Pre-Production: VFX Animatics

Here's the animatics for the thumbnails I posted earlier. Some of them worked better than others. On some I restricted myself quite a bit on the motions as I didn't want to push the director into a shot or angle they didn't want to do.

Pre-Production: VFX

Way behind with this blog now. We're well into production now with 3 weeks off uni for Easter at the end of this month. Three weeks off uni doesn't mean three weeks off work though.

Things have been crazy busy on the work front, and it's been difficult finding time to get everything done. In order to attempt to keep on top of uni work I've let the blog slide alot. But I'll be trying to keep it up to date better from now on. After all third times a charm.

My dissertation was handed in a couple of weeks ago now so luckily I no longer have that to worry about. It went quite well but I found I didn't spend as much time on it as I would of liked since I also had to try and keep up with production work at the same time.

Anyway, onto the actual post. This time I'll be posting my pre-production for another project I'm an animator in. This one is a VFX project in which essentially, an elephant wanders through the streets of Cardiff. Filming for it took place a few weeks ago and it was very very cold carrying and guarding the equipment in the city centre. I'm due to start animating for this project sometime next week, if I manage to catch up with my other animation work...

New Uni Year

Uni has started again and it looks set to be a busy but interesting year. For the first week we had to decide what we want to do for our major project this year. The major project will cover most of the year so it’s very important to figure it out early on.

We each have to complete 4 projects for the major project, for each of which the practical work will take 4 weeks. The pre-production is done awhile before that but it’s easier to find out now how you want to spend the third and final year.

As for me, I’ve decided to join in three collaborative projects and work on one personal project. The personal project will be to animate and possibly rigging some interesting quadrupeds. I was thinking of looking into cats, squirrels and deer’s as they all have interesting ways of moving.

Collaborative project #1 is a game project which at this moment is referred to as the “Fae Game Project” and will possibly be called “Echoes”. This game is set to be a third-person action game in which you play a fae character that has to help a human girl get back to her world. The game will be run in Unity and has quite a large team working on it. I will be doing animation on this project on a centaur, a wyvern and a small section of the girl. As I want to head towards creature animation, I’m quite excited for this project as it gives me an opportunity for creativity with animating creatures that don’t exist.

Collaborative project #2 is another game project with the working title of “Form Wars”. It’s a turn based strategy game in which the player tries to take over as many tiles on the board as possible and summons creatures in an effort to defeat the opposing king unit. In this project I’ll be doing rigging and animating of whatever needs to be done. I will also have to learn how to create game engine friendly animations so that it can be run smoothly.

Collaborative project #3 is a short VFX film project. It involves a CG animal being placed into a real city street scene and walking down the street possibly interacting with people in the street. In this project, at the moment I’m the only animator but there is a possibility of getting second-years in on this project too and extending it.

As I said before, a busy but interesting year. I also have a dissertation to write this year but I’m planning on linking that in quite strongly with my practical work so that should make things a little easier.

I’ll post more on these projects as I work on them.