2D Group Work
Choosing the nursery rhyme
For our project, we were tasked with creating a 2D animation based around a nursery rhyme we chose at random, I teamed up with Leah and Callum to complete this task as well as our separate 3D project.
The nursery rhyme we got was “Humpty Dumpty had a great fall”, we immediately started throwing out ideas, there were a few obvious ones like having him literally fall off a wall but that had already been done to death so we wanted something unique.
One idea we did come up with that was still related to a wall was something based around Donald Trump (Trumpty Dumpty if you will), it well known that for a while Trump kept going on about the wall that he wants to build so for a short while we expected to go for that, the problem was it still included a wall which we would have preferred to steer clear of.
I had suggested the idea of skydiving, this was a good way to approach as it didn’t need a wall but it would still be about him falling and it appealed to us as a group too, we still wanted to push this idea a little further, at the time of coming up with these ideas, Players Unknown’s Battlegrounds was a very popular game at the time, at the start of a game, you are parachuted in to the arena where you fight, because of this, we thought of including this part of the game into our animation, and we came up with the name PUBG Dumpty.
While designing the characters, I decided I wanted to have a go at modeling our egg, the main thing that is notable in PUBG is the helmet the character wears on the cover photo for the game, because of this I wanted to include it in my model.
I was quite happy with this little model, it was pretty simple to make, I started off with a normal sphere and played around with it to look more egg-like, the helmet was a bit more of a pain to do, I had to duplicate the top faces of the egg and enlarge them a little, then model on the visor to complete the look.
I even went a little further and rigged him, I gave him a basic move controller as well as some squash and stretch.
When it came to animating the video I started having problems, I’ve tended to struggle with 2D animating, it’s never been my preferred medium and it showed in the final piece, I had opted to go for the beginning scene where the plane/helicopter is flying past and drops off the players, as well as a short part showing our main PUBG dumpty and another egg.
This was a storyboard for my scene:
My part of the animation stayed very close to this storyboard which in a way is the positive of how it turned out however I still was unhappy with it.
Final Video: https://vimeo.com/271772455
I think what made it a bit more difficult is that I chose to try and show this plane in a 3D environment which made it quite difficult for me to understand how it should move and look in 3D using 2D, this in the end made the whole process a lot longer and more unfinished looking, if I was to do this again I would try and simplify my part of the animation, knowing that I would struggle with this should have made me think at the beginning about not trying to do something more complicated than it needed to be and instead focusing on making a better quality animation.
As well as this I didn’t spend enough time on the 2D group work compared to the 3D project, I am certain this is due to me much preferring 3D over 2D when it comes to animating and naturally I found myself allocating more time to that rather than this animation, in the future I will be sure to try and work on both equally or at the very least allow more time for the project that I know I struggle at.
Walk Cycle
For the walk cycle, I decided to use Stewart, I preferred this to the Simple Bot rig as I wanted to include arm and shoulder movements as well as the legs, feet and hips.
When animating, I wanted to work from some sort of reference, I found myself referring to walk cycles drawn by Richard Williams and videos of a walk cycle.
I found myself using the video for the style of walk I gave Stewart as well as timing, my goal was to achieve a very cool and laid back type of walk, the Richard Williams reference was very useful in blocking out the walk which I would later adjust to achieve the style.
Richard Williams kindly numbers each keyframe and inbetween to their corresponding frame, from this reference they keyframes are found on frames 1, 4, 7, 10, and 13, this is for one pass of the walk cycle, as I wanted to have two passes for a full cycle, I would also have keyframes on frames 16, 19, 22, and 25, these would later be adjusted to fit the style.
I started off by selecting all of Stewart’s controls and created a character set, what this would allow is to key every control in that set without keying them all individually, this would save a lot of time and stop me from worrying about unkeyed controls.
In addition, I wanted to make sure that the little auto keyframe button was enabled, this does exactly as expected as it automatically keys on the current frame whenever I move any of Stewart’s control. 
Now that I was all set it was time to start posing Stewart, I posed him in a similar way to the Richard Williams reference, Stewart has some very handy controls especially in the feet, for example Foot Roll and Heel Twist were the two most important, Foot Roll would roll the foot on the heel using the heel as its rotation point, this would remove the need for having to translate and rotate the foot to stay flat on the ground, this was extremely useful as it reduced the occurrence of the foot phasing through the ground which can be a nightmare to keep track of usually, Heel Twist was mostly only visible from the front view, when people walk their feet generally aren’t completely straight, they are usually angled slightly outwards, Heel Twist works similar to Foot Roll as it negates the need for translation and rotation.
Foot Roll: 0
Foot Roll: -29
Heel Twist: 0
Heel Twist: -6.8
After I had posed him how I wanted him, I selected on of the controls and pressed S to keyframe, since I created that character set beforehand, there was no need to key anything else as it had all been done for me.
With all the controls keyed, I could now move to frame 4 and do the next keyframe, I repeated this process for all of the keyframes.
With my keyframes in place I wanted to see how it looked splined, to do this I went into my graph editor, selected all of the points and clicked the Plateau Tangent.
Initially the splining process looked pretty good on its own, Stewart moved rather fluidly with no real glaring issues, on closer inspection there were a few frames where there were a couple of tweaks that needed to be made, more specifically with the feet, between frames 1-4 and 10-16, the toes do slightly clip through the floor.
Frame 2
Frame 12
This wasn’t too hard to clean up, it just involved moving the foot itself out of the floor and making sure that the foot rolls off of the toe until it lifts off of the floor fully.
I continued making small tweaks such as these to problematic areas, I found that the arm swings were a little off, they seemed to move backwards and forwards too rigidly, to fix this I had to smooth out curves of the end of each swing, this would soften them a little and make it flow a little better.
To improve I would like to make it longer, as it only lasts two passes, maybe 4 or 6 passes would be better, I also would spend a little longer tweaking it, it still isn’t perfect and I would like to make it a little smoother and more fluid, the weight distribution is a little off in the hips so i’d want to address that.
3D Group Work
As a group, our task was to create an animation in 3D where we would all block our scenes and then give it to the other person in the group to spline it and then again to improve it, for our animation, we had Stewart be inspired by a film he watches at the cinema and then go on to try and be a superhero.
We initially didn’t expect the final animation to be as long as it turned out, I had chosen to do a scene where Stewart is sitting in the movie theater watching the film, Callum would animate a dream sequence where he sees himself as a big muscular man, and Leah would do the end scene where he tries to jump off a roof to the next building but fails.
This was our quick storyboard we came up with for it including the mentioned scenes, it also had extra scenes such as where he is putting together his costume, I had the idea of basing his superhero character off of a meme including a badly drawn picture of Spiderman known as Spooderman, this was because I thought it might be funny and add a comedic element to our animation.
MY WORK
I decided to do the sewing scene as my cinema scene was very easy and didn’t require much to finish it, for the cinema I posed Stewart in a sitting pose on a box, this wouldn’t be seen so it didn’t matter that it was just a box.
I then added some basic looking chairs, I only need to do that back part as the camera wouldn’t show the bottom parts.
I applied a red material to them, when rendered these looked almost purple-y as I used blue lighting in the scene.
In the storyboard we had the camera zoom into his face, this was very simple, I created a camera from my perspective view and keyframed it at the 1st frame, I then moved over to frame 200 and moved the camera closer to his face, with auto key on it keyed it automatically, I later adjusted this to achieve better timing.
Next I added a few lights to the scene, I settled on two lights, a directional and a spot light, the directional light would act as the cinema screen and I added a hint of blue just to make sure it wasn’t pure white, the spot light was added as a way of highlighting Stewart so he stood put from the rest of the scene, I didn’t want the spot light to be too obvious, I used the cone angle and drop off to make it more subtle which feathered the edges of the cone.
No Light
Directional
Spotlight
Subtle Spotlight
For Stewart himself, I wanted to make him to gradually become more astonished as the camera zoomed in.
This was okay on its own, but I wanted to add a little extra, I decided to make him blink in amazement one the zoom had finished.
In the storyboard, he remains in the same position when he is in the Cinema, in the car and in bed, I thought of this when I saw a clip from Spongebob where this happens to one of the characters.
This was quite a fun way of showing how amazed Stewart was by this film as well as providing a nice transition to the next scene where he has his dream about being a superhero (Or just a really muscular guy).
For the bed scene, I went and modeled a bed for him as well as a pillow, the bed was straight forward to make, I didn’t make it too complex or detailed as those details wouldn’t be focused on at any point.
The pillow was quite interesting to make, I could have opted for a simple round rectangle, but I did want to have a bit of fun with it and make it look uneven like a normal pillow would, to do this I would use nCloth to generate something that would resemble a pillow.
First I started with a normal cube, I then stretched it out into a flat rectangle, I gave it a subdivision count of 10 for the Width and Depth, and 5 for the height.
Next I went and turned it into an nCloth by switching to my FX menu set and create nCloth.
I needed to make sure I turned the gravity in the scene to 0, if I left this at 9.8 the pillow would just fall out of the scene when running the simulation, to do this I opened up the attributes of the newly created nucleus node and turned the gravity slider to 0.
To actually make this look like a pillow, I switched over to the nClothShape1 tab, in the drop down menus there is a Pressure menu, opening this allowed me to change the pressure value from 0 to about 0.7.
What this will do is add pressure to the pillow once the animation starts playing, all I had to do then was look out for a frame that I liked the look of and stop it there.
In order to freeze this, I had to delete the history of the pillow and freeze transformations, this would keep this shape regardless of the frame I was on.
Initially I had planned on creating the pillow in a separate file and importing it into my actual scene as an object, unfortunately I had issues with importing it into my scene, I assume it was something in the scene causing issues, to work around this I redid the pillow directly in the scene, this stopped any issues of importing.
The last scene I blocked out was the sewing scene for this I created a sewing machine and imported it into my main scene, this time with no issues, I didn’t worry about details as it only played a small roll in the scene.
This scene wasn’t too hard to do, I only gave him subtle movements as he worked on making his costume, I did decide to create another nCloth object in this scene, this time to actually be a piece of cloth or fabric I created it in a similar way to the pillow only this time I kept the gravity at 9.8 and didn’t add pressure to it, Maya already includes presets for different materials using nCloth, I selected one of the presets called silk to make it as close to realistic fabric as I could get.
The most time consuming part of this scene was choosing the materials and lighting for this scene, initially, I had planned to use Mental Ray for this scene as well as a few other scenes in our animation, however we kept experiencing problems with Stewart in particular messing up once it was all rendered, even switching to Arnold we encountered these problems, we had to settle for Maya’s Hardware renderer which was still not too bad looking but no where near as nice looking as Mental ray, this is a still I did manage to render:
Despite the fact we couldn’t use Mental Ray, we carried on anyway and sent off our blocked animations to each other, I sent my scenes to Callum and Leah sent hers to me, Leah’s part of the animation was having Stewart do a run up and attempt to jump to the next building, only to fall into a bin below him.
SPLINING LEAH’S WORK
When I splined her animation it turned out much better than we had expected, there were a few issues but a lot of it wouldn’t be seen from the cameras, these included the feet acting quite strange at times and phasing through the ground occasionally, most of this was easily fixed in the graph editor, the first thing I did was actually remove some keyframes, it seems she may have put in a few extra frames for the feet and legs which weren’t necessary and were causing the legs to look as if they were popping in the air, I simply went and deleted all of the leg and feet keyframes at certain frames and the problems were eliminated.
Another slight issue was the graph curves themselves, one reason for the limbs to pop almost is because the points on the graph aren’t smooth, such as this for example:
The way I fixed this was to use the handles that appear when the point is selected, moving them can smooth out these curves and help smooth the animation itself, this is what it looked like afterwards:
I continued doing this mainly for the parts that would be seen in the animation.
I also decided to add to Leah’s animation, when I put our scenes together it cuts to him running straight after my scene finishes, I felt this was a little too abrupt, to fix this I decided to add an establishing shot of sort where he isn’t moving and the camera is just panning around for a few seconds before it cuts to him running, I also quickly added some basic looking building in the background, this was purely to fill up the empty space in her scene.
Overall I feel our final animation turned out pretty good, much better and longer than we initially expected, we had aimed for 30 seconds and it turned out to be more than double that, it was a big shame that we weren’t able to make it look even better with Mental Ray or Arnold but that would definitely be an improvement for our next project, I still believe it looks pretty good with Maya’s renderer, we did get some feedback for our final film, the main point that was made was to make the bed scene a little brighter, I agree with this as it is too dark even though its a night scene, Stewart doesn’t stand out enough as he should do, next time I would add probably another subtle spotlight into the scene like I did with the cinema, I believe this scene turned out much darker than intended due to it being set up with Mental Ray and I hadn’t gotten around to fixing it to make it a little brighter.
Link to animation: https://vimeo.com/271497854
Modelling a Coke Can in Maya
To start modelling I needed some reference to work with, I used these for a front and top view, as the can is perfectly cylindrical, I didn’t need a side view.
To import them into Maya, I went into my front view and created a new image plane by going to View>Image Plane> Import Image, I then went to my the front reference and selected it, I did the same for the top view which I would use later on.
After importing the images, I created a new poly cylinder, I kept the subdivision axis at 20 but changed the subdivision caps to 0 as I wouldn’t need one of them.
I then deleted the top face, I did this so I could extrude the edges to make the main shape of the can.
I positioned the bottom of the cylinder at the bottom lip area of the can and scaled the top of the cylinder to be in line with the lip (Switching to the x-ray mode helped line up the object with the reference).
By switching to edge mode, I selected one of the top edges and then double clicked the edge next to it, this allowed me to select all of the top edges, I then extruded the using Ctrl+E and resized them to complete the bottom of the can.
By pressing G, this repeats the last action which was extrude, with second lot of extruded edges, I brought them up to top of the can where it begins to taper inwards.
I repeated extruding and resizing to finish up the body of the can.
To make the top lip I added an edge loop and lined it up with the bottom lip.
Next I went into face mode and selected on of the faces and double clicked the one next to it to select all the faces in that row, similar to the edges earlier before, I then extruded them as changed the thickness to 0.02.
Going into object mode and pressing 3 allowed me to view the mesh in a smoothed mode, the problem with doing this is that the can looses its shapes as the edges have been smoothed too much.
To avoid this, I would need to add more edge loops, this would help in keeping the shape of the edge but still allowing it to be smoothed, I added edge loops to the areas where the can has sharper edges.
Finally I selected the whole mesh and smoothed it out properly.
This was the main model done, I decided to add a metal material to it, as I have mental ray active, I used the material included, to apply the material I held right lcick and went to Assign New Material>mental ray>Materials>mia_material_x, then in the attribute editor I switched to mia_material_x1, clicked on Presets and selected SatinedMetal.
I then wanted to add the label, to do this I selected the faces where the label would go and then went to UV>Create Spherical, this would create a map which I could apply the label image to and edit the size and positioning.
Next I assigned a new material but chose blinn instead of the mia_material, to make the materal use the label, I had to change the colour option to use a file, selecting the checkerbox next to the colour select would open a window that allowed me to change the node to a file, there would now be a browser box where I could click the folder and then locate my label image.
Pressing 6 will activate texture mode so I could see how the label looks on my can.
The positioning was pretty good however I wanted to adjust it as it looked too stretched, to do this I opened the UV editor, right clicking on the map and selecting the UV shell option allows it to be scaled and re positioned, I tweaked this until the label fit better on the can.
After I had applied the label, I worked on finishing the top of the can, I created another poly cylinder, I removed changed the subdivision caps to 0 and changed the subdivision axis to 40.
I then resized it to fit inside the hole in my coke can, to align the lid with the center of the can, I went into my top view and switched to wire frame mode, Selecting on the lid and holding the V key allowed me to make the lid snap to vertices, I snapped it to the center vert of the can and adjusted the size some more to fit.
Next I needed to fill in the small gap between the can and the lid, to do this I selected the top face of the lid and extruded it inwards slightly, this would give me some more faces on top which I would then also extrude upwards and outwards until it was just about clipping into the can itself, this would essentially hide the exposed normals of the can which are the black faces on the inside of object.
Normals
No Normals!
The final step of the modelling was to model the little pull ring, this was quite simple to do, I started with a poly cube, positioned it and moved the verts to follow the basic shape of the ring.
Selecting the top face on the side of the cube, I extruded it out to follow the rest of the shape of the ring, adjusting the verts as I went along.
The blockiness of it didn’t matter at this stage, smoothing and adding more divisions would define the shape more, at this stage I am more focused on achieving the basic shape.
To cut out the hole in the ring, I started by adding two edge loops down the middle, in the settings for the tool, I can change it to multiple edge loops which distribute 2 or more loops evenly.
I moved these new loops so that they matched the shape of the hole.
I added another set of edges, this would allow me to adjust the verts to achieve the shape of the hole.
I then selected the new edges created in the middle of the hole on both sides and deleted them, this left me with two faces that I could delete to make the hole.
This left me with holes between the top and bottom that I would need to fix, to do this, I would take the edges from the top and bottom that corresponded with each other and then use the bridge tool to fill in the gaps.
When I tried smooth previewing it, I ran into a problem, the top part of the hole was very thin, the reason for this was the verts on that shape the hole, I had to bring these verts in a little which sorted out the problem.
I added some edge loops to the sides of the pull wing which made it so it held its shape better when smoothed.
After tweaking it further to match the shape of the pull ring, I smoothed it out fully and positioned it onto the can.
Selecting both the lid and the pull ring, I combined the two object together using the combine tool.
Finally I combine the lid to the can and I had a finished coke can!
Modelling and Rigging Bender
I started off with creating a polygon plane, I made it larger and then rotated it 90 degrees on the X axis and moved it to the edge of the grid
I then duplicated it using Ctrl+D and moved it next to the original plane.
I downloaded this reference of Bender:
I then added a new material to the planes using Hypershade, I chose Lambert as my material and changed the colour to use a file instead, I selected the Bender reference as the file, highlighted the planes and went back into the Hypershade window, I then right-clicked on the lambert material and selected Assign Material To Selection, this applied the texture to the planes and after I pressed 6 on the keyboard, it then showed on the planes.
I then switched to the panel layout which let me have 4 viewports open at once, I decided to have perspective view, front, and right view visible at the same time, this meant I wouldn’t have to constantly switch between views when editing my model, I then created a polygon cylinder and lined it up with my reference planes.
I then resized the cylinder to make up the main bulk of benders body, I tweaked it using both the front and side viewport to get the correct shape.
Next I finished the curved section that makes up his neck, I did this by extruding the top faces of the cylinder and following the outline of the reference pictures, I press Ctrl+E to start extruding and then pressed G once I had finished the first extrusion which extrudes again, I repeated this until the neck was completed.
The reference used has benders legs bent and spread apart, personally I wanted to start with straight legs as I felt it may make the rigging easier later on, I therefore modeled them to roughly the same length as the reference (just without the curvature of the leg) and then straightened them out, the side view had straight legs therefore I used that to line the leg up with the body.
To create the feet I created a polygon sphere used used the face select tool to select the bottom half of the sphere, I then simply deleted it and was left with half a sphere, I resized it to be roughly the same shape as the reference and then placed it in line with the leg.
To make sure the rigging worked, I combined the foot and leg together, I did this by selecting the leg and shift selecting the foot, I then went into Mesh>Combine and that was that.
Next I selected the leg (now with the combined foot) and press Ctrl+D this duplicates the leg which I then move over to the other side, the feet do clip slightly however this shouldn’t be a problem later on.
Next was the arms and I made these the same way I had made the legs, just in a different position.
For the head I will create another cylinder, I will make it the same size as the neck and line it up roughly with the reference, I then select the top faces and extend it upwards just up to where the head starts curving in to create the dome.
I then did the extruding method I used to create the neck section in order to create the dome on benders head, I also made sure to include the antennae as well.
This model was now completed however there was a few more tweaks to make, this is where I ran into a problem, what I needed to do was change the subdivision height of the legs from 1 to 10, this would be needed when rigging the model, however when I tried changing this setting, this is what would happen to the leg:
This isn’t what I wanted to happen, I couldn’t figure out why it went wrong however I fixed it by simply redoing the legs, I had to do the same with the arms which was very straightforward, I also set the sub division height to 10 on the arms as well.
With the limbs now ready, it was time to start rigging the model, we only did the legs for now but a similar process would be used for the arms as well.
To begin the rigging process, I decided to focus on the front and side view, these would be the most useful for lining up the joints with the legs before binding them together.
I then changed my Menu Set to Rigging 
and selected Skeleton>Create Joints, this would give me a new cursor which allowed me to place joints anywhere in my scene, I started by placing one at the top of the leg, then while holding shift, I placed one about halfway down for the knee and one at the ankle, holding shift would ensure that I was placing them straight and inline with each other. 
Luckily for me, the way I modelled Bender meant that the leg was already in the correct position so there would be no need for any adjustments.
Next I selected the leg and then shift selected the top joint, to combine the two I clicked on Skin>Bind Skin and the leg is complete.
Starting off and bouncing balls
Basic Controls
Alt+left- rotate
Alt+Middle- Pan
Alt+right- zoom
w- move
r-scale
e-rotate
windows- Setting/preferences- preferences- animation (Settings)
Bouncing Ball
From this video, I learnt that timing and spacing is the most important part of animating, especially with a bouncing ball, for example, the ball is fastest during its fall and slowest at the peak of its bounce, this is important as it shows that the ball is affected by gravity and its how high and how much it bounces is determined by the properties of that ball, a small, soft, light ball will bounce higher and bounce more than a large, hard, heavy ball.
Once in Maya, I added a Polygon Sphere to my scene, I then moved the sphere (using Translate Y in the Channel Box) up by 1 unit.
This would make it so my sphere was flush with the floor rather than inside of it, to make things easier, I then went into Modify>Freeze Transformations, what this does it reset all the Channel Box setting to 0 while also keeping the ball in the same place.
Next highlighted the Translate X,Y and Z in the Channel Box, right-clicked them and selected ‘Key Selected’, this keyed the position of the ball on frame 1 to be resting on the floor, though I would change this soon.
The next step I took would make everything much easier when setting up the frames to come, to the right of the timeline there is a button that looks roughly like a + sign with arrows around it, clicking this would make it so I wouldn’t have to manually key every change I made to the ball, instead what it would do is automatically key the changes I made to the frame that I was on.
Before I started to do any animating, there is a setting that has to be changed first, this was located in Windows>Settings/Preferences>Preferences under Animation (Settings), I checked the ‘Weighted Tangents’ checkbox and set the ‘Default in tangent’ to Clamped and the ‘Default out tangent’ to Stepped.
The reason for changing these settings is to stop Maya from automatically deciding how our ball will fall and bounce, these settings give us a clean slate to make our own bounces.
As I was animating a bouncing ball, it made sense to start with the ball dropping, I therefore moved the ball on frame 1 up 12 units, because of the Auto Keyframe setting, the ball was now keyed to be in the air.
The ball would take roughly a second to do a full bounce, as this is done at 24 frames a second, it would take 24 frames to do a full bounce, to make things easy for now, I would have the ball land at frame 12 and be back up in the air by frame 24, so on frame 12 I set the Translate Y to be 0.
Any ball no matter its properties will start loosing energy during its bounce, therefore after the first bounce the height of the next will be less, because of this I set the Translate Y to 10 units on frame 24.
As well as the ball loosing height every bounce, the time between bounces will also be shorter as there is less distance to travel, so instead of using 24 frames for a full bounce, I reduce it to 20 frames meaning 10 frames to fall and 10 frames bounce back up, I would continue doing this, gradually reducing the height and the time it takes the ball to do a full bounce.
Once I had finished setting up my frames, trying to play the animation presents a problem, default Maya sets the playback speed to play every frame as quickly as possible, to overcome this, I go to the same place where the Auto Keyframe Toggle button is and to the right of it is another button with a gear and a man.
This is a shortcut to the Preferences and more specifically a shortcut to the Time Slider settings, in here I would locate the ‘Playback speed’ setting, open the drop box and change it from ‘Play every frame’ to ’24 fps x 1′, this basically means it will play the animation in real time rather than as quickly as possible, clicking save will close the menu and this time the animation plays at the right speed and I can see that my ball does in fact bounce though not as smoothly and not realistically.
This is where the graph editor will come in, it is located in Windows>Animation Editors>Graph Editor, this allows us to see the setting made in the Channel Box in graph form and the arcs of the bounce, which don’t really exist yet due to the setting I changed earlier.
To make the ball actually bounce somewhat, I used the Plateau tangents tool 
after highlighting the graph which will apply the arcs needed.
Playing the animation this time will look much better however it still looks unnatural, the main reason for this is because of how the ball reacts when hitting the ground, a ball wouldn’t slow down as it falls which is what the graph at the moment is doing to the ball, the ball would continue accelerating until it hit the ground and then bounces back upwards, to have this show in the animation, I will select the bottom points of the graph and click the ‘Break tangents’ button 
, next I dragged each side of the points upwards creating a V-shape, this is whats going to give the proper looking bounce in the ball, I did this for all the other bottom points.
Once I had done this the graph looked like this:
Now the animation appears much more natural and realistic, After this I tweaked it a little by adjusting the timing and spacing between frames to enhance it a little more and adding in some smaller bounces at the end so it doesn’t end so abruptly.
Scott Pilgrim Sweded Trailer
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzyxE9ugM9Q
Scott Pilgrim Sweded trailer 19/05/16
What did I do?
Today we went back to recording the Scott Pilgrim trailer, we decided to do the filming around my house as it would be a more suitable location than the college, the main specific locations we needed were a kitchen, a room with a bookshelf and a lake.
Sasha and I managed to capture enough scenes to bulk out what we already had recorded, the main scenes we recorded were the conversation between Scott and Wallace in the kitchen, Some of the guitar scenes, the bathroom scene and the throwing Scott into a building scene.
Any setbacks?
Unfortunately Chelsey and Antonia were unavailable again however this wouldn’t be an issue as we managed to record everything I needed for that day, there were some scenes such as the scenes where Matthew Patel is talking with Scott Pilgrim however we needed people, even if Chelsey and Antonia were with us we still wouldn’t have done these scenes as we wanted to cast Dan or Bobby since they look like Matthew Patel.
What software and tools did I use?
This time we didn’t have have Riley’s camera but we did use Sasha’s video camera which was still good enough to record with, we also used some props that featured in the original trailer such as my guitar, some costumes and a loaf of bread.
After we had recorded these scenes, I put them into Premier Pro and started cutting them down and matching them up with the original trailer, this wasn’t difficult as the razor tool and speed/duration tool allowed me to edit these clips with ease.
Did I like or dislike it? Why?
I really enjoyed this, the scenes we did were some of the funnier scenes from the trailer which made preparation and filming much more enjoyable to do, it was also a lot less stressful as when we are filming in college, we usually have a short amount of time given to us to film whereas at home, we could take as much time as we needed to capture the footage.
What is my favourite part of the work? Why?
My favourite part of this work had to be when we did the screen where Lucas throws Scott into a building, obviously we couldn’t really do this mainly due to safety reasons, instead I had the idea of throwing something that would get badly injured, near my house there is a large gorge area that has many lakes and ducks, this gave me the idea of throwing slices of bread into the lake and pretending it was Scott Pilgrim’s body, the end result wasn’t anywhere close to perfect…however it was a tonne of fun to shoot and made the sweded trailer a lot more humorous.
What’s next?
The next step is to film as many more scenes as we have time for, the main parts we want are the fight between Matthew and Scott as it is the only main scene we have left to film, the rest of the trailer is mainly quick shots that can be done anytime, any scenes that we can’t do of have no time left to do we can use some of the stock footage to fill in the time.
Scott Pilgrim and Beetlejuice Development 18/5/16
What did I do?
Today I did a bit of the Scott pilgrim trailer as well as helping Sasha’s group with their Beetlejuice trailer, in the Beetlejuice trailer I mainly played the main character Adam who was one of the ghosts in the film, I also played Beetlejuice for a couple of the final shots, I chose to help their group as Sasha had helped me yesterday and also agreed to help me today, they are also in need offer than just three people so Scott and I offered to help fill in some of the main characters.
Our main filming location was a grassy hill area across the road from the seafront, this was chosen as Sasha’s group needed a outside location that was relatively empty, this hill area was the only suitable area we had that was available at the time.
We also filmed some scenes in the college that required and interior location, we decided the best room to use was the small empty room near to the Tech office as no one would be using it and we had tables and chairs available that could be used in filming.
We also managed to shoot a couple of scenes for our Scott Pilgrim trailer, we didn’t do much as the main focus of the day was the Beetlejuice trailer however we did shoot a couple of scenes such as the ‘Is Scott here?’ scene which would have been one of the more difficult scenes to shoot.
Any setbacks?
The main set backs were that Chelsey was still unable to do any filming and Antonia wasn’t able to make it that day as she was busy, however this wasn’t too much of a set back as we didn’t do too much of our trailer anyway, however if they had been able to come in then we may have done a bit more.
What software and tools did I use?
The tools we used were the same as yesterday, we had Riley’s camera once again as well as all the necessary wigs and make-up, I was lucky enough to find an old Joker wig that I had bought back in secondary school and this was to be a perfect wig for both Scott and I to wear while we were dressed as Beetlejuice, the only problem with this is that everyone in college and in the high street thought he was supposed to be the Joker as we had applied white paint to his face and black paint around his eyes, safe to say we did a pretty good job with his make up.
After we had taken off Scotts make up we then realised there were still a couple of indoors scenes that we still had to do, unfortunately Scott wasn’t able to do any more filming therefore I decided to quickly take the role of Beetlejuice as it would only be a few quick scenes, because of this I didn’t need to wear any make up, I only needed to put on the wig which went well.
Did I like or dislike it? Why?
I really enjoyed it, it was fun playing as three different characters in one day and it was also entertaining when taking Scott down the high street dressed as Beetlejuice although everyone mistake him for the Joker.
What is my favourite part of the work? Why?
My favourite part was when Scott was standing between Sasha and I and he had to turn his head quickly, this was my favourite part because every time he turned his head his wig would flick into my face, it took as around 5-6 tries to get this scene right without me, Scott or Sasha bursting into laughter.
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