Corked- Working with 3rd years

"Corked" was one of my favourites of all the 3rd year students presentations. And luckily i was chosen to help them make it.

It is a story of a pirate who tries to escape from the prisoncell of rival pirates. It is a comical story with a twist in the end and has a snappy, high energy feel from start to finish.

I was first assigned to work on the weighting of the 3d characters. But we had some problems and im not particularly good with that, so a bit later i got to start working on the blockthrough. Which i actually really enjoy, because like an animatic, it gives you a very clear idea of all the visual stuff like timing and the shots etc...

After just a few days working with Andy & co, we had powered out the first 8 shots. Though the animation is very very rough, you still get the idea.



I am looking forward to continuing this process, but since i am home in Norway and dont have all the necessary files, they gave me another job well suited for my interest; making a gun.
THE gun that is going to be used in the film.

I enjoyed making the highpowered-fullyautomatic-superkiller for our sfx project. But this time its a bit more subtle. The gun im making is a classical 18th century "pirate-gun".











Andy gave me a toy gun to use as reference, but i realized we have an almost identical (real) one hanging on a wall at home. So that should be plenty to go by.

Its finished!!

We finished our sfx project, but we didnt have time to render all the clips. Just the most important ones. So the rest will be added later.
But here are the shots:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPoxwp3DZwA

Compositing!

Now were finally at the stage which this project is all about! The compositing!

First things first, the footage of us had to made into high quality image-sequences for Toxik to recognize them. Toxik is of course the amazing software we are doing the work with.

The first thing we did was keying.
Since all our footage was of us on greenscreen, we just had to go through them one by one and key out the green, so that in the next step we could just add the needed background and then add all the fun effects and color corrections etc...

Sometimes there wwere clips that was tricky to get all the green out of. So we had to rotoscope masks to remove the remaining stuff.
That was probably the one thing that has taken the longest time to do on this project. but once you know how to do it, you just put some headphones on and let your hands do the work almost without thinking about it.

The next bit is by far the most fun one.
This is where we had to make the different layers of each clip look like the same.
There are alot of different things that might be needed for those layers to look right.

We mostly did it in this order:

2d transform - to place the clips around in the frame to make the shot we want.
Time offset - to make the clip start and/or end at the right time.
Color correction - to adjust contrast and color value.
Add grain - to make computer perfect images seem like they have been filmed with the same videocamera as the real life footage.
Blur - to simulate a shift of focus by blurring different layers.

Now all the clips are finished and we are really happy with the results! It honestly eceeded my expectations. We have managed to make something that we would be impressed to watch two months ago.
The thing i am most satisfied with, is the fact that we successfully merged a 3d object onto real life footage. I consider this a very powerful skill to have experience in. Because essentially anyone could do it, but having tried it, like we have now, definately builds an advantage for whenever we do this for real!

Rendering & Composoting

The rendering process has been very hectic and chaotic mostly due to the computers being a bit difficult.
They seem to crash whenever we need them the most!

Luckily, not everyhting we needed to render was animated. Only the gun itself is animated and it took ages to render! The backgrounds were only one frame each, so they were done relatively quickly.

There has been a lot of ups and downs during this rendering process. It seemed like one day we got bad news, and thought we were doomed. Then the next day we would recieve good news! And its been going back and forth like this for a couple of weeks.

The rendering process has been long and boring, but quite a bit has been learned.
We used render passes on everything, mainly to have control of everything in toxik. So if anyhting needed a bit of a tweak, we wouldnt have to render the whole thing all over.

Nothing creatively challenging in this rendering business, but its def. an important part.
But now that whole jazz is over with, so were moving on to compositing which should be more fun!

Things are coming together!

I've been spending most of my time finishing the gun. But now we need to wrap it up. And i am happy with it anyway, so we should get moving on to the next steps...
Pete finished the tracking for one of the main shots.
The clip is where i pick up the gun and start shaking it ( shooting).

Witht the movement all tracked and put into maya, we could now see the first test of matchmoving.
This is what that looked like.



We are very happy with the result! It definately gave us a good chuckle, but to be serious it is what we wished for and we can actually see this all coming together and looking really cool.

Ive finished texturing the gun. To be honest it could have been a bit better and more realistic, but we need to move on to the next stage which is rendering.
Which means that we have to animate the gun (prescicion is crucial!!) and then render it. The rendering is, as always, gonna take a LOT of time, so we need to get that out of the way so that we can spend the remaining two weeks composoting, keying, maskin, tweaking, frustrating and maybe succeeding, all to make it look as good as possible.

Here is a little preview of the finished gun in action.

Greenscreen session and the first rough-cut!

We spent a whole day in the greenscreen studio, getting the footage we needed.
First we had an induction on how to use the greenscreen (its a big dangerous process to get it down from the ceiling). Then we got the rest of the day to spend in the studio.
Thankfully we were able to check the footage right away on my laptop, so we could do a couple of tries, adjust the camera and then try again until we got it right.
There were only 5-6 shots needed, but we have tons of bloopers that are quite funny (Pete actually falls over himself when he kicked me).
It was a lot of fun. And for the first time i have used a professional greenscreen. So hopefully the footage will be good and it will all look good in the end!

Here is the first rough cut we put together today.

Special Effects project- Making guns!

This project is all about nice n glossy special effects. We Teamed up in groups of 2 to 3. I am in a group with Pete and Simon.
We spent some time beforehand to figure out what COULD be done in accordance to what we would LIKE to make.
In the morning meeting, where we all pitched our ideas, i realized that all of the groups had really good ideas and i cant wait to see them all come together!

Our idea was initially to have me and pete come in to a totally white environment, and then (in the video) gradually "create" everything around us. Sort of like a breakdown, but as part of whats happening.
Then we wanted to have me and pete turn against each other and start fighting with various cg created weapons. Im talking guns, bombs, throwing weapons, even vehicles!
The oucome of the fight was never planned though.

BUT since this would require WAAAAY to much work, we shortened the whole thing down to one clip each of the effects we wanted to show.
So there will be one major establishing shot to show mattepainting background with 3d objects (a big bridge), one shot of us fighting to show interaction between real footage and cg environment, and then a shot of me picking up a big cg gun from the ground and then shooting pete. This is probably the trickiest of the techniques were using, but with georg´s expertise, we´ll get there soon!

My job was to create the "box" which we were to use as a tracking reference for the cg gun. And also to make the actual cg gun in Maya.
The Box i first wanted to make out of cardboard boxes and spraypaint them in one solid color. But i figured a paper box would be too weak, so i made one out of shelves i bought.
So i hacked up the shelves and assembeled them with handy screws and spraypainted the whole shebang in florescant green.






The handles i created was covered in black tape so we could keep them instead of keying them ou and replacing them. That would add a lot of work.
But when the thing wa finished i got way to excited, picked it up and started shaking it ( i was pretending it was a machine gun ratatatatta), and then i broke one of the handles....
But it wasnt a big problem since we had one handle left. Still very stupid mistake...

We hve done a lot of testing with The Box, but havent quite gotten the results we need. So while Pete was struggling with that, i was working on the cg gun.
Its almost finished, but i have a very essential part of it left - texturing.
It may the most important part of convincing realism to the audience.
This is what it looks like so far...