Note

As this blog works in chronological order, please view the oldest post at the end of this blog first.

Thank you.

Personal Reflection

This project has been really educational for me as well as a good experience in the field of work I wish to do. The final results have turned out pretty well, one viewer of the video stated that I had good taste in the theme and setting and that my character designs have improved since the beginning of my last course although there are some areas that could do with some improvements like other designs, compositing and show more detail. I took this criticism to the point where I attempted to fix some of the film before submitting it online such as adding and altering particular elements in some of the shots.

The flow of the project has been good and deadlines have been met with good results. Of course there have been several setbacks, time management issues, technical difficulties, among other things that have in some way affected the progress of this project. I need to work on my weaknesses a bit more such as organising assets and stages more efficiently and sticking to a schedule; I could go on but I’d rather not overdo it. Besides that, every stage of the project has been done in an orderly manner; everyone who has collaborated have managed to keep up with the progress and the updates and have done exceptionally well with their roles.

Overall, I’ve really enjoyed working on this project and I would like to say well done to all those who collaborated on the film. Thank you for your participation and hope to work with you again in the future.

30 Second Showreel

For an extra assessment, I have taken the liberty of producing a 30 second piece of breakdowns of several shots involved with the film. I did the breakdowns in After Effects, making transitions to several layers and elements to show how the shots were composited together and a transition from simple polygonal shapes to the textured rendered scenes.

Final Film

Here it is, the final version of the film with sound and music. 

Sound Effects and Music

The sound effects and mixing were done by Luke Hodsdon and Stuart Trewhella. They had produced two versions of the sound track, one with sound without music and one with both sound and music.

This is a draft of the film with only the sound effects put in. The soundtrack has not been mixed nor the levels changed yet in this clip but they give an idea of how sound fits in with the visual and brings it more to life. Some of the sounds would need to be lowered in amplitude such as the bird flapping its wings and the girl's gasp when she looks down should also be fairly quiet like.

This clip shows the film with the music only. Music can reflect the mood and themes that are occurring throughout the scenes.

Grading

Although I have chosen to use several different styles of tone for my film, there is some colour grading that I wanted to have done so I was recommended to ask another peer at my college, Samantha Wade into doing several versions of my film with different grading samples. once the editing was done, I arranged to meet up with Sam and give her a copy of the movie clip for her to work on for around 3 days.

The clip above shows Sam's first attempt at grading the movie. She had applied a blue tint to the environment while keeping colour to the main character. It's quite good but the main character kind of stands out too much so it needs to be toned down a bit more.

This clip is Sam's second attempt, this time having a blue tint all the way through and not enhancing the colour of the main character. This works really well so I may be using this version for the final piece.

This is Sam's third attempt, where she was going for a sepia kind of tone. This works quite nicely but it is a bit too warm to my liking.

I think Sam did an excellent job with all three versions of grading the film, very well done.

Editing Progress

When it came to putting all the shots together into one sequence, I used Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 for the editing stage. I set up a new project, chose the project settings 

I set the Editing Mode in the project settings to Desktop as it would allow me to run the sequence/timeline in 24 frames per second. Then I made sure that the frame (screen) size was at HD 1080 (width: 1920 height: 1080) and the Pixel Aspect Ratio was left at D1/DV PAL. 

I imported all the movie files that were composited and rendered in After Effects and set them in order according to the final animatic. Once all the shots were cut and fitted together, I had to render them in Adobe Premiere Pro so I would be able to keep the quality while exporting the whole sequence as a movie clip.

I did several versions of the final movie and exported more than one movie clip of the whole sequence in order to send one to my fellow collaborators to work on the music, sound effects and grading. Had to change and re-render some of the shots though when something was missing or didn't look right. 

Importing the rendered files into Premiere pro. There was more than one rendered shot as I kept updating/altering any shots that needed fixing. Also I thing throughout this stage was to make sure that the files be named correctly. If a Quicktime movie clip was saved with an avi code such as "example.avi" it would not work properly and won't even import into Premiere Pro or After Effects. 

Painstakingly rendering every single frame in Premiere Pro. The longest time it took to render the full sequence was approximately 40 minutes.

When it came to exporting the movie clip, I did it in the format of a Quicktime movie file and changed the compressor to H.264 as I had to chose a setting that would keep the quality of the original sequence. I also kept the Color Depth at "Millions of colors" and the Pixel Aspect Ratio at "Square Pixels (1.0)" as that best fits the HD 1080 format.  

Export Movie Settings.

Kept the Keyframe and Rendering Settings at default mode, the Bit Depth was fine set at “Use Project Setting.”

Audio settings

As for the audio, I kept the mode at uncompressed and the Sample Rate at 48000 Hz although the original music and sound effects track that was sent was at 44100 Hz but it would still work just as well.