Circa 23 Tshirts redux!

Ive just noticed blogger went down and deleted the last post about The T shirts so ill put it back up. Its just a quick one to show the t shirts and hoody I made to promote the Circa 23 logo.

Circa23 T shirts

I've finished the Circa 23 tshirts! I made a stencil of the logo (a lot of knife work) then using a sponge painted it onto the tshirts using acrylic,

Circa 23 Vimeo account

Just a quick post to publish the vimeo URL's for the Level 6 advanced animation and special effects module. My vimeo account is gradually building content and I hope to have a few more things on it by monday.

Here is the link to the sequence:

http://vimeo.com/23108298

Here is a link to the breakdown

http://vimeo.com/23280788

Circa23 Showreel 2011

I've just finished a short showreel showcasing my work in the last few years. Its a short edit of around one minute, not too to leave out any work but not too long to bore any prospective employers/clients. From looking into other postgraduates showreels the time of it should not be more than two minutes (people with industry experience can allow a longer time to showcase work). Ive added a link below to the vimeo file as the showreel size was too big for Blogger.

  http://vimeo.com/23267808

Circa23 DVD

Ive have just designed the DVD menu for the Circa23 2011 showreel. Made in Encore I used a motion background made in After effects and a button made in Photoshop. The DVD when played will play the showreel first before the menu this is because companies viewing the DVD may be put off by having to go through a DVD menu to get to the video. The menu displays after a viewing of the showreel and serves as a way for any viewer to replay the showreel if necessary.

 

Circa23 DVD Cover...

I designed a cover to match the design of the business card using the wax seal idea to make an envelope.

The cover design to be printed on A3.

Half a glue stick later they're stuck to card.

A long knife cutting process for the wax seal.

The finished case!

A few errors! The logo and type become upside down when assembled which is a bit annoying. Also I think the contrast of the print is too deep and rich in colour, I also want to add a little more texture and content to the design to make it more interesting.

Circa23 Business Cards

I have designed the first business cards for Circa23 Motion graphics and sfx. Influenced by other design company business cards I wanted the style to be graphically pleasing as the company itself is to deal with design solutions. I based the design on an old letter with a wax seal. I made the wax seal using vectors and added the logo in the center of it, add some bevel and emboss and I got a nice 3d relief wax seal. The fonts used is a free font called 'Chadwick' which is the main font to be used we the company 'Circa23'

Front

Back

Some of my inspiration was took from really awesome business cards. I really liked when the designs reflected something else.

http://twentyfourhourpartypeople.com/post/188760034/awesome-business-cards-for-mixtape-generation

Above is the koji sueyoshi mixtape generation business card which I love as it reflects purpose of the medium by being designed like a cassette tape.

http://insearchofdesign.com/2008/06/awesome-business-cards/ 

I took a lot of inspiration from these business cards. I feel its necessary to spend time in the design element of a business card as a business card can act as a first impression for companies and clients. 

ASFX CUT ONE!

The first cut of the sequence... not completely satisfied with a few of the shots i think the specular on the hand match shot needs boosting and I'm not sure what looks wrong with the hand pan shot but something does and I want to re work it. The back plate on the final shot also needs some tweaking as the perspective slips a few seconds before the end.

Colour Grade

I added a colour grade to enhance the aesthetics of the shot. I wanted the footage to look like it was shot on a 35mill camera so a little over exposed, blacks slightly crushed etc.So the footage I tweaked the curves and added a little orange hue, blew out the levels to give an over exposed look then crushed the blacks using contrast. I also added a magenta solid and turned the mode to soft light to give the highlights a little purple hue. then I just added a black solid with a elliptical feathered mask to give a slight vignette.

 

Beauty passes

I wanted to render out just the beauty passes from my animations as I think they look really nice un-composited and the quality of the beauty pass kinda gets lost when composited. So here are the un-edited, un-composited beauty passes.

 

I don't want to rant on about the compositing as most of the things i did are discussed in a previous post. However I did just want to show an extra element I added in the compositing. I added a glow to the specular channel to highlight and ...glow the shiny, reflective elements.

 

Smashed

The shot in which the hand jumps through the wall needed a transitional cross over point from when the wall didn't have a hole to when it did. I decided to make some dust and rocks to act as an explosion. I first made a particle systems in 3dsmax. I used a pfsource with a spawn event to create flying debris. I added gravity, spin and rotation and then instanced the particles to some random shaped rocks that I made with the texture used from the hand hole.

To enhance the debris I added some dust particles made in after effects. I started off with a white solid with ccparticle world. Then I added some turbulence displacement and guassian blur, vector blur and fast blur.

below are the video tests from the dust and debris

hole in the wall

The hand hole was modled in 3dsmax. I started by making a rough outline using the line tool. I refined and added a few more points then added a bevel modifier to extrude along the z axis. I then added a subdivide modifier to add more verticies, a tesselate modifier to give some random rock like quality and a noise modifier to enhance the randomness of the rock shape.

I textured using unwrap uvw, below are the uvw templates and the texture I made from a still of the wall. Using offset and clone stamp in photoshop I made the edges of the texture match.

Making a false background...

The final shot in the sequence shows the possessed lego hand jump through the wall. If it were to do this in real life it would leave ahole in which it jumped through. However as this isn't real we'll have to make one. I could make a false wall, comp it in then animate a hole being made in the fake wall Ive made but that doesn't make any sense because I would have to erase digitally the wall thats already there. So I decided to create a false hole via a masked alpha channel. However when the hole is made there is nothing behind it in the background. The solution to this was to take a still shot on a fish eye lens of the scenery behind the wall then align it correctly in 3dspace using the cam data from the matchmove. see image below.

 











The second part was to add the foreground video and use the alpha channel of the hole from the 3dsmax render to cut a hole on the video and reveal the background.

comping crystals hand

The starting element I needed to created was to erase crystals hand and replace it with the back ground image. Not too tricky as it was shot on a tripod all it meant was too mask the hand and drop in a still from the sequence where nothing was in the way. Then just a case of key framing some color correction onto the background plate when the light changed.

The first initial problem I faced when adding the matched hand to crystals real hand was the joining section from her wrist to the animated hand. Having just the hand would mean that when it dropped it would leave an area of the wrist that wasn't modeled and would be too tricky to paint in the back of her sleeve. Therefore I decided to match a stump base acting as her wrist.

 I then had to rotoscope the area that needed to be underneath the sleeve and thus invisible to the camera. This just involved keyframing the mask frame by frame until a seamless mask had been achieved. I feathered the mask slightly just to make the join a little smoother.







The second stage of the stump was to add some shadows where the sleeve ended and the stump started. This could have been done in 3dsmax by modeling the geometry of the sleeve but I decided it would be easier to just mask in after effects. I duplicated the diffuse channel model and tinted it to all back. The using the mask made for the sleeve I feathered the edges to give a slight gradient on the shadows, duplicated the mask and changed the mode to subtract to give the look of some contact shadows to the stump.

The next part was to add the hand itself. I added the passes into the comp (diffuse, shadow, specular and reflection), changed the modes to : add for the specular, soft light for the shadows, screen for the reflection and left the diffuse as normal. I matched the color of the diffuse using curves and de saturated it slightly as it looked more correct to the original plate. I also boosted the levels of the specular and added a glow effect aswell just to give a little more dull shine to the model.

 












I added a grain match to the final renders also to match further the quality of the video. I had also intended to add motion blur on to the model however after an extensive 39 hour render time for a previous test scene when compositing it didn't look right. The reason for this was that i shot the footage with a pretty high shutter speed around 2500. This pretty much reduced and motion blur to zero especially things not moving particularly fast. The motion blur did enhance the animation but looked out of place in the composit. when I lowered the blur amount to a correct level for the footage the blur amount was so low it wasn't really noticable however it still kept the render time ridiculously high. so the decision to abort motion blur was made.

 












The final element in the compositing I made was a slight glow around the edges of the alpha to look as though the light from behind was engulfing the foreground image. I autotraced the alpha channel of the model which gives a rough mask for the duration of the shot then added it to an adjustment layer above all the other layers and feathered and altered the glow radius until it gave the correct look.

 

cuttin' classes squeezing passes

reflection and lighting

As the scenes have been matched and animated Its now time to render... I made a lighting right out of omni lights positioned into a cone shape. The idea behind this is that using lots of low intensity omni lights will give good soft shadows and speed up the render time... this is instead of using say a sky light.

I wanted also to add a reflection to the material. So first I changed my render-er to mental ray instead of the default scanline.Then in my materials I added an ambient/ occlusion to the diffuse map with around 32 samples, made the bright color the red of the lego pieces and checked reflective. I then added a falloff map to the reflections map, changed the falloff type to fresnel and added a raytrace map to the black channel of the fall off parameters.

 

animating the hand...

The hand is made up of mainly rectangular elements and the way in which i wanted it to move was literally as if it was made from Lego. I didn't want to rig it and skin the object to move like a human hand. With this in mind I made a simple bone rig and linked the corresponding parts of the hand to the bones

After animating the hand to give it a run cycle it was then a case of linking it to a dummy object and using the dummy to animate the distance of the hand traveling.

Can't get with that track

Recently I have been having extremely difficult problems with the tracking shots. Firstly the object tracking shot went haywire and produced an inverted rotation solve to the object.

Above is the original shot I was trying to track. Syntheyes confused the markers placed on my hand. It thought the points closest to the camera on the z axis were the furthest from the camera and vise versa. This in turn made the object rotate the opposite way to the rotation of the hand. After hours of trying to correct and resolve the track using the inverse settings, zero weighted and constraints it still wasn't budging. I then decided to re film.

Here on the left is a cardboard 'mitten' to be worn on the next shoot. My idea behind it is to give a larger and flatter surface area than just a hand. This should give more parallax in the scene and thus provide an easier solve.

 

Here is a still from the shoot. The track had a lot more success this time. The increased surface area made syntheyes solve the track with no problems and got to a 0.23 Hpix error in the first solve.

The mitten worked better also as the tracking points where recognized by syntheyes better (being as there is a more prominent black on white texture). This made the manual tracking aspect much much easier and quiker.




The second problem I have been having is pulling a track from footage shot with a fisheye lense. Due to the distortion around the edges of the frame I makes refference points look as if they are moving within the scene (however the movement only comes from the distortion). This in turn produces extremely wild camera solves.

 












I tried to un distort the image and then make a re track. This again didn't work and I haven't found and supporting articles on the internet to help with this problem and it appears that pulling a track from footage shot with fisheyes is an extremely hard thing to do. The footage is to be shot on a standard lens which isnt ideal as I wanted a wider depth of vision for the animated hand shots.

   

I used to be a teenage handmodel

 

Above is a preview of the hand model made for the project. It was constructed from literally building a lego hand in 3dsmax from the separate lego pieces I constructed. I attached most of the palm however there is 3 separate pieces for bone attachments.   

Storyboard '61 revisited

 

Above is the revisited storyboard for the sfx project. the previous idea heavily relied upon good 3d modeling and rigging to achieve the effect. This is not a strong aspect of my technical creativity and as such would really let the piece down. The revised idea is to have a person notice that his hand has turned into a lego hand. Upon this realization the hand drops off on to the floor. The following shot shows the lego hand animate and run across the floor and jump through a wall leaving a hand shaped hole. The way in which I will achieve this is through using the camera matching and object tracking techniques discussed in the original idea. Obviously the hand will need to be constructed in 3d and animated and composited onto the real world floor. The final shot with the hand going through the wall will be created by making a mock up background image of the scenery behind the wall and positioned accurately in 3d space. then by masking a hole in the wall to reveal the mock background and as its set in 3d space the background image will parallax with for ground image to produce the illusion of a hole in a wall.     

Above is the first test to object track a hand. The obvious flaw in this is the shoddy hand rig made which in all honesty was made in hurry to test the accuracy of the object track. The object track itself is quite solid. The co ordinate system works properly and the individual marker points (taken originally from ink dots on the hand) became invaluable in aligning the rig to the real life hand.I think the track however could be improved. The hand I find seems to be a quite shaky and I was convinced I had steadier hands. I put the unsuccessful track down to the fact I only manually tracked the bare minimum of 7 points each frame necessary to pull a camera solve.    

Story board

This is the initial concept for my sfx project. The idea is to film a cinematic piece showing a man slowly turn into a character made completely from lego. The idea's technical aspect will rely heavily on a good 3d model to be produced (artistically with regards to the lego concept and atomically correct with regards to the person being replicated in lego). The main technique to be utilized in order to achieve this would obviously be a great object track and lots of measurements to critically look where the points would be in 3d space to effectively match the animation to the real life footage. Reading upon the technique of matchamation or rotomation leads me to the belief that this idea would work for a full rig of a character as supposed to matching every object of a moving person. The idea is to take accurate measurements of your subject whilst in the production stage (ie distance of feet from cameras iris). With this information in mind and after a camera track has been pulled (if the track is hand help) you then literally rotoscope the animation of your live subject on to the 3d rig.  

here is a quick drawing to illustate my idea. I want to transform parts of the human anatomy into atomically correct Lego figures.

I found this picture by Adam Kola when searching around for visual style inspirations for my piece. I think this image shows a great colour pallet that I would like to incorporate into my piece.

circa 23 vfx level 6

Taking inspiration from the 'Africa Shox, Leftfield and Afrika bambaataa' video by Chris Cunningham I initially want to create a visual effects piece that involves digitally altering the appearance of a person. My first idea is to shoot footage of people walking and then gradually turn them into lego characters or to give the appearance that they are made from lego pieces. This idea would necessitate object tracking, 3dmodelling and animation and obviously good compositing.   

The second piece of visual effects work i have taken inspiration from the white stripes video 'fell in love with a girl' the video showcases great visual images of rotoscoped animation of the characters as big Lego figurines. Although the effects and techniques used are not the same as I will be using, the video gives great reference to the final creation of the person in my vfx shot.

 

I also took inspiration from the Philips comercial 'Carousel'. It shows amazing motion control and wire removal techniques. I initially had the idea to shoot a stready camera track through a shattered Lego man whilst the pieces were suspended in the air. This idea however would become too difficult to produce without a motion control rig and due to budget constraints etc this idea will have to be developed or dropped.

Another visually nice piece that I have taken inspiration from is 'Sommar' by Sebastien Abes. I like the attention to colour matching in the compositing stage. The piece has a great soothing ambient flow which compliments the fluid simualted elements composited into the scene. This piece makes me want to stay away from Hollywood influeced visual effects focusing on high octaine action scenes and focus on something that looks aesthetically pleasing in (and i hate to use this term)  an art house way. I also want to take from this piece along with 'Carousel' the great use of fitting music.

Sommar