Rough-cut Composition

I put together some of my final footage (pre- colour correction and grading) with some finalised line animation and tried out some 2D tracking and masking:

The only thing apart from workload that worries me atm is the length this rough cut is coming out at... almost double my animatic- probably due to over generous time allowance when filming. I'm hoping this time will go down as i fully animate sections and have to cut the footage to match the animation.

I've been keeping some secrets....

I've withheld work i've done from public view for the past couple of weeks for... normal artistic reasons (fear of criticism both on quality and quantity).

But, a greater fear is starting to take hold: what if people think i actually haven't done any work? Well, first of all, i really shouldn't care what people think, but also...

Here's some animation I done did already, ENJOY.

Scene 4!

Rough blocks

cleaned up keys

finished line animation

This scene still needs to be coloured

Scene 5!

Rough blocks

finished line animation

This scene still needs to be coloured

Scene 9!

clean keys

finished line animation

This scene still needs to be coloured

There is a rough cut comp coming soon aswell including all the tid-bits you see above so hold on to your hats!!

Final live action filming (hopefully)

It's been a busy and stressful week, although looking at these pleasant photos you'd never guess....

These are some reference and behind the scenes snippets from my 2 days of filming. I hope to god this is all the  filming i'll need to do, but i'll have to wait and see! Carrying make-shift equipment around a forest all day is tiring, and although I couldn't have hoped for a better team or weather - the scorching sun sometimes made for fast changing light and high contrast in shots where we didn't need it...  Working with friends and Kira the wolf stand-in was fun but working with a disobedient apple was not so much fun!

At the moment i'm putting together a rough cut of the footage we gathered and the animation i have so far, and trying out some masking, 2D tracking and 3D tracking. I hope that this will speed up the final editing process as it will throw up any problems i'm having sooner rather than later and force me to solve them or look for ways around them rather than just letting them be for lack of time.

At the moment the rough cut looks to be nearly 5 minutes long! That's nearly twice the length of my animatic. I know that we were sometimes over-generous with time when shooting scenes i had roughly timed in my animatic, I see no immediate problem in leaving sections that are empty of characters longer than i estimated as it makes almost no difference to my work load. I will have to be careful not to leave some shots over long and empty though for fear of boring the audience- Birdemic style....

Adam and I are planning to edit the colours and light across the chosen shots in the coming days, this will hopefully help to tie very differently lit scenes together and express the chosen moods of my film a little better.

 Kira and Wendy being scale references

 Kira filming some rough and tumble to help me animate my pup caught in a snare (she was having fun, don't worry)

 Turns out: Kira likes apples

Kerri and Kira being references

 ^Photos by Adam Morrow

Kira being a jet pack

^Photo by Wendy Wang

The decision of how to colour my characters is drawing close. I decided to hold off making  the final call on colour palettes until i saw what the final plates would look like, and now that will have to wait until post colour correcting. I have had a little play around though and am keen for feedback.

Numbers 1 and 2 also have a coloured lines version. Numbers 3, 4, 5 and 6  only have a black outline version. As you can see, i already have a fairly solid idea that i'd like the colours on Anna to include some sort of red for her scarf, blue/ green for her skirt and neutral for her top.

I was tempted by coloured lines in theory but looking at the comparison with plain black line art against a photo background from our filming days... I am leaning further towards black lines (also for speed and simplicity sake).

The rest of the gang with their puppy companions in my favourite colours...

I will be attempting to put together a rough colour script in the coming days to help me colour correct my footage. Once that is complete and i have some feedback on my character colour choices i can start working out how to best and quickly colour my animated line art!!

Thank you to my filming team:

Adam Morrow- Camera work

Wendy Wang- assistant and photographer

Qi Feng- assistant

Kerri- reference actor, assistant and dog trainer

Kira- reference actor and stick finder

Thank you to colourlovers.com for colour palette inspiration

Story Surgery with Mark Grindle

I had an individual meeting with Mark Grindle about my personal project. His feedback was very positive, he said the story hung together nicely. Some small suggestions he had were: 

allowing more time before the pup has a negative reaction at the end of the film (allowing his innocence to linger a little longer while the audience understands before him what is happening); 

adding a slight zoom in or focal length change in the first person perspective shot of the wolf mother looking at Anna through the trees to emphasise the inescapable danger Anna is in.

I haven't spent time re-doing the animatic i showed Mark today after his suggestions since they were so very minor, i have made a note of them in my script breakdown though.

Script Breakdown and New Schedule

I had a production meeting with myself and took note of: Everything i said i would achieve by this point- completed or not and if so whether it still needs to be completed. The old schedule looked like this: 

Final 2D animatic is complete (recently updated to include 2 new scenes with one old scene that was really annoying me cut. The new scenes are important- they show the 2 main characters together in the same shot as equals seeing each other for the first time and their first cautious exchange)

Live action/ 2d animatic is not complete because final footage is not filmed and will not be by the end of this week. I also think it's far too late for me to be faffing around with animatics.

Designs are complete.

Character sheets are complete.

Final filming and editing are not complete.

Research observation is complete

tests are incomplete (i have written off "set dressing" as i would rather focus on animation not hard core compositing past what is strictly necessary to allow my flat characters to exist in the live action setting) I have not tested any compositing past having a meeting with a member of staff knowledgeable about vfx about specific requirements for my film.

2D animation is not complete.

Based on the new animatic i made up a script breakdown (as detailed as i could manage) which will hopefully help me keep track of my film requirements scene by scene and will help when it comes to filming my live action footage. I have arranged a meeting with Adam Morrow who is leading the live action footage team for this project to discuss how the script breakdown and new schedule is working for him.

 New schedule with updated hierarchy: green means high priority, yellow is medium, red is low. i plan to push for having 62 secs of complete animation by the beginning of July. This way i hope to at least have a film that makes some sense to start putting together a month before deadline.

I have acquired a live action reference actress for my wolf pup character! Her name is Kira and her and her owner Kerri have kindly agreed to accompany us on our filming days. Having footage of Kira for reference will help me scale/ place and animate my wolf pup character.

Wrapping up Pre-Production

Since finishing semester 2 i've been in a hurry to catch up as much as i can with pre- production for Once bitten, so that i can start production as soon as possible. 

I had a fairly good idea of what my pup should look like thanks to the work i did with Bimpe at the beginning of semester 2:

 But i still had a mother wolf character to lock down- with the wolf pup's design solid i had something to work up from, i also had my main inspiration from secret of the kells as well as Bimpe's concepts for adult wolves.

Not wanting to dally much longer in the designing stages i came up with a design i was happy with using what i already had:

I also made a turnaround for my pup:

 I produced character sheets to help me understand the characters in different moods and poses and to give me practise drawing them:

The scale of the wolves is stylized: 

I found reference of a real wolf cub with a human for scale as i wasn't sure how big to make the cub in comparison to Anna (turns out wolf pups are pretty big!). I knew i could make him slightly bigger than realistically accurate but needed him to still be cute and un-intimidating. I also want the scale of the mother when the audience and Anna see her in full for the first time, to be a surprise.

I was also inspired to make the mother wolf large and imposing, by the scale of the Dire wolves in Game of Thrones:

However compared to my original storyboard the wolves are scaled DOWN!

While making up my model sheets i played around with some possible colour combinations for my wolves. However i think it might be early to make a final decision here. I am tempted to leave it until i have final footage to comp the characters in to. 

 

Title Change!

Heads up! The working title of my film has changed from "Fall of the Wolf" to "Once Bitten". I felt that the previous title had been out-run by the film's development- now the film involves neither a fall of a wolf (owing to my decision to leave the ending as a cliff-hanger) or a seasonal fall (owing to the time for final filming falling in spring).

"Once Bitten" refers to the phrase "Once bitten, twice shy" obviously, and i think the literal meaning ties in with the symbol of the apple in my film, whereas the metaphorical meaning ties in with the film's narrative arc of innocence lost and the birth of a war between the wolves and the humans.