So today is officially 2 days from hand in, and I am rather far behind.

I’ve endured a lot of sleepless nights just to keep my creative juices flowing rather than falling asleep and loosing my rhythm, and this week is going to be much the same. I have lots to do, and in essence shouldn’t really be spending too much time writing this blog post up, but I feel I need to otherwise, how am I to document my work? (Also, After Effects is rendering, and I can’t do a whole lot while that’s happening. )

SO, just to clarify exactly what I’ve spent nights on a chair at a desk in the sub 0 temperatures of my bedroom doing, I am going to be submitting a drawn animatic for the lastminute.com video and a recorded, motion tracked, white balanced etc etc video with temporary animations for my Metro character for the Metro brief, along with 3 posters – along with moodboard for both and all the other malarky. The point being that for LM.com, if I was to film this project in future, the clips of the animatic are exactly how I want the video shot, cropped, trimmed etc too, which means once filmed, the clips can just simply be pieced together in minutes and exported. Sound, other than what needs to be recorded on set, will be done. The Metro brief is much the same.. But without the interaction. (I’ve had shockingly bad time planning with tis project.) Video will be fully recorded, edited, colour corrected etc and motion tracked, the only temporary parts are the animations as their not a 3D animated character and possibly the VO as I’m sure there is better elsewhere. The idea being that if the 3D ever was completed, it can easily be just put into the project, parented to my tracking data and voila, done! Also, when it comes to a final thing, I would get actors in to ‘interact’ with the 3D stuff. Obviously, if this was a working prototype, it would be  real interactions and reactions.

Just so I can refresh my own mind.. My plan is as such. As of Monday (yesterday) I would have filmed, captured my footage and got all the motion tracking done. On Tuesday, I will draw up the characters poses for the simple animations and piece them together with my footage and have them all masked, placed and animated. (Along with the posters) Wednesday I would be compiling my mood boards and having a look over the WHOLE project to see if I have missed anything, screwed up or just need a slight tinker about with things. I will also be, possibly at home in the evening, making the VO for the Metro character. Again, this will be me in place of whoever does the VO if the final animation is made. Then, Thursday morning (more than likely a continuation of Wednesday evening for me..) I will export all my blog posts to .PDF files and burn everything to disk. Then head into college and submit. That’s the plan

So far, Monday went as planned, although the motion tracking has kind of extended onto now as I have been asleep half the day. I am essentially on about 1pm in normal persons time at time of writing, and that’s not good beings it is 7am. After Effects, for some unknown reason is being a bit off with me tonight and tracking two points on a 10 second piece of footage took around 30 minutes to do! I’ve never seen it go so slow, also not showing me a live preview of what it’s tracking, so I had to sit back and wait blindly in a way for it to do it’s magic. Several attempts fell flat as a car drove past my tracking points and threw it off. After a lot of analysing I found what seemed to be the best possible track points and thankfully they worked fine! No random veering of the points or being distracted by traffic. Once that was done, I put a temporary place marker in to see how well my tracking was and was pretty good. Not as perfect as Hollywood, but acceptable for me. (And I’m a perfectionist!) I then realised that to embed my own content onto the poster board I would have to make them blend. Just simply plonking the animation on top of the footage and messing about with feathering, position and other things just wouldn’t cut it. It definitely wasn’t as easy as my test footage was with the bus stop and the Toy Story 3 trailer was! So, I thought it be best if I took a snapshot of the board and then edited the area in Photoshop and put the content on top of that. So to try and explain that, instead of just dropping a video on top of another video (which I hoped would work) I cut out an area of the video and painted over it using the colours and textures of the footage which sits over the video and has a blend on the edges to really have it set into the scene. The final results worked rather well if I am honest… See for yourself.

Being’s my animation is made up of still images, to have 100% control over the timing of the individual images, I left them as individual layers all parented to the motion tracking data. The problem with them being individual clips, and indeed layers, masking each one for passing cars is very long winded to do it for all clips involved, so my idea is to render this out as a 100% export from AE, then re-import it and place it over the working area then mask the video out. This way I have all my content, all it needs is masking and removing in comparison to the plain video underneath. AE has just binged to say the render is done, so I shall nip off to do just that now!

The problem with this is that this is just one clip. I have several shots of which I need to do all this for. Not to mention then record the VO for, colour correct and other tweaks before finally piecing it together in Final Cut ready for showing. The rate this is going, I could either be very screwed or plain lucky.

This may also be the last blog I write for the DMD brief baring the Evaluation, so if you are an internet user who has kept up with these posts, thank you. If not, what am I saying?!