Animals & Creatures - Session 209

Kept refining and cleaning stuff up this week, especially under the hood, and in general just proceeded refining the shot.

The exhaustion is starting to set in, but almost there :)

Here's the second refining pass:

Animals & Creatures - Session 208

I spent most of the weeks cleaning things up - cleaning up the curves and the poses from the blocking pass.

I also worked a little bit on the dragon flying in and landing, as well as the pulling of the dragon. 3 weeks to go and a looooot of work left. :)

Here's my first clean-up/refining pass:

Animals & Creatures - Session 207

It's been quite a stressful week trying to flesh out my shot and add more breakdowns to both characters. I think I got the main stuff in there now to show the idea and the intent, but it still has to be pushed and exaggerated - lets see if I can get to that next week.

This second class is a bit more demanding than the first class and a lot more hours are required - still fun though and I'm learning tons. 5 weeks to go!

Here's my blocking pass of the Lion vs Dragon shot:

Animals & Creatures - Session 206

Rough blocking of our 2 character interaction shot this week.

My layout from last week wasn't quite working staging and composition wise. So I found another plate of the same setting where I could get the characters to fill the frame a little bit more.

The problem with the new plate was that it was panning slowly across and didn't fit the action I had planned out very well - the camera was leading the action instead of the action leading the camera. When somebody in our Q&A pointed out that it looked like a security camera in middle of the forest, I figured I gotta do something about that haha - thanks by the way to whoever pointed that out :)

Then I remembered something that Glen Macintosh had mentioned in one of the previous lectures - in one of the Jurassic Park movies, he had deleted frames from the plate in order to get more intensity into an action that felt too slow.

The original plate I used was about 30 sec long and the camera eventually came to a stop. I went ahead and started to delete keys from the matchmove camera in Maya to speed up the pan to make it fit the action I had planned out.

Once that was working, I went back and deleted the exact same images from the plate and renumbered all of them to match the new keys on the matchmove camera. It took foooooorever. Ah well...pain is temporary - film is forever. And I think it works better now, so I guess it was worth it.

In a production I would probably not be able to do that, but I'm pretty sure the plate would have been shot to fit the action better in the first place - at least it's my way of justifying it :)

Here's my "old" new layout:


Here's the new layout after the camera change:


Here's the first rough blocking pass of my assignment:

Animals & Creatures - Session 205

Countless hours has gone by this week searching for reference for the next assignment. I had a few ideas that I explored. I went ahead and researched and edited reference for three different ideas, but eventually I decided on an idea that I think is doable within the time we have.

The next assignment has to have character interaction, so my shot is going to have a lion type-ish cat attacking a dragon that lands to search for food at some kind of picnic forest clearing.

My goal for this one is to be able to get to the polish stage and really dive into the details that hopefully can make it a nice reel-piece. Let's see how it goes :)

Here's my planning for the assignment:

And here's a super rough layout pass: