I think the last post ended with me making a showreel and beginning to make my fish armitures. I'd be lying if I said that everything went smoothly because it certainly didnt, but i'm trying to stay positive about this until I'm finished with all my tasks.
Veronika brought in a production designer who helped me to make my sea world set to animate in.
I sourced some free wood for her and she went about making some frames, she stuck polystyrene on it to simulate rocks. We decided to have 3 frames that I would line up to create depth, also I would film it from the side but animate all of the fish as if you were looking down into the rock pool. From there I glued tissue paper and salt on to get a more rocky feel and then painted it, with Tylers help.
I think it looks pretty effective, I had a bit of a crisis because I wasn't sure how I would keep it stable to animate in but after discussing it with Mike he suggested to clamp it onto the bottom of a table with G clamps. it was surprisingly strong.
I made a new mermaid armature and sent it off to performance costume so they could dress it. I was quite pleased with what they came up with.
When it came to animating it was a bit stiff, and I had to cut the fabric a bit to get it moveable. I should have explained more how to dress the character without restricting the movement.
While they were dressing the body I started to work on the head.
I at first tried plasticine, but it was far to heavy, after getting some advice from Neil he suggested I use polymorph which is incredibly light.
I couldn't help but notice the resemblance.
With all my stuff ready I prepared to animate, I used my monday to try and get all of my lighting sorted and did a couple test shots of my animation.
This was my initial lighting but then when Veronika came in we changed it to her preference.
Okay heres where the problems began.......
I thought I could get away with using thread to tie up my fish armatures and then move them along to simulate them swimming. But I didn't have enough control over the fishes stability and so the movement was really off.
I think I pretty much knew that my rigging wasn't going to work, but because I'd spent so much time on the set I was determined that I would be animating inside it. Honestly it was a bit of a set back for me and I was feeling a bit sorry for myself.
But after a few hugs and some motivational drawings from the good old folk of animation I went on with a new plan.
What I would do would be to film on a green screen and then composite my work into the rock pool in post production.
Filming the mermaid went okay, I filmed it on a pink screen and it keyed out pretty well when I did my test shot.
I think the movement could be better, it would be alot more graceful I think, I was kind of losing the will to live with it though.
"I hate you"
My pink screen kept falling down....... I was pure loving it.
So after all the testing a rethinking I eventually came up with this.
26 seconds in in about 5 hours! I was fairly pleased with that!
I would key out the background and then make the mermaid gradually get bigger on the screen in post, to give the impression of her swimming up from the deep.
After that I decided to film my fish on the rostrum, I used the same rigging for my prawn that I used for the mermad. For the fish however, I cut them in half and animated them flat on the rostrum.
Again the movements are a bit jarring at times I think, the legs on the prawn could have been quicker, the fish are rather effective though I think. I planned to just move them in a stationary position and then give the illusion of then going across the screen in post production
After showing my mermaid sequence to Veronika she said that the wanted the facial expression to be more frightened, I suggested that we do this in a close up shot
This time I actually got to shoot in the set so I was pretty chuffed.
I actually enjoyed making this scene so I'm quite happy with it.
I have a brief example of what it will look like in post, this looks awful but it gives you an idea of what I'm thinking of doing. I will not be editing until the end of my summative hand in as I want to focus on other things for now.
I decided that it was still a waste not to use the set so I have decided to go in on Sunday and have a play around with animating in it to see what I come up with. watch this space........
So heres what I came up with. I want to have hand drawn animation over the top of this, youll hoefully see what i'm going to animate over the top of this in the near future. I animated to my favourite piece of music as I found it really inspired me.
Heres a sneak peak of how I want the animation to look
Update
Its been about a week I think, Ive made a bit of progress with compositing everything together, there are issues with the keying on the tail that I need to fix and Veronika has asked for more fish and for more effects to make the mermaid look like she is in water.
Update
So I went back and added a few warp effects to try and get more of a watery look, after discussing the final product with Veronika she told me all the timings and amount of fish that should be in each scene so I will get started on that and then hopefully be done.
Here is a full sequence with fish and mermaid, it still needs a bit of tweeking but it looks alot better than before.
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