frames the piece very well and finishes off a nice animation in an equally simplistic way which I think I have done here.




I may try this kind of thing when it comes to the final shot in my 1 min video which I think will be my actor being captured by the cyborgs, this might work as I want it to be a very simplistic looking scene with not much in it but with the focus being drawn to the fact that it is a blank environment with nothing to stimulate the mind which would then give the viewer a feel of isolation or being trapped, this is much based around the idea of a real prison cell where there are plain walls and very basic essentials to keep the inmates isolated and unstimulated mentally.


Here are the notes that I have taken and elaborated on in the lesson which I will leave as all yo have to do is read them to understand what I have done and learned in the lesson.

Ship Interior Concept Design

This was the ship interior I designed in Photoshop after getting a little inspiration from DA and just browsing images of interior spaceships online in general. I tried to get the overall feel of a sci fi ship by trying to keep the piece perspective looking and a little gloomy (from what I have seen this type of sci fi images works the best) and think that I managed this rather well. 

As shown in this lower image this is the kind of image that gets put in magazines and are called professional pieces, this is done by a username Dominuself and I have found that this person is also looking to keep themselves in the creative arts drawing industry by producing works of this calibur.

This is the kind of work I would like to produce more of. 

Another thing that I think I have done based on what I have seen done by industry practitioners is keeping the colour range the same throught the picture especially when it is a Sci Fi image really brings out the atmosphere and temperature of the image, like this image is blue and cold looking which is very fitting for a large ship interior wherehouse feel.

I will be applying this method when modelling my interior as it really pulls a picture together and makes the brain see and feel what the artist wants it to see. 

AE Lesson 4.5

Just another post about my learning process and how we jump an animation from Maya into after effects, this turned out to be really easy and once I had done it once it was never a problem doing it again.

This is one of the best ways to get a good shot when trying to get an object in Maya at the right perspective angle for the AE scene that it will be importing into, this is done by importing the image plane into the camera I am using and this will make it easier to follow the ship and buildings at the correct angle at the correct times.

A few settings that I screen shotted to make sure I remember what to do.

And finally my really crappy ship that I modelled in 5 mins. (more like 2)

Green Screen Filming Day 1

I thought that I would take a few pictures during the outdoor filming session as I knew I would be blogging about it later, also it helps me remember what we did for that day where I can articulate on how we worked and how absolutely cold it was filming all day.

I had a unique experience filming my own work as I wanted to do a specific kind of video and therefore had to direct the shots myself for a time, where Annabeth stepped back and said 'this is your directing time' and she just let me tell everyone what I wanted them to do and it was quite fun saying action, cut and take 2! 

I used my own actor as well so it was again a mix of trying keep everone happy and get the actor and my scenes done in the timeframe the actor had to shoot in, this involved talking to people in the production team and arranging time slots in which we would shoot our footage to work around and find a compromise where everyone would be happy, it all worked out in the end I think was a good experience being a semi director of 20+ people for a few hours.

AE Lesson 4

I took a more old fashioned approach at taking notes in this AE lesson, because my print screen button wasnt working I had to take notes but it wasnt really a big problem. 

In this lesson we learned about different types of key frames, these helped us to understand how to use certain types of keyframes in certain places, this can help with things like making an object seem more natural when it comes to making it move and ease in and out. We were told that nothing natural moves at linear speeds and everything has curves in it, this helped with understand more of animation as a whole.

So anyway these are notes that I took in the lesson which speak for themselves.

Ship Design Idea

I decided to do some initial ship designs with some free time I had on one of my Uni days after a lecture and was surprised with what I came out with, I thought first off 'what cool design thats not a ship could I base my ship on?' I then had the idea of using an image reference of a high tech mouse that is used for professional gaming, I have one a little like this and thought it would be fun to do. 

I then thought what could I mix this with that I like the look of that says to the audience what I want it say as a security space ship, I then though about the film that had come out fairly recently at the time which was the new Batman, I decided to take a reference image of 'The Bat' from the film and incorporate it into my own designs, I had already though of adding arms to the front of the ship that make it look more dominating and aggressive (A little like what a scorpion looks like). Then thought it would look cool with some spot lights and search lights which I then incorporated too, I am happy with how these painting came out as they show a lot of what I image my ship will look like.

I drew it from different angles to show the shape of the ship and get an idea of what it would weigh and then how it would hover or fly, this will all be applied to the animation which I will be doing to the ship once I have modeled it, but yeah overall I am happy with these designs and think that they provide a soiled basis on which to model my ship from.

504 Moodboard

I have made myself a moodboard for the project to try and get the theme of what I was trying to portray across, which is that of a Bladerunner/Judge Dredd type of dystopian world where people are restricted by the government and law. In this case though I think the focus of the module is just in creating some good visual effects instead of creating a good story and reason for doing so, I would like to try and get as much of both in as I could so this is why I have looked into the story of my piece maybe a little more than other people might have. Anyway I chose a load of pictures that I thought show cool ides and concepts and basically want my stuff to end up looking like, here it is.

The pics I have chosen from include things from DeviantArt which are just artworks that fans have made, stuff from starwars like the interior of the millennium falcon, the floating city also from starwars, a few Halo artworks I think and just generally high rated google search images but which are all relevant. 

Cyborg Concept 2

This was a piece I really enjoyed making, I did the initial rough sketches based on the web image I found for the search Cyborg, this came up with a semi decent picture which I thought would be a good place to start working from as reference. 

I created the big bulky looking robot first which can roughly be described as a warhammer 40k space marine and then I did a little more research into cyborgs and remembered that Star Wars' General Grevious was one. I then did the second sketch based on the idea of Grevious' look and gave him a chainsaw, this would have been a cool character to model as it would have had interesting and maybe hard to model parts as well as parts that would need unique rigging that I have not treed before. 

I will have to think about which one better suits the role and impression I am going for from the cyborg character in my scene. But overall I liked the work that I produced here and think that it shows a good development of my ideas and where I might end up on a character in the near future.

AE Lesson 3

In lesson 3 of the after effects workshop lessons we learned about Ease in and Ease out as well as making easier motion paths when it applies to objects coming back on themselves, we also learned about how the different keyframe assistants worked and why we might need to use them, we looked at a little more in depth animation with the basic attributes of solids and we also looked at linking layers to other layers and why that would be useful in certain situations also. 

I have again made all of the notes on the actual JPG image and have found this to be quite a useful lesson in terms of steps forward to my overall understanding of AE.

I have also come to like AE as a program as it has been called the Photoshop of moving imagery, and as I love Photoshop as a program I am compelled to like this also. But seriously I do enjoy using this program and hope we have enough time before submission to really get to grips with the program and really play around with it and test its potential.

Cyborg Concept 1

I actually drew this right before the Winter Holidays but I didnt really like it so I waited a while before I went back to it and 'finished' (added a background) it. It only took 30 mins and dont think it truly shows what I wanted the cyborgs in my head to look like. I will come back to these characters soon and try making more detailed sketches to show more of what direction I wanted them to go in visually.

Another thing about the picture is that I could never get the perspective right and thats probably because I didnt really know what I was drawing when I started drawing it, I will again be working and trying to improve upon my perspective drawing which I think has already come so far this year even if it is not shown particularly in this piece. 

This was a little piece I did near the start of the module when I was thinking of other shots that might be included in my finalized sequence, I dont know how far I will stray from this general idea but would like to at least get a quick shot of this in my video at some point. This pic took about 25 mins to make but I got bored of it as it wasnt really going anywhere so I added a filter to it and left it as a reference image and said 'well theres that'. I may come in use at some point later down the line in this module.

AE Lesson 2

In lesson number 2 we learned all about GREEN SCREENING! this was a surprisingly easy process with an alright result being produced with not much effort involved. The initial parts of green screening a simply adding one or two effects called KeyLighting and then simply changing a few settings on this effect to get rid of the green colour altogether, then by adding a mask removing the rest of the undesired image from view. 

The trick part with green screening is getting it perfect, as I said before it is very easy to get an alright looking result with little effort but when you are going for a really convincing result that you want to look good and have the character sit really well in a desired scene thats when you need a lot of time and a lot of patience messing around with all the various options and settings to try and figure out what will work best for your character and scene. 

When I was doing my test with the stock footage I created a sort of Brodi Quest, I made the guy with the green behind him go across the several other stock images I have below with a happy little tune with it, this only being a test was a little fun and really got me to grips with the basics of green screening and keying out characters. I think I will shine though when it comes to working with my own footage as I would like to really get in to AE and play around with it in my own time.

Location And Effects Ideas

A 20 min sketch of what my scene may look like in one of the shots of the 1 min video I will be creating. 

We were told that we may be shooting in the royal armouries courtyeard space location and that instantly seemed to me like it would be an awesome idea, the space and the atmosphere and the things you could edit on them huge plain looking walls and buildings down there would have been awesome. With this in mid I decided to sketch out what could possibly be a scenario and what one of my establishing shots might look like in my 1 min video. The ship would come over the top of the armouries and shine a spotlight down on the character with a loud radio voice saying some sort of warning message before they are beamed aboard.

This would be nice to do since I think a chance form the last year would be nice as I think the films they made could have done with a little more variety, but we will have to wait and see what is available on the day when it comes to shooting the scenes, and wether we will actually be allowed to film in a place like this in public as there have been issues before when it comes to filming in town or a semi populated place.

AE Lesson 1

The FIRST lesson in what will seem like a lot of after effects lessons. We learnt the very basics in this lesson with things like solids, simple attributes and where they were, composition settings and a little on how to make ram preview work a little easier. Here is a very simple animation I made with my mad originality skills, its pong! Anyway the tutor Mike Flower seemed to like it and I dont think it is too bad for a very very very first after effects attempt, hopefully better more ambitious stuff in the future.

           

I dont think I need to write too much about this next JPG which I have already elaborated on in photoshop while I was comping all the screenshots of the days lesson together, I made most of the important notes on the image and have highlighed the aspects of what I have learned to be most important to me and the process in which things are created properly in AE.

504 Presentation Before Winter Holidays

We were quite busy at this point with the winter exhibition (Blogging about this soon) and so I had to do quite a quick sketch when it came to having something to present on the friday before we broke up for the winter holidays, I came up with this simplistic ship interior that gave a kind of industrial vibe and also a futuristic feel, sort of starwars/startrek ship interiors while also being quite like the matrix ship. 

I had two ideas which I discussed and they were 1. The character who is beamed up is then arrested by the cyborg people on the ship, this idea was a little mellow and I really wanted to get deeper into after effects and cool effects like explosions and gunshots. The idea #2. was that I could have the character who gets beamed onto the ship put up a bit of a fight and maybe shoots back at the people/cyborgs trying to arrest him, this opens the opportunity to a lot more after effects play time but also the prospect of more work to do, I was told by a few people that this was a little bit ambitious and that I may not have enough time to do this idea to its full extent but I really wanted to push myself so in the end I think I will be going with idea number 2.

504 Initial Notes On The Module

These were some of my initial thoughts on the 504 module when I got past the 'I dont like the sound of this' stage and decided to focus on the 'What can I actually get out of this' process. I decided to write a list of a few of my favorite things I would have liked to have focus on during this module, I then realistically selected the ones I like the idea most of out of them and also which ones were feasible to do without going too far astray from the brief.

I think it will end up around the Halo universe and Sci Fi side of things because thats what I think the brief will limit me to, this is fine as it is on my list of things I would like to do and therefore will be able to get a lot of work done but also enjoy it.

Judge Dredd Speedpaint

I have recently been taking my speedpainting/concept art/Photoshop drawing a step further by recording the screen as I paint so that I can create a timelapse speedpainting afterwards, much like how some professionals do. I thought why not try this with while have a bit of inspiraion, I had just watched the new film Judge Dredd at the time and really wanted to do a piece themed around that universe, I ended up only doing a sketch of the main character himself but I really like how it turned out and think the video works really well as a time lapse speed paint as this is the first one I have ever managed to create which I am also proud that I managed to do.

Anyway here is the embedded video, I kept it short - 3 Mins - because sometimes these kind of videos can be boring to some people especially without music which I may add later on and re upload. I have added the finished sketch as well for better detail.

I feel that this has been a good PPP practice because I have taken a good 8+ hours learning a new program to create this video and spent a lot of time actually creating the painting itself which is not related to my learning study at the moment, I had to watch and learn many tutorials and have found that programs we learn at Uni can sometimes be similar to other programs which have the same function which is good and makes things easier.

Exhibition Day

Evaluating the usefulness and success of the exhibition night DFGA level 5 exhibited I would have to say it went okay for the tools we had, overall people enjoyed the exhibit and I think it was a more useful experience for the students that presented and got the event organised and sorted for which I was a small member. We all had to organise the event into different sections so that the entire class could manage it, this worked better than I thought it would with a lot of people jumping at the opportunity to get involved and help with the event. 

The role that I had in helping out was a simple one, I pretty much carried things from A to B when we were moving all the equipment around, I was happy with this job however as I had a lot of work to do of my own with other projects at the time and the job I volunteered for did not take much time in the end just a little lifting and moving on the day of the presentation. 

Like Annabeth said, the real worth of doing the exhibition out of our comfort zone (meaning our own college) is that it brings much more professionalism to the feel of the event, on the other hand though it did seem a little out of the way for people to be able to get to. Also the weather was horrendus and as such probably reduced the number of people that were willing to treck all the way down town to a freezing gallery they know nothing about. But in the end I think everyone involved in the preperation of the event would agree that it was worth the experience and it did in fact turn out to be quite fun (maybe a little drink contributed to this) and we will be better prepared for an exhibition in the future.