Titlescreen Project: Man down and New Start

A few weeks into the project we found out Alex was leaving the group to go onto the Deep project. So Sam and I met for a meeting to see if we were happy with the direction of the project. This was because before it had felt like he wasn't really into my idea and we were only doing Yesterday's Tomorrow as nothing else was suggested. A new direction was decided.

The new idea was a previous suggestion of mine, which was the biopic task based on the Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson. We spent a another week researching the author and formulating any new concepts. We regrouped and integrated our ideas into a general direction.
The new direction consisted of representations of Hunter's own and various alter egos characteristics from his various works (I will refer to Hunter S Thompson as HST througth out the project for personal ease). We also decided that we would intergrate a Ralpth Steadman inspired character animations (Sam worked on this section) into a 3D CGI enviroment for scenes (I would work on this half ). Below are some examples of Ralpth Steadman's work which is associated with HST as he used his illustrations for a few of his works..

The general idea consisted of the following stages:

• Starting with HST ashes reverse explosion with the camera following the ashes canister/bullet into HST's Gonzo funeral cannon. 

• We had a few problems in deciding how to go from the bottom of the funeral cannon into the next part which was set in HST's study(almost set out like a museum). In the end we just went with a fade to black which could blend into a shadowy corner of this study. The rest of the animation would be based within this scene. The two images that follow inspired us in how we would portray his study, cluttered and smokey enviroment full of character.

          

• The first section of the sudy we decided would contain a fireplace with a mantle piece conatining a Samoan war club and a framed Hawaii postcard to represent The Curse of Lono. In the book HST was ment to cover the Hawaii Marathon but due to the weather ended up getting high, then going fishing for marlin. He caught one and beat it to death with a Samoan war club.  The plan was to have HST walking into the scene, ducking under the club from rain coming from the postcard which was situated above the club. He would then walk back along the mantle piece and catch sight of something above him. The camera would follow his line of vision to a Richard Nixon mask (this represented Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72)on a moose head, lightning would flash and HST would proceed to shoot the mask off with the camera following its path down to it landing on top of a suitcase. This suitcase when would open to reveal its the suitcase from Fear and Loathing in Vas Vegas conatining drugs and alcohol. We had a few ideas with this section including; projecting a animated Vas Vegas into the reflection of the glass containers (which didn't happen in the end), having HST interacting with the scene by sniffing ether from his American flag hankerchief and falling off into the suitcases depths. The camera would then pan screen right into the shadey corner of the room, which would lead to...
• The next section would have the camera continuing panning to the right with HST walking along a bookcase with several other representations along with books. The first would be a sherrifs hat and badge, which represented HST running for Aspen County Sherrif. The second being a pair of binoculars which represented The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved. After the binoculars we decided to have HST change onto a motorbike which leads the audience to the next representation via him crashing into the end of the book case. The camera then carries on to a Hells Angels motorbike jacket hanging on a door (this represents Hells Angels). a big biker then appears in the jacket then punches HST in the final representation a Rum bottle depicting The Rum Diaries.
• The last stage contains personal characteristics of HST. We wanted to include; his various hats (like his bucket hat and Vas Vegas visor cap), cigarette holder, typewriter and his iconic yellow tinted sunglasses. These would be displayed either on a desk or other methods like a hat stand.
• I wanted to end with the camera sweeping up from the floor infront of the desk to the window behind. This I pictured having the sun shining through American flag curtains which would draw for the camera to go through into the feature film.

(A lot of ideas have been excluded as I'm reflecting back, not ideal.)

Learning Nuke!



As I decided to choose post production for this year I decided I should start learning the compositing software Nuke by The Foundry before the lectures began. I only had time to do a couple of the simpler tutorials but hopefully I will have time to tackle the more complicated ones.

 

 

 

 

The First tutorial in Nuke 101: A simple composite of the doll into the scene using a gain node to adjust the colour to match the lighting change. 

 

 

 

The second tutorial in Nuke 101: There was a more complex node tree involved to make this composite of a animated element into the scene. It required the splitting of the serperate channels from the original openEXR file to have greater control of each render layer, such as shadow, colour and light passes.

 

 

Titlescreen Project: First concept.

From my previous research it dawned on me that Sci-Fi came from humanities inquisitiveness of the unknown. The main areas that caused the most speculation were areas that lacked comprehension and that sparked the human imagination. So these areas included; the oceans (what laid beneath), the sky (what it was like to fly), what was beneath the land, and finally space (not necessarily in this order).   From this it seemed logical to apply this to how the titlescreen could flow. Below is a basic(poor) flow diagram to show an example to how it could flow. (I thought it might help describe my idea to the rest of the group.)

As a style guide I really liked the look of sketchy diagrams (such as Leonardo concept sketches) and scenes that were matte painted in a first edition style. So I did a rough animation with a couple of cogs on a old parchment background (shown below). I should of also included a background. For each scene I wanted to start with a concept drawing gradually fading into a more detailed scene  with colour and texture like it was in a book. This would simultaneously happen with a gradual camera movement  through the scene with animated elements like machinery, smoke and other subtle animations.

The white represented the texture fading in.

After describing my idea to one of my illustrator friends she was keen to help with the creation of assets. She drew a winged windmill floating city which i quickly made into a rough animation.
Her work can be found here.
http://www.illustrationjester.com/

I also played around with some smoke effects within Maya, as smoke would be essential especially for airships and cities.

Was just an idea anyway.

Titlescreen Project: Briefing and Early Research.

The Brief: Working within allocated groups we had to create a title sequence for one of the following ideas.

• Yesterday's Tomorrow: A series of hour long TV programs bringing to life early science fiction. Keeping the style close to how it would of been imagined at the time.
• Say Yes, Say No: A major motion picture depicting the anti-art DADA movement starring actors such as Christian Bale, Joseph Fiennes and Julianna Margulies.
• My Father The Hero: A biopic film either based on someone personally known or a famous person.
• Creative Review: A TV series based on the magazine which includes advertising, graphics, illustration and the web.
• Radio to Screen: Take a radio show from the present or past then adapt it for film or for TV.
• Deep Project: Work on the DEEP project as a member of the crew and negotiate your role.

My group consisted of Sam Helyer, Alex Papanicola and myself.

Out of all the above ideas I was most excited about the Yesterday's Tomorrow, due to my like of science fiction and especially my fondness of the steam punk elements to the task.

Early Research: The first couple of weeks was dedicated to researching any of the concepts that were most exciting. Without any input from the rest of the group I started researching the earliest forms of Sci-Fi so when it came to our first meeting we would of had at least a few ideas to bounce around.
A few visual concepts of early sci-fi are as follows:

 
The main authors I researched for inspiration were as follows:
H.G Wells
Albert Robiba
Jonathen Swift
Jules Verne
Rudyard Kipling
Thomas More

New Year, Last terms Work.

With all intentions to keep on top my blog updates I still managed to majorly fall behind. As a reflection this was probably due to focusing on one project and getting stressed about it. As a whole I'm quite displeased with what I managed to achieve last term.
The following posts shall be in a a rough chronological order of the work I managed to achieve.

As a note these posts will not be as detailed as if I had done them at the time.