D&AD and YCN Competition Briefs

For this competition my personal favorite is the Animation - ScienceMuseum Brief.

It will give me the chance to learn further skills, e.g. creating space, gas and water in Maya.
I came up with an idea right away for this Brief.
My concept is to show in 3D the formation of a blackhole up close and personal then to pan back and reveal that the blackhole is actually a giant plughole.
I could maybe fade one video into another for example the end of the Men In Black movie staring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones where it becomes apparent that the universe is all contained inside a singe marble that giant aliens beings are playing with.

Unfortunately I didn't feel I was making any headway in this project and had a change of heart.
I'm now doing the ITV2 ident my role on this project will be the 3D Work and Animatics.

My first responsibility in my group would be taking charge of the 3D aspect of things. As a group we decided that we would need to make the ITV2 logo in 3D so that we could use the logo for interaction with greater ease, as it has been decided that our neash was going to be that our ITV2 logo's were going to be interactive.

This logo was created as a vector art format so is actually made to look 3D although it isn't. My 1st task would be to get as close as possible to this but built as a 3D model.



From this very good image I was to be able to create our 3D Logo.


Building of the No. 2

very nearly finished just with camera angling to go

the final model is built and ready to animate

The 1st animation which was agreed by the others in my group was that we would have the logo react like a guitar amp. The letters would ripple as the amp was been plugged in and the no. 2 would vibrate to the sound of the music, pretty much as a speaker would do.




Next was an idea to have a drummer playing in the ITV2 ident so here is a quick capture of what was going to be used for our drummer animatic:

The man was just downloaded from Turbo squid and I built a quick drum kit. Unfortunately the only time we had to film and the times that our drummer was avalible were a no go so we had no choice but to kick that idea to the way side.

Another idea we had was to have some removal men bring the logo from the back of a removal van and put it into place. Time, space and money were all factors so we decided that the only way we would be able to carry out this idea would be to build a van in 3D.

This was the gradual process of building the van.



Unfortunatly the van wasn't to be used due to our footage and the van not been able to be matched up given the time left and the other idents we also had to do!












DNAD/YCN
Competition brief
1000 word evaluation

For my chosen brief my original plan was to work on the black hole project this was something I felt instantly drawn to probably because I felt I had come up with a very good idea that I really would have liked to put into production. The group I was in didn't really share my idea which is understandable - it's a group project after all. As there was a lot of talking and not a lot of action been carried out I knew that I’d be mainly doing 3D work and I’d need to crack on with it!

Having talked with another group doing the ITV2 Ident competition they seemed to know exactly what they wanted to do and what they would want from me if I joined there group. After a bit of thought I decided that it would be more beneficial for me to transfer groups and get cracking. I thought it would be good practice for me to build something that had to look exactly like something that was already in use, a skill I’ve not really had a chance to do yet.

Right away I knew what I had to do and had plenty to be getting on with. Trying to make something that had just been drawn to look 3D actually a full 3D working model was quite a challenge. My first thought was that I could just build the seemingly simple model use as closer colour matchs as possible and that I’d use lights in my scene to give it the correct amount of light and shadow. This proved harder than I'd originally though. The model ending up with shadows where they weren’t supposed to be colours looking the wrong shades so I opted for another way around it by actually giving my model an overall light and artistically colouring the models highlights to match the vector image I had for reference.

The team me asked me for a little more challenging model to do which was to build a convincing removal van having never finished a model of a car or similar I took on the challenge only knowing the basics on how to build a car using references. I came across a few difficult issues and errors although the van appears to look ok from a far there were so many thing wrong and it wouldn't paint correctly which would show random shadows and black marks in the final render which then had to be edited out in Photoshop. Although this was a negative thing I learnt a much better method of practice. It was to render out sequences as images and then put them together in After Effects - a technique I'll defiantly be using for the future. Matt our tutor has since pointed me in the direction of a good car modeling tutorial which I’m trying to get done in whatever spare time I can manage to get I’m already learning so much from the tutorial in its early stages.

With the filming side of things the original idea was to go blue screen and key out all of the blue to leave a white background but Dave Norman showed me the infinity curve used for photography which had no corners or edges kind of like a giant half bowl which would be ideal for our Ident. The problem is that the space seemed to be non bookable which proved a real problem with sorting out actors because we couldn’t tell them when we would need them and they weren’t available at the drop of a hat. One of our ident ideas had to be thrown to the way side and decided that trying to sort actors/musicians would all have to be everything we had available to us i.e. using talents already present with Tom knowing how to play the guitar and banjo. Having both of the above to hand that was one problem sorted.

We managed to get in for a full day of the infinity curve due to issues that stopped anyone else been able to use it and with some gentle arm twisting managed to get the space but ideally we wanted to get filming done a lot sooner and spend more time with effects and not having to edit and get everything put together in such a short space of time.

We had some idents planned and others were decided on the day as fall back plans which I think showed although I’m proud of them there is still room for improvement. I think given the project again there would need to be more of an identifying in roles I did only work of the 3D side of things took part in a bit of acting and give a bit of feedback I wasn’t sure what everybody else’s roles in this project were which I think could have been more organized. Time management could also have been improved as I didn’t really feel I needed to plan. All I needed to know was what models did they want building and when did they needs them for? Given that we didn’t know when we would be able to get the space for filming I just put as much time as I could possibly find into getting the 3D work done as soon as possible and counted every day they weren’t needed as a bonus and took the time to refine and improve the models to look more convincing.

If I was given the project to do again all that I would change would be making sure everyone knows what each other in the groups are getting on with and what roles and responsibilities are. I felt I didn’t see sufficiant storyboarding so that I could carry out animatics of our realized ideas before filming. A lot of the camera angles were worked out on the day and the whole time management was pretty much out of our hands. Perhaps we could have found another infinity curve although I think it would have been unlikely that we would have been able to find one.