The film

Here is our final film, all our shots in, animated, how there were intended too like, lit all nicely and all the rest of it! I'm really happy with how it went and how it has turned out. We got a sound designer at college to help us with the sound as we felt the sound was a major part in this project. To help us stay in sync and get things done one time, we used an online 'time-keeper' called shotgun. As director, Ollie set us all the tasks on shotgun and we completed them accordingly.

Enjoy!

(It's best viewed in 720p and with headphone or a decent sound system with bass. Laptop speakers wont do it justice!)

Shot 5 - Final Burst

This is the closest we see the creature, so we wanted it to be tense, exciting and really scary.

The creature bursts though the door and then the camera cuts out. The creature is really in our faces here. There is the first one I animated.



After showing the group, we all decided that it should come more at us, rather than turn away to the right slightly. Here is the final final shot!

Shot 4 - Atrium!

The big boy shot! Really looking forward to this shot and I have the main creature in it too! He smashed through the big circular window in the reception of the college. I had it jumping onto the seat too, and then finding his balance on the floor. I'm really happy with this shot and didn't really have many complications with this one, so here it is.

Perspective View:



Camera View:



Other atrium shot:



Here I animated another creature just at the end of this shot to be climbing through the window that was just smashed.

Shot 3 - Corridor No.2

This shot was REALLY fast, only 20 frames, so I had to get across what the creature was doing really fast, obvious and without over doing it. It is pretty much a run cycle, but it had to be really quick. You cant really see it from the camera view, but i think thats what adds to the shot.

Modelling!

Okay so for out first CG shot, we are having an explosion. For this, we need to model the things that will be exploding. In our case it is buildings getting hit by meteors. Me and Nick (animators) have the task of modelling! Fun!

Okay so we went on Google earth to see the buildings location, then went onto Google Sketch Up to get the dimensions. Once we had all of this done, we were set to go in Maya!

Shot 2 - Corridor

This one was really fun to do, as it was quite a long shot with gave me a lot to work with. This is where the creature comes though the door. We set up this shot but having someone the other side of the door (Steph) and she just pushed it open as we needed it!

This is what it looks like



One problem I had with this shot was the door opening and timing. The door doesn't open enough for the width of the creature, so his arm is in the wall, but its not visible so I got around that one easily. The next issue was that the door wasn't open long enough because i wanted him to move very slowly though it. To get around this I had the idea of having the camera jump a bit and blurring out to the creature fully through the door. I think this will work well in the final edit. It goes with the handy camera shaky theme too!

Here is the second part after the 'glitch', but from perspective view, not the cameras view.

Shot 1 - Balcony

Okay so here is my first shot in our film! This is the third creature creature we see in our film, so its still very much first impression shots! This is the closest shot you get of the creature apart from the final reveal. This needed to be just right, so I have got it climbing up the balcony. We thought this would be a really cool shot to do as it puts our CG directly onto the college environment. This is all good practice and learning for us!

Here is my first draft... If you notice, the shoulder warps a little bit so I needed to go back into it and try to smooth that joint out.

After some playing around, I managed to get it looking much better.

Reference! Rig!

Getting this film to look right, as an animator, our own creature needed to look right when it's moving. We have no settled on a four legged creature. Before we get a model and rig to animate, me and Nick started to test some quad walk cycles on a free rig which I found called Nico.

I was just playing around with it, as I have never done quad walk cycles before to I needed to do some tests and get the feel of how it all works. This is a really basic test I did after some research, its not much and not great at all but i just wanted to play around with all the controls.



Update!

Okay so here is a render of our creature which Ollie has modeled and textured:

I'm really happy with it and cant wait to start animating it! Before all of this though, I need to get some ideas to how it will move, its personality and all of that stuff. I bought some books such as Animals in Motion by Edward Muybridge and some animation books such as 'timing for animation' and 'Cartoon Animation' by Preston Blair. These helped me see how four legged animals walk which i would then apply to our creature. As these things have arrived by a meteor and they have come from another planet, we figured that they would be quite intelligent to an extent, as it is rare that you see aliens who aren't more advance than us. (weaponry etc) We were going to have them quite clumsy but then decided that because of the intelligence, they should come across as confident and aggressive towards us.

As our creature is bases on a lion, human, gorilla and a crocodile, it was hard to distinguish what sort of walk, or even how this thing would move. All of the power comes from the huge front arms, but the back legs give it speed. I researched into quadruped walk cycles and got some ideas. I used lots of youtube videos as reference so that i could see how big cats walk, and even some animations which had been done of these creatures before.

The Rig!

Now that Sanjay has finished the rig, we can finally get started on working with it! Getting some tests done etc. Here are a few short tests I have done to get used to our new rig. I'm so excited to start working with this!

This was done with the third draft of our rig. The first and second has some slight problems with them, but we made sure we started this project early enough and got working really fast so that if things like this happened, we had time to fix them. I'm really pleased and happy with how the rig is now though. Let the animation begin!

Initial Ideas

Our initial ideas kind of stuck with us throughout the planning process for this project as we wanted to do some sort of creature/alien within a live action scene. We got thinking and I watched some films as a reference to gain more ideas to what we could do. The main films which I started to look into were Cloverfield (2008), Outlander (2008), and the TV series Primeval (2007).

These films have a more of a creature in them, that a stereotypical alien who rides in a green UFO and makes weird high pitch noises. here are some pictures of these creatures:

We wanted our film to have a narrative to an extent, and this is what we have come up with:

We are all sitting around at uni making a video blog of what we are going to do for this project, discussing ideas etc. Suddenly the lights go out and a meteor hits Canary wharf in the background out the window. We run downstairs to see what it was and to get a close look, but whilst we are on our way down we are faced with creatures roaming around the building. We are forced into a corner and need to find a way to escape...

It will be filmed on a hand held camera, which will be shaky to give us the affect of panic and amateur filming. We wanted it to be like a Cloverfield sort of thing, so this is why we have used the shaky hand held camera! Also, this will give Greg more of a challenge when it comes to tracking the shots.

My role in the Group

So as I want to be an animator, that is mostly what I will be doing on this project. This term is really good because we get to actually specialise in our own areas which we didn't really have the freedom of in term one. I will help out with other odd jobs too, but primarily I will be animating along side Nick. I'm really looking forward to this as it gives us all a chance to push ourselves to our very best which will hopefully produce a film which we will all be proud of and even good enough for a showreel piece.

Here are all our groups job roles:

Oliver Kane: Director/modeller/UV artist/texturing/lighting
Sanjay sen: Rigging/particle effects
Greg Martin: Tracking/modeler
Stephanie Joy: Compositing
Nick Georgeou: Animator

Getting started!

For this term, we have to make a film, which will incorporate live action with CG. We also have to create a tutorial on an area which we want to improve in, and it would also help if both interlinked. The film would carry most of our overall mark so we knew we had to step up our game and produce something which pushed all of our abilities.

The group that i will be working with are:

Myself
Nick Georgeou
Oliver Kane
Sanjay sen
Greg Martin
Stephanie Joy

Let the work begin!