The Final Stretch

The final week is upon us and animation is almost over. As of Sunday every single shot for Polished Off will be complete meaning we've hit our deadline.

Today I animated Jed sliding in next to the polisher which was really fun as I've been waiting to get him into this finishing pose for a long time. However the file I've been working in is so tempramental its a joke, it literally crashes every five minutes for no apparent reason. I've tried absolutely everything from cleaning up the scene until its almost empty right through to switching users, computers and even deleting preferences. Even Hulse was stumped which is rare. Anyway I simply had to make do with saving every minute and being careful not to click certain things which increased the chances of a freeze.

Eventually I got it to this stage...

Im actually really pleased with the animation I achieved in this shot especially Jed. All it needs now is an unravelling wire which I have no idea how I'm going to do but thats what the weekends for I guess.

From Monday onwards I will be working solely on the final premiere file, importing our mov's, importing sound, and editing. I really believe we can do it for the Friday hand in - its just going to take ALOT of work....

Ed's Death

The hardest part of this shot so far has been the revolving floor polisher which slides into view. It needed to rotate as well as gently rock from side to side before grinding to a halt. I spent several hours trying different methods using the graph editor to its full potential however all of them seemed jerky and unatural. It wasn't until we watched this video of a spinning coin that we realised the base of the polisher never actual rests flat on the floor during its spinning...



Alec then suggested moving the pivot point to the edge of the base rather than the centre which prevented it from sinking into the floor. An obvious mistake but when your pressed for time these things escape you. Anyway eventually I got something I was happy with and then spent the afternoon animating Ed dying. Here is the progress so far....



Tommorow will be spent animating Jed sliding in 'risky business' style.

P.S 2 shots left!

Keep Goingggg

Spent a lot of today tweaking the release pose of the spin shot I mentioned yesterday. This was my first attempt...

This was Ok however I felt it lacked momentum and required more of a hip swivel and thrust. It appeared as if he was simply jumping off of the polisher and not spinning it away from him. Instead I went for this....

The final pose is much stronger and the movement feels much more fluid. I also animated the wire which was mental.

We now only have 3 shots left to animate!

Sneaky Spinning

We decided to cheat the hardest shot of the film today. It sounds bad but with the amount of time we have left and the endless file problems its the only way.

Orginally Jed was to spin around with the floor polisher as if he was ballroom dancing with a woman. I made a start on the key poses however the file continued to crash making it almost impossible to make progress. After two days of struggling and the animation looking like a stumbling drunk I asked Alec whether we could get away with him being just a whirling blur, almost like the tazmanian devil. It sounded stupid but considering the shot only lasts a second and a half and its supposed to represent Jed at his most extreme we decided to test it out.

We did a test animation of the rig simply rotating around at a hundred miles per hour across a distance and did a batch render. Nothing fancy just the model, one light, and a few textures to get an idea of how it could look. We then applied a directional blur to it in AE. The results were as follows...



Pleased with the results and realising that to actually animate each movement would take days we decided to go with it. It's still going to tell the story and its going to save time. All I have to do now is make sure the release pose is animated well, which I started this afternoon. Heres the progress...



Meanwhile I believe we're behind on rendering and composting so I'm going to try and help Simon in anyway possible.

Oblivious

Made a start on this one today. . .

Jed walking away from Ed screaming in the background. I have yet to animate Ed and am still not happy with Jeds facial expression timing however time is of the essence and as Phil said he does look oblivious which is the aim. I have to finish this shot by Monday morning!

Talk about pose to pose...

This shot literally was pose to pose animation and to be honest it kind of works ....





I could go in and add inbetweens and follow through etc however we always imagined this final shot of Ed dying to be ultra fast spazzing. I did animate the oxygen tube as that obviously did need to be flying about during the manic outburst. Considering time constraints this shots done.

Moonwalk

By far the hardest shot I've had to animate this term - the moonwalk. Sliding feet, hip rotations, change over steps, polisher wire, head movement, afro swing, and Michael Jackson swagger all had to be taken into account. Chuck in a deadline of 2 days and it becomes an almost impossible task. I did my best however lets face it, a moonwalk needs at least a week to perfect. I would love to be able to animate this properly with correct timing, better posing, and closer representation of jackson himself. I found a neat video to refer to . . .

I got the key poses from here...



and the timing between steps from here...



I then had to replicate the same movement but with jeds long flipper feet...



Im pleased with the progress made in 2 days however I just wish I could spend more time on it, as I know I'm capable of much better. Tommorows a new day and that means a new shot, ah well, at least it will tell the story...

Ritchie & Sounds

Tom Ritchie saved the day today as me and Alec failed to animate our allocated shots. He submitting shot 55, a hard scene in which jeds reels in the polisher wire. . .

I hope he doesn't mind but I thought it was worth posting to show the progress made. It's definately alot smoother than it used to be, and the timing is much better. It reached a point where he simply didnt have time to perfect it any more, and considering it's only seen for a couple of seconds we called it done. I've already assigned him a new shot which he's aiming to start tommorow.

Although Alec and I didnt animate today we did record the dialogue in the voice over booth - a task which involved a lot of running about and hiring of equipment. We spent the best part of the morning recording Ed (myself) and the afternoon Jed (Alec). We then burned them to disc and kept copies ready for our sound guru, John Solly, to edit. John is also sorting out all of the sound fx at the moment from a list I emailed him at the weekend. Hopefully when combined with the animatic sounds we will have an enormous library of sounds to choose from.

As well as this I made sure Simon was on form with rendering and gave him my improvment requests. He's been doing an absoultely brilliant job lately and has had the patience of a saint so once again cheers mate.

All in all an OK day with Dalli stepping in after lunch to give some advice and much appreciated criticism. I just hope the rest of the week is spent animating now....

Twennie Sev

Shot 27. Jed turning the corner. Not even a second long...

Danger Ally is now Shit Creek

We now only have two weeks to animate 19 shots - not exactly great. However we are speeding up with our animation and Tom Ritchie is willing to animate 2 more shots. If we just keep bashing them out I'm sure we can make this deadline. The only problem will be that those last few shots will have to be rendered and composited in our last week of editing...

43 done - 19 to go!

Fawty Sex

Shot 46. Quite pleased with this one. Jed flings the floor polisher into a microphone position to blurt out a scream...

53 final

Walkcycle Latest & 53 Blockout