Over the past week:
we’ve all gotten a lot done.
Using the animated storyboard as a reference, Callum and Ben created a suspenseful theme to be used in Act 2, which I’m very excited about. It’s exactly what I was envisioning for the story.
In the meantime, I put together a set, and began working on rough blocking animation for Act 1 Shots 2 & 3.
Kamil then reached out to us with some suggestions for changes to the file structure, models, and set. He was able to reduce file size tremendously by referencing in each element of our scene:
In this setup, we use the animation file anim_act01_shot00 to work on the blocking, incrementing it for each shot so that eventually we have a new anim file for each one. The character, background, and spaceship are all referenced in. This way, we can work on updates to the set or character and have them update in all of our animation files. This is not only more efficient, but it allows us to get the animations to the VFX and sound design teams quicker so that they may begin working without waiting for us finalize every aspect of the scene.
He also updated the ship so that the shaders were applied correctly:
And began working on the colony. We still have some ways to go on this, but with our new referencing format, we can start animating without worrying about that yet.
The group expressed an interest, however, in keeping the large cliffs and canyons visible in the original set, as they had been planned into the storyboard. Kamil sent us an updated version with a possible way to lay this out:
While me and Kamil worked on set design and beginning animation, Antoni and Gherardo have been working on particle simulation ideas for the space dust and sandstorm scenes. This morning, we learned that we have a sandstorm zoetrope available on the class resource share folder, which is incredibly lucky for us.
During the meeting today, we decided on this plan for next week:
Kamil and Emma (Animation Team): We will split Act 1 so that I do shots 2-5 and Kamil does shots 6-9. We have all been discussing using an entirely different set for shot 1, so this doesn’t concern us yet. Kamil shared his screen with us during the call to demo how to use the pipeline for our work. I will transfer my previous animation to the new scene using Studio Library and get shot 2 to the rest of other teams by Thursday or Friday so that they can each begin working in it.
Ben and Callum (Sound Design Team): Once Ben and Callum have shot 2, they will start working on sound effects for it (spaceship whirring, wind, music, etc).
Antoni and Gherardo (VFX): This week, they will also take a look into shot 2 and begin working on their simulations in it, as well as settle on the most time and space efficient way to store these simulations (Zoetrope vs created in Maya or Houdini).
Once the rest of the group has shot 2, we can really begin getting a sense of transferring our work between teams and feeling out what our finished product will look like for each shot.
We are also meeting with Luke on Thursday to discuss all of these plans and take any feedback or suggestions necessary to better our project.