5DM034, 5AD008: research and development: Shaun Tan

On the 18th March's 3D Production session, we were shown an animation short called 'The Lost Thing' created by Shaun Tan aswell as the documentary that shows how the creator developed and produced this short.
Here are the links to the documentary, the short film's website and the actual animation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9NCUydoJFk
http://www.thelostthing.com/
https://vimeo.com/63003515 

As the animation is an adaptation of his own written illustration novel, the 3D animation presented matches the aspects of his original concept art and ideas for the setting and characters. And what I reed in the reviews about the art style and then compared it to the art that the reviewers say, I do agree that the presentation looks primarily based on surrealism, particularly from artists max ernst and salvador dali as for the most part the characters are the ones that look and feel unrealistic.

From the story and title aspect, the visuals of how they present the characters clearly state that the humans are actually 'the lost thing' rather than the creatures. For one thing, they all have the same geometrical shape and personality, so in retrospect if you look like them, you'd be lost int he crowd. And from the personality traits, they are lost in idealism of not being curious to new things as they would rather lock it away and are lost in the old ways of thinking. All this makes them too obvious to be individuals. This is the same for the setting as it was bland and boring with no clear understanding of the city's way of life other than their ways of locking things away that seem out of place but brings something new to the world.
This was clearly shown from the main character's perspective of being curious as he was the one who found the main creature aswell as his hobby of collecting different type of coins. But by the end of the story when he finds the home the creature is looking for, he starts to forget and gets to start doing the same old routine as everyone else and not even help another creature who is out of place in this lost world.
For the creatures, their individual look and design flow shows they aren't lost as they would express their own personalities from their characters. This is the same for their utopia as the landmark makes the viewers have a sensation of happiness and it doesn't make the characters feel lost at all.

From the 3D module, this is a useful inspiration for modelling and how to tell a complex meaning and story from this approach. In the Essay module, the art style is useful information and for research in my topic of Experimental film making and what approach this short film took to make this Oscar winning animation short, particularly the artist or art movement Shaun tan generated his visual ideas and inspiration from.

5DM031: The benefits of live action production techniques

This post will show how film making in both animation and live action film making benefit from the use of different production techniques to bring out the full understanding of the subject matter and topic they want represent in their screening outcome.

VFX & SFX
From combining these two different processes, you get the best out of the theme and scenario being presented on scene and tell any story they like. This would be by making the set up and figures placed into shot feel real with the use of practical effects especially from the props to make creatures like dinosaurs come to life, weather conditions to make their location of environment look real and with the make up like presenting man sized creatures wearing masks that look real when placed next to other actors in a scene. For the visuals, they can benefit from creating amazing and surreal worlds, environments which would be backdrops, weather effects that sometimes special effects can't do and characters, particularly when they use motion capture. All this in visuals and also special effects can gain better presentation standards on screen from constraining them together with good colour palettes, sharpened representation and contrasting textures. This is how green screens come in play as they would help with putting special effects and live action actors with surreal environments and backdrops. Which enables to blend all the techniques together and all would feel I they are showing the same theme but visual shown through multiple ways. In a way, compositing both techniques can help with the type of production values they want to make to get noticed more in film making and would help with the type of budgets they are working from. This is through what they can and can't use but also finding ways to get the best out of the alternative solutions.

Two examples of how both techniques benefit the storytelling include the walking dead and Jurassic park

 Clear behind the scenes understanding of compositing, use of blue screen and green screen visual effects of removing the legs and prosthetic make up for the actor playing the Walker. This is the same for other parts of the walkers that need to disappear to explain the situation. These make clear examples of how compositing benefits the storytelling and the production values as people would never guess straight away how these sequences were made.

This example shows the use of visual effects to create a horde of walkers which in turn helps out with the production budget of the amount of actors they would need to use as they would want to use them for close up encounters with the main cast.

 

This image shows a clear use of both mediums from the prop helicopter to the green screen creating the extra visuals of the background and extra setups and props. This in turn creates the mood of this gloomy, apocalyptic scenario and helps progress what sort of story they telling given its visuals. 

 

In Jurassic Park, these images show that they've used big animatronics and prosthetics to represent some of the dinosaurs. Their reasons for doing this would to get a perception on the creatures and make them real feel other than using visual effects all the time. And when creating realistic dinosaurs in terms of performances, the suits, particularly the raptors would be made to fit the actors in.

These images show their breakdown use of visual effects, especially creating creatures movements that the production staff wouldn't be able to do with animatronics and prophetics. The second to last image shows what I feel is their compositing with sfx and vfx, particularly with the cgi version of the T-Rex with the especially effects rain.

5DM034: (Week 8, 25th march) motion capture

As part our 3D learning, our group had a little tutorial on Motion Capture. This was frrom being shown the software of Motive: Body and the suits aswell as how to place the markers needed to appear on screen. What I realize is that this approach to animation and film making is easy to learn including the how to film on the software, the tips to avoid glitches and avoiding over 15 of the camera positioned around the room; and how to transfer the 37 markers from the needed skeleton in the software properly from both in front of cameras and on the computer.


Below are some images of how the suit works whilst being transferred onto the motive body software screen.

5DM034: Week 7 (18th-25th march) parenting objects to rigs

For this weeks learning into maya, we started to look at how objects interact with the 3D rigs' action and movement. This in turn helps get a broader understanding of the scenario and story elements aswell as creating a secondary action to describe the personalities better.
 Here is a link to the video that we learned this technique from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkDNwFZgc-Y



As part of the learning and seeing how to do it from both the instruction of the lecturer and the YouTube Video, I started to try out constraining and parenting objects with 3D rigs.
As part of my understanding, I decided to use the tutorial's movement as reference as this process is a practice run if I would use it for my final showreel.
Below is my rough, first try at this technique and in my opinion, this process is easy to do when you get use to the main controls of how this method works.