Dazzle

My lighting skills are awful so I decided to try and light a textured and posed Jed for a poster I have in mind. Unfortunately I failed miserably and never want to touch lights again. Instead I imported an old setup Alec created for an Ed still a while back. It seemed to work OK although I had to tweak loads of textures and never had time to pose him. More to come on thiss.....

51 & 52

I feel a bit ashamed to be posting these as there's barely any animation occuring in either of them. All I had to do was some subtle vibrations in the hands, handlebars and shoulders. I also added a few cheeky head turns so he's not a complete statue...

51.

52.

(headphone animation still needed)

I spent most of the day rigging the floor polisher with the help of clym and hulsey babes. Its now almost ready for the walkcycle shot tommorow.

Version Deux

Plug So Far

Shot 56 - the crucial unplug of the polisher and plug in of the life support machine. Needs alot of work. Should be done by Saturday leaving me Sunday to do an easy shot and meet our deadline of 31 by Monday....

Shadow Test

Heads Up

Just a quick run through of whats been going on over the past few days:

Simon has now taken over from Grigsbys role lighting the BASE_SHOT, a shot which is seen in more than a third of the film and so is of great importance. He has made a blinding start and with a little supervision from Grigs and countless changes requested my myself has managed to almost get it looking perfect. Below is the latest development...



It's 85% there now. Ed's skin still needs a little work because at the moment he seems to be glowing, this can be achieved by playing around with the inner colour of the ramp. The pillow needs adjusting so it has a few more creases, a lighter shadow at the base and less intensity on the right hand side. Any other changes can be made in post, meaning Simon can then finally start importing animation and rendering it!

Our second year Tom has delivered the goods again this week with shot 21 - the pump breakdown. This was an especially easy shot in which Ed simply had to move his head ever so slightly whilst looking up at the pump. The reason for this being that the depth of field focus changes so the audience won't be paying any attention to the little fellow. Well played Ritchie...



Hopefully Tom can animate a further 3 or 4 shots for us before the end of the term meaning an extra bit of weight off me and Alecs shoulders.

Alec finished the long awaited shot 22 on friday with great pleasure, although you wouldnt think it with the amount of rage that occured soon after. He has since been working on the 'Ding' shot and today completed the POV shot (excluding Jed). I believe he still needs to complete a further two shots this, as do I.

I have been working on the mirror shot since Friday, a scene in which Jed walks past a reflection of Ed screaming, stops, returns to examine it, but simply adjusts his name badge instead - hahaha the crowd go wild. It used to be funny, I'm sick of it now. Anywho its been a nightmare trying to position the two cameras correctly for this shot as we intend to composite 4 layers - the mirror/room, Jed, Jeds reflection, and Ed's reflection. I have almost finished both views, tommorow lunch time is my deadline...



How the scene should look mirrored.



I also completed shot 37 this weekend/this morning, a close up of Jeds bum making contact with the end of the bed...



One last thing - the pump shot and isolation shot are rendering at the moment, so fingers crossed me and Simon can get the trailer together by thursday for Rave Live.

In Recent News

We have now completed 19 shots of animation meaning a third of the film is ready to render. However stress levels have been high lately with a a range of problems occuring everyday such as discovering Daves Jed rig is unscalable, the renderfarm not being able to handle 1080 HD, render jobs failing because of unknown reasons etc etc. On top of this the pressure has mounted on my lighter Dan Grigsby, and my fellow Director Phil has felt neglected due to P.O's tremendous workload taking over.

Yesterday we had a meeting about the situation and I must say tempers were high. For the first time I actually felt the real meaning of stress, so much so that the night before I had to take tablets to calm myself down and get some sleep. To wake up to a heated discussion was the last thing I wanted but at the same time I totally understood where the guys were coming from. Phil has been plodding along with Splay on his own for too long now and its about time he got some more help. Grigsby has felt sucked into working solely on P.O rather than distributing his time evenly which is true, I guess I just never stopped him because he was knocking out such good work.

The meeting ended with an agreement that Grigs will now teach Simon everything he knows about lighting and supervise him at all times in order for the shots to reach the quality they were before. He will now work primarily on Splay shots and any free time will be spent doing shots Simon cant do. I think this is a fair compromise, plus Alec is going to try and spit out a couple more Splay shots.

I actually had a really good day after that and managed to tidy up a shot animated by our second year helper Tom. What he had done was great it just needed the oxygen tube animated and follow through added to the ears. Below is the updated version...



He did such a good job we have already given him a new shot which he hopes to have complete by the end of the week.

I then finished shot 24, one which has been up in the air for a long time now. Again the tube needed sorting, as well as the timing, and ears. Its all cool beans now though.....



I aim to start a brand new shot tomorrow.

Shot 24

Thought I'd post the latest development of this shot seeing as I have been working on it on and off for the last week or so. I'm actually really pleased with it now, especially the deep breath Ed takes after he's cried out for help, a suggestion made by Phil. All thats left is for him to quickly look around in panic ...

Swift Stroll South

This was meant to be posted a few days ago now, its the opening pan down the machine. I had to animate the camera tracking all the way down the main terminal from the pump to the bed. It was really difficult and required the help of Mr Brooks who tweaked my line graph.



Apart from the animated dials and importing the sleeping animation this shot is ready to render, and can form part of the trailer we hope to have complete by the end of the week.

Ham n Cheesy

Easy shots are running out fast. In order to hit our weekly target of 3 animations per week I have had to nab possibly the easiest shots remaining, the bum shake, headphone boom, and floor polisher rev. These are all 2 second snippets of Jed, which when montaged together produce a rythmic reveal of the character.

First up my favourite, the bum shake. I animated this on Easter Sunday whilst munching on an egg and setting up my new PS3. . .



I know its ridiculously simple but it needed to be done well, and the buttocks required serious follow through and overlap! If it were up to me I would have exxagerated the boings even more but Phil has already complained about the obscene wobbles.

I then took a break from staring at Jeds rear and instead animated the pounding headphone on Monday. Again fairly easy, but it had to be timed perfectly to the music...



It was difficult to get it to recoil back to its original shape whilst vibrating, especially as I had extended it so far, however it got there in the end.

Finally today I gave the rev shot a crack. This was definately the hardest of the lot down to the fact that the polisher handle bar needed rigging and the handle itself needed twsiting. By lunch time I had finally achieved a bar that was ready to be revved and imported in with Jed, however when I attempted to clench his hand around the accelorator it wrapped around like bent paperclips on a lump of s***. This lead to me repainting the finger weights and starting over.

Eventually I set up the camera with the help of Phil and began animating. This is the work in progress...



Bearing in mind the sheer amount of 'mation' left to be done I may well leave it in this basic stage. we have bigger fish to fry.

Polishing up

I have had to go back and remodel the top half of the floor polisher as unfortunately I saved over the latest file which included all the buttons, handle bars and dial. It didnt take me longer than a morning to sort out, but had to be done as Simon has been waiting for a while now to texture the damn thing.

I handed the file over to him and he applied a number of deformers to the polisher enabling it to bend from side to side and squash upon impact. Although it worked initially upon reflection it was far to laggy and slow to possibly work with. this was due to the untold amounts of history left on the model, a fault of my own. The combine and seperate tools seemed to effect it especially and caused issues when attempting multiple deformations.

Hulse suggested a spline IK with control points, which to be honest wen straight over my head. A quick demo proved successful however we then agreed a few set driven keys would suffice. Hopefully I can achieve this at some point, if not I'm going to grab Dave and see if he can bash it out in an hour or so.

Knock Knock

I modelled this door today in preparation for the establishing shot when the whole room is seen. Continuing the big chunky rounded style I have maintained throughout the ward was fairly easy as I had my original designs to refer to.



The double doors will be seen in the background of a number of Jeds dancing scenes aswell as heard when Jed comes crashing through them at the start.