Correcting Colours

We did it! It all came together in the end, I would like to say nicely but it came together with a lot of late nights/early mornings, days that felt way too short and a fair bit of madness but the outcome was definitely something I think the whole team is proud of. Being the first short film I have been a part of it was an experience that I will take a lot from in every aspect within film making and animation. Thankfully all the stress and work isn't a deterrent, most likely because it paid off and it is a great feeling to have accomplished something that requires such commitment and dedication to produce. Working as a group is still an new concept to me and I think overall we worked well, I assume like most group projects there are bound to be some issues, which we had and the way in which issues were dealt with was in a very professional way (as professional as students can be). One of the best things about this particular film is that we can all walk away with something personal and something shared that we're proud of, great job everyone!

Park Scene - Compositing Break Down

In this clip the break down shows our compositing method to reach our final look, one that we aim for throughout all the scenes. There was often colour correcting for the matte paintings and the models which varied from scene to scene to achieve an even feel throughout. The characters were often softened to reduce some of the overly sharp details in comparison to the matte paintings. The shadow comp/final look was developed by Juan where multiple colour shadow sequences were multiplied over one another and slightly offset to produce a smokey and fluent look. The coloured shadows were contained with the original shadow masks but each layer contained a variation of a fast blur or radial blur. The particle render of the smokey colours was created by Isaac. 

Joe & Bully 2 Textures

The feel and look for the characters need to match with the rough painted feeling of the backgrounds so our approach was to start with a Plasticine/clay look and maintain some of the matte/flattened feel. Using mental rays mia_ materials, it gave us flexibility to reach this look and it allowed for multi-layered bump maps to distort the surface of the characters. These two characters were painted in Photoshop using the UV maps as a base, James on the other hand was started this way and then taken into Mudbox and cleaned up, by Juan.

Door Matte Painting

With the door matte painting we decided to match the background, it would be best to hand animate and paint the door. So I painted seven frames of the 30 frame shot and because of the limited movement I was able to composite it without having to paint all 30. There are three variations of the door movement and what best suits the edit will be used.

Pool Matte Paintings

The matte paintings for the pool scene take place inside of James' head, where he is mainly contemplating and for this reason he is mostly still until he decides to dive. To aide the still, isolated feelings of the shots the mattes with sky have been separated into layers which will allow us to have subtle animation for the clouds. Shot 430 is for the dive sequence where the camera follows him until he hits the water. The splash is a 2D animated splash that has been created by Nur and plan for the water is to render out a sequence using the ocean shader in maya, mainly for the highlights and then composite it with the water in the matte paintings.