Shot 5
For shot 5, I really wanted to explore the environmental terrain by keeping an aesthetic consistency of using spherical shapes. This was to accentuate the juxtaposition of child-like ‘safe’ looking aesthetics with quite darker, more serious tones of people discussing their experiences with the lockdown. In the initial environmental model, I thought it looked quite bare in spite of the use of X-gen, and I felt like it needed the background to further accent the key foreground elements.
Looking at the Tuscan landscape, since the house itself is based on the architecture in the area, many of these rolling hills feel very gentle and green. Translating this into the environmental design, I tried to create this smaller, enclosed area utilising the reference imagery to accentuate the isolation and feeling of confinement this particular interviewee experienced.
As seen below, the initial render test had a similar colour scheme to what I wanted to achieve, but there is no colour in the background, and the frame is highly overexposed in a way that washes everything out. Due to this lack of colour in the sky, I am not able to create rim lighting that would blend all the mesh and textures into the scene together. After the animation process is complete, I will then work on adjusting the lighting of the scene to be reminiscent of a warm Tuscan location.
After creating the environmental model, I moved on quite early to the animation stage, and the first process of lip sync was the ‘jaw bounces’. While In Kenny Roy’s book it states that you know, think about the way words are being said rather than just simply moving eh mouth in time with the audio, I still wanted to keep a level of stiffness to sell that they are houses (2014).
Below is the finished rendered animation. Due to the heavy use of X-Gen, lighting and mesh the render time took several days before it was complete. However I allowed contgency time for the week so that I gauge how long an intense environmental scene will take, especially going into shots 11 and 19. Shot 11 and 19 also have the inclusion of heavy lighting that is replicant of a ‘laser’ beam. Retrospectively looking at my animation in this shot, I feel that I could have spent more like smoothing the motion out as it appears very jerky at points.
Shot 8
For Shot 8, I wanted to replicate an environment that would be rememniscent of side scroller layouts in video games, especially that of the super Mario franchise. By using this association, especially with the kinetic sign that points towards a ‘hole’ it feels symbolic of the distance many people experienced from reality during lockdown, and also using a bright colourful aesthetic to distract and juxtapose from the spoken content.
Using the previous tutorial of creating X-Gen Grass, I made a new description to enhance the ground more and to match aesthetically the previous shots. I also feel this will help accentuate the ‘underground’ area.
Lighting
Since I wanted this scene to be brightly lit and to have a ‘sunny’ appearance that would contradcit with the darker, dingy looking ‘hole’. Since one of the interviewees states how they were stuck down the “hall” with a ‘random guy’, however since the audio quality isn’t the clearest and the interviewee has a slight accent, it also sounds slightly like ‘hole’. playing with this is decided to make a visual joke out of it, which led to the inspiration of the environment.
With the addition of the rim lighting, the character and environmental assets blended into the scene much more seamlessly, and due to the blue saturation of it, achieved a ‘cherrful’ sunny look that I was aiming to achieve.
When initially lighting the underground area, it was very dark and nothing in the scene was visible. In order to get the space to be enclosed to get a top down lighting effect, I had to create an enclosed piece of mesh that wasn’t open like a side scroller of a ‘dolls house’. This meant that I had a slightly limited space to work with the camera however added to the overall lighting.
Due to one of the characters being a ‘skyscaper’, I thought I would utilising interior lighting implications to add an additional light and glow to the scene, to make it stand out more. I also feel this utilsies the character designs to a better extent.
Below is the finished shot, which I think has the inclusion of a well timing camera move. However, reflectively, I think that the walking animation is not very neat and does not quite match the timing of the audio and therefore the camera. At times there are also noticeable knee-pops which indicates I should revisit the graph editor and ensure everything is smooth. I also feel i could have played more with the weight of the upper body, as it is massively disproportionate to the legs and could have been a really good opportunity for a more interesting, weighted follow through. I also feel that some of the motion is too ‘floaty’ and doesn’t convey the right amount of weight in general. Since this shot has a very long expected render time, and it currently still not finished, I will add these improvements to be added provided there is additional time for me to work on it.
Shot 11
Using the same environment as in shot 5, I changed the environment to create a night time setting that would appear more striking and allow for more contrast when visualising an ‘alien abduction’.
Trying to ehnace the setting and accentuate the time of day, I created some stars in the sky and turned them into mesh lights with a very high exposure so they would appear to be ‘glowing’. While I considered and testing making the beam of light a mesh light, It would not have created a transparent mesh, making the character not clearly visible.
A key part of this scene is the lighting aspect , since I wanted to add this very dramatic green hue that would illumate the scene. In doing this I added a very high intensity are light and used the spread so that it covered essentially the entire grass. The green environment also helped to enhance this overall.
In the video below is the completed animated shot, in which I think the eye darts and eye animation was quite successful given the lack of things to make character expression with. However, again I feel some of the motion is a bit too stiff and also in some parts too floating without clear character motivation. If given the time, I aim to improve this along with the earlier shots.
References:
- Roy, K. (2014) How to Cheat in Maya 2014: Tools and Techniques for Character Animation. Focal Press.