Final Word

As a final word on this blog, i just want to recognise the whole team;

Jonathan Pryce [Director]
Jenny Morgan [3d Artist]
Giles Pease [Technician]
Dan Hayes [Lead Animator]
Ben Griffin [Concept Artist]
(...not to forget Yemi Adelekan, Rebecca Morgan, and Alistair Primrose)

for their outstanding commitment and dedication to the film. As a team we worked well, effectively and professionally together, and not forgetting the fun we managed have along the way. This film for me has been and character building experience to say the least, and not only have i enjoyed making the film but the company i've shared whilst doing so. Its been fun and clearly rewarding and we should all be really proud.

Well done guys once again and all the best.

Rob
[Producer]

Final Output

The film has finally been completed and all that is left to do is output the movie with sound from premiere. I did this for hand in today and found that an uncompressed Quicktime movie with stereo sound was 6.33GB!!

So i decided to compress with the soreson3 compressor available and stuck with stereo sound (as i believe it plays a massive part int he movies feel, and therefore must remain as higher quality as possible) and the file size dropped to 455MB, perfect for hand in.

The Edit

The edit has been progressing since January, and finalized about a month ago. All i had to do this evening was take the final renders of the film and place them over the top of the playblasts we had done prior to rendering in the edit and ensure they we're all the same as the previous edit; this was to avoid any discrepancies with the sound. It went pretty well other then a few issues with a couple of render notes we had taken when rendering out our playblasts were not quite accurate. but a bit of clipping and we were there.

Organizing and creating the credits, with Alistairs music also

A slightly frustrating task I have to say, since everyone wants to be credited for what they have done. Which is fair enough, however, as advised by the tutors not a good idea regarding that we want our viewers to leave the film feeling excited and remember it for its good points; as apposed to the long drawn out affair of some boring rolling credits. Therefore, after looking at the word of Saul Bass and some good advice from our tutor Jared Taylor, we decided to shorten the Credits to specifics as much we could and come up with some designs for them.

Reciept of Alistairs adjustments, and final output

Today we received the final draft of Alistair's score, and it was fine. we still had to adjust a few levels in favor of Beci's sound effects, but other then that it fit perfectly on top of the film. The music certainly does create a exciting mood about the film and aids the fast paced tempo we were aiming to achieve in this film. Nicely done Alistair, really nice work.

Received sounds from Becky and from Alistair

Today we received all the music back from both Beci and Alistair and placed it on top of the final edit with all the renders already inserted ( a quick and easy job that was finished yesterday morning). Although both sounded fantastic on their own, I suspected that they wouldn’t sound as brilliant together and some levels would have to played with. Therefore, Jenny, Jono and myself, once again sat down and played it over and over and over again until our heads went numb trying to find the right levels for both tracks at their significant parts of the film. This was a long process, and one part of this film where opinions seemed to be more varied then ever. But non the less, we nailed it and in the end were all happy with the final out put of sound.

However, one more thing needed to be sorted by Alistair, as once again he hadn’t quite timed one section correctly. Therefore a quick phone call got him back on it and we hope to receive the file tomorrow. Which as before the levels (which we now know where the changes need to be made) need to be adjusted and a final out put can be assembled.

Organizing Renders

Whilst the files were being rendered, I used the time I needed to organize the renders that had been completed into scenes and shots, to make the transfer to the edit smoother and quicker. I found that by doing this doing this the task of dropping them into premiere was such an easy task and I am very glad I took that small amount of time to organize myself as a result.

Meeting with soundtrack composer

Today me and Jono went to see our score artist as a result of the audio file we received last night. The music, although very good and clearly right for the film, had no sign of timing or understanding of what was in shot. The music seemed to be out of sync and after talking with Alistair it was some what deliberate. Therefore Jono and myself saw fit to spend a good few hours with him in order to give some direction on the what went wanted the audience to feel at certain points. Although our presences probably frustrated Alistair, from a creative prospective, we certainly new what we wanted and once the piece had been out together Alistair agreed that it sounded better and made more sense. Therefore we left him with the rest of the film and a better understanding of what we wanted, with somewhat of an excited feeling inside.

Rendering was started and order was organised.

The rendering proved to be somewhat frustrating where once again we were restricted due to hardware. The only pc that seemed to be able to render was Giles’ and therefore to ensure it was all done, we had to man the PC all day, everyday for the last week, rendering each scene end on end. Other then that the rendering went well and only a few problems arose like random missing textures, which mostly were sorted in Adobe Premiere by my self and the defects were not visible at all.

Since the temple was all being rendered on Giles’ pc, I thought I utilize my own to finalize and render the Kitchen scenes. It seemed that neither Jenny nor Jono’s laptop could handle the Maya file either which was enormously frustrating, but irresolvable at this point. Therefore, my time was now spent manning the both my own and Giles’ PC’s to ensure both of them were rendering constantly. Albeit not the most taxing task, but a very boring one, and I spent a lot of time watching numbers ticking over on screen.

Spent an evening lighting the main chamber

Yesterday was a continuation on from the weekend, where once again I found my self with Jono and Dan finishing up during the early hours of the morning after a long attempt to try and light the main chamber within the temple. We took some time concentrating on the lights themselves, but realized that we needed the accompaniment of fog to acquire that dingy dark chamber feel.

This however made todays work a hell of a lot easier as we had decided to keep a similar style running throughout the whole interior. The problem we had was the lighting of the corridors. The justification of light source is hard enough in a large chamber, but in corridors with no light holes it was hard. We decided to place spot lights at either end of the corridors to simulate light flooding from the chambers either side. Furthermore we used a series of low intensity ambient lights to soften the harsh shadows we were getting on our character, which was restricting our view of the characters face and body. The fog node worked throughout and created some pleasing results.

Organizing drop in files and animations

The last couple of days have a been rather stressful due to the size of the files I’ve been dealing with, which has resulted in multiple computers crashing on the event of opening the files. My aim was to take all of the animations out of their environments and place them into the textured/lit sets, along with the cameras, but was seeming an impossible task, since it was only Giles’ PC that would open any files (due to its immense hardware specification). However, the problem of months of Maya binary and data being copied and pasted and exported and imported meant that a large amount of baggage was being held within these files. Although un-necessary history was being deleted along the way if not by me by everyone else, and the geometry that wasn’t being used was deleted, a lot of data still remained in the outliner. Only during the last couple of days have I realized this. Therefore, whilst preparing the files, I found myself deleting shed loads of history and data that wasn’t needed from these files, which not only time consuming but very demanding on the computers being used to do it. Never the less, it was sorted and I was able to open the files a lot quicker and they appear to run smoother now.

Receipt of texturing

Today, Jenny, Dan, Jono and my self brought all our textures to see if they matched in style and fit nicely into the environment. The sets were primarily meant to be dark and the style of Jono’s walls along with my floors really helped get that feel across. Although I felt that maybe the chamber had more of a somewhat medieval feel to it, I loved the way the stone walls and the dingy floors set an eerie ambiance in the set. Can’t wait to see it lit.

Final Bllitz on texturing

Today we started the texturing of the temple interior. We knew this would be a long job, however, with Dan free from animation and Jenny always at hand, Jono, Jenny, Dan and my self all took a section; along with a selection of colour swatches and a few methods we all agreed on to produce a consistent style throughout. The jobs had to be organised first and then delegated to each one of use. Jono for example did all of the walls for the two chambers. Jenny took on the assets, such as stones rocks and plants (which had already been done) and the Dan took on the walls for both corridors. He also took time to texture the assets in his area which really helped Jenny meet her deadline for her textures. I my self textured the floors throughout along with the altar and the statues either side.

Lighting on the house left to Giles

About a week ago, Giles found himself at a loose end during the texturing process so I asked him to finalise the lighting for the house interior. This went well and we were happy with the work. However, today when I came to prepping the set for rendering, the lighting had strangely changed and half the lights were turned off. Therefore Jono took on the task of finalising the lighting for this set. This took a while and the results were not bad.

Colouring the rest of the explorers

Using the colouring method we decided to use for the explorer the other day, Jono and my self sat down to colour all the files that had been animated prior to the realization of the wrap problem. This took some time due to the tedious nature of the process, however it only took half an evening and by making it a race between the two of us, it got done quicker then we thought.