Last week’s lesson was cancelled, so this week was our first class with Nigel for this term.
We went over how to develop potential topics, and how our thesis and proposal should be structured. Nigel mentioned that while it is more standard for the Thesis to be connected in someway to our FMP, it doesn’t need to be. This does feel reassuring to me, as I often get very uninspired and demotivated when I am focusing on one topic or project for long periods.
I began considering areas of research I am interested in. While I am still unsure what would make a good research topic, my current interests are:
Unique visual styles/techniques in digital media
Viewer immersion
Empathy towards fictional characters
The link between phycology and the way we interact with fictional stories
Socio-political themes in modern digital media (especially those that have conflicting themes against the production houses/streaming services they are featured by, such as anticapitalism themes in Apple TV show Severance for example)
I have also been considering potential artefacts to write about. I would want to choose those I have either enjoyed or had an interest in analysing, as to keep my focus while writing about. Some I have considered:
Andor (2022)
Arcane (2021)
Severance (2022)
Spider-Verse films (Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Across the Spider-Verse (2023))
This week we covered world building, including the tone of the world and story within it. When constructing a fictional world, it is important to consider things as its history, ecology, and geography to make the world as interesting and immersive for the viewer as possible. George also went over creating moodboards for our ideas to build a tone for the story and world setting.
This week’s assignment:
1. Moodboards: Create moodboards for our 3 ideas, using what we learnt this week.
2. Shot blocking: Start creating some basic compositions/shot blocking in Maya (using crane rig as our camera). Don’t need to be final/shots we keep in final, but should be enough to combine into a first previs draft that will then be reviewed and improved on over the term.
Week 1 Assignment work: 3 storyboards
What I struggled with: I have always had some difficulty visualising what ideas I have in my head in a way I’m satisfied with (or in a way that I actually feel mirrors what I had in my head), usually due to visual ideas that are difficult/not possible to execute for whatever reason. With Idea 1 in particular, the idea in my head felt more engaging and visually stimulating, but when I got it down on paper it didn’t feel as such, and I struggled to figure out what was missing between the idea I had in my head vs the storyboard I created. With Idea 2 and 3, this felt easier to do.
I did enjoy making the storyboard for the second idea. It was easy to pick out which shots didn’t really work for me to change or cut while I’m also applying the feedback from this week. However it was also easy to see which shots did work/worked more than others, and this was also motivating as I could imagine how I would create these shots in 3D and what experiments I could do to develop these shots.
3 Storyboards Feedback:
Idea 1:
Feedback from George:
Feels like this idea doesn’t have enough of a start to it. This could be helped if between scenes we see flashbacks that show how the mage ended up in his current situation.
Idea 2:
Feedback from George:
Would be good with this idea to think a lot about transitions between shots to add flare to the visuals
Idea 3:
Feedback from George:
Not much to say as this is a very basic and short idea, but it works well. Should be expanded on if it becomes the chosen idea.
Though I was unable to attend the class, I caught up with the class material and this week’s assignment via the class PDF and discussion with my peers.
Along with introducing us to the brief, this week covered mise-en-scene, with a focus on shot layout and different types of shots and camera angles. In the past, I have found it difficult to create dynamic shots and camera angles, so I would like to use this project as a chance to improve on these things.
For next week, we should draw out 3 different ideas for our final projects. I have two in mind so far that are fairly fleshed out, and one I’m unsure on.
Idea 1:
A wizard is being chased through a forest by a group of men with hunting dogs. The wizard reaches a clearing, and begins to cast a complex spell. An orb of light surrounds him as he works. The men and dogs reach him, but hesitate to attack, fearful of the wizard’s power. One man tries, but is thrown back the moment his weapon makes contact with the orb of light. The wizard smirks, raises his hands, and claps them together. Light explodes outwards from him, sending the men and dogs flying backwards. One of the men sits up, dazed, and looks over to where the wizard once stood. The wizard is gone, and in his place a wanted poster with the wizard’s face on it floats to the ground.
While I really like this idea, the visuals I have in mind would require either a lot of 3D or 2D FX work, and because I want to focus primarily on animation and exploring my personal visual style, I would want to collaborate with someone to do this idea who would be able to handle the FX side of things for me.
Idea 2:
A fake anime/tv show opening.
It’s difficult to write about this one, as the idea is more a collection of random shots that I want to try piecing together, instead of a typical narrative. This idea started in my head when I was debating if I would and should make a showreel for my final film. Speaking to other 3D animators (and VFX people in general) about their time studying, many of them said they regretted trying to make a full film as they weren’t able to focus on their specialism as much as they liked, and most of them only got two or three hero shots for their showreel from almost a year’s worth of work. A couple of them mentioned that they wish they had just made a showreel instead, hence my consideration of doing the same.
However, a big part of the reason I wanted to study at UAL was to explore and develop my personal artistic style, and to reconnect with my passion for the arts. I felt that making a showreel wouldn’t satisfy these goals. I was still considering the topic, and around this time I watched the anime Frieren. The second opening features many dynamic shots of the characters that I noticed would cover a lot of the types of shots someone should have in a 3D animation showreel. I decided at this point that I would explore the idea of making a fake anime/tv show opening, so that I could include a diverse collection of shots as seen in showreels, while still being able to experiment and develop the aesthetics and style. If I develop this idea, I would like to come up with a narrative for the fake anime/tv show, as this narrative will drive many aspects of the opening, especially how characters act and move.
Idea 3:
Fake zoo advertisement
I’m still unsure of what kind of story I want to tell with this idea, but I like that this idea would allow me to work with many different creature rigs and have a diverse collection of creature animation shots for my showreel.
I really enjoyed the animation assignments this semester. Even though I learnt most of the equivalent material while studying for a year on 2D Animation on my BA, I skipped over a lot of them when learning 3D animation because, at the time, I didn’t think I would need to relearn the fundamentals. Yet now I can look back at my animation work before coming to UAL and see where not having relearnt them held me back a lot. At the time, I might have had the knowledge from my time on 2D, but I wasn’t always applying it to my 3D work.
The feedback sessions were super helpful, both for getting feedback on my own work and seeing the work of my classmates.
I would like to do more of these exercises (such as the previously mentioned ball bounces with different weights), so I plan to do this in my own time as personal work.
Learning to use UE5 this semester with no prior experience was a huge challenge, but I have very much enjoyed the process once I was able to get over the hurdle of not knowing where to start. I’m excited by the possibilities of this software in my future practice, especially because I have previously struggled with other programs because of the lack of live visual feedback. I feel like using UE5 will allow me to focus more on animation, which is what I want to focus on most, as previously most of my project times were taken up with parts of the pipeline I found a lot easier and faster to do in UE5.
As shown in my Formative Presentation, the production process for me was as follows:
Visual research
Storyboarding
Animatic
Environment layout
Shot set up
3D Animating (Maya)
Texturing/creating materials
Lighting
Making custom LUTs
Rendering
Editing
I briefly mentioned it in my Formative Presentation, but if I had more time to work on this unit I would prioritise animation clean-up, adding more characters to the environment, and material creation. I did enjoy making materials in UE5 a lot, but I didn’t feel like my project idea gave me the time to fully delve into the process and possibilities. Early on in production, I really wanted to explore 2D line art materials, but I unfortunately wasn’t able to fit it into my schedule. As previously mentioned however, UE5 allows for easier editing of the different parts of the project in the future, so I will definitely be returning to this project as personal work to improve on existing parts and to add new assets.
The main bulk of my work during my extension for animation was applying the feedback I received from George to the individual assignments he gave us. I also splined and cleaned-up the animation on my body mechanics shot.
For submission, I added some materials to the assets and tweaked the settings of the viewfinder in Maya so I could still playblast the animations but have them look nicer for the submission showreel.
If I had more time, I would have liked to do additional animations for some of the assignments. For example, I initially wanted to animate different ball bounces, giving each ball different weights. I do still plan to do this in my own time, but it would have been nice to have these for George to review and potentially give feedback for.
I really liked the week by week assignment set up of George’s classes, as it was helpful for me to stay on top of the work when I was essentially being held accountable each week to have work ready for review. I can see why this might not work for other projects, but for animation it was great to both get feedback on my own work each week, and to also see other people’s work and learn from their process and feedback.
I first did blocking animation for all active shots with animated characters, and imported those to UE5.Then I went back, and did splining and clean-up on those shots. If I had more time, I would have liked to do more clean-up work. But I’m okay with how the animation looks, and due to how dynamic UE5 is I can, in the future, do the clean-up work I want to do and reimport to UE5 for rendering. I do like that I won’t need to worry about going through an entire pipeline just to re-render improved animation, which UE5 makes much more simple. It is one of the reasons I’m very glad I learnt UE5 from Serra this semester, as I could potentially use it for future projects both at UAL and personal works to save time on parts of the pipeline I’m not as interested in perusing and learning. For example, I don’t like compositing in Nuke personally, but I found the live view ability of UE5 made making those counterpart adjustments and applications easier and faster.
Materials:
As mentioned previously, I remade and applied the materials for all of the rigs I used. While this was a little annoying and time consuming to do, once done for each rig I didn’t have to worry about it again until it came to the final render, where I made some tweaks to some of the materials.
I also changed and made my own materials for the subway train asset to make it look like the London Central line, as I wanted the film to feel more like my own experience with public anxiety so the film looking more like it takes place in London made most sense to me. For the seats, I roughly imitated the pattern used on most London underground seats in Photoshop, which I then applied to the Albedo texture for the seat assets. I also replaced most of the metal and wood materials, as I feel these aren’t nearly as common on the London underground, where everything is mostly a white matt material with black frames. To finish, I made some Decals using my own graffiti tag designs.
For the secondary characters, after the mood/lighting change I wanted them to be as void of personality as possible. I wanted the visuals to be representative of my experiences of working on my own social anxiety about people staring at me in public. I’ve found it helpful to question why people would be staring at me when I’m not doing anything outwardly worthy of watching, or thinking of times I’ve seen someone doing something weird and I maybe only glanced over momentarily before continuing to be more preoccupied with myself and my own thoughts and actions. All of those actions entail me thinking about the other person’s/people’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences as opposed to seeing them as void of those aspects and only focused on me. So if I wanted to add a twist to such a narrative, it makes sense to me that the people staring at the main character should be void of depth. Going back to my visual research, James Fenner’s works depict people as mostly silhouettes which I felt would work well for my idea. I made a flat, black material in UE5 and applied it to the skin, hair, eyes, and facial hair of the secondary characters in the ‘red lighting’ level to be representative of the above themes.
I also added 2D eyes to overlay the secondary characters. I found these shots to be a little boring and too static, so I added a jitter to the 2D eyes to give these shots some life. I realised later this worked well because the jittery eyes reflect the panic and instability of the feeling of these people staring at the main character.
Lighting:
I mostly went in and changed the colours of the lighting on the subway train asset, more so for the red lighting after the mood change mid way through the film. I did find it a bit difficult to not have the lighting too red, and essentially feel flat, so I would like to go back into UE5 after the submission and experiment more with the lighting.
I also added one point light each in front of the two characters in shot 0200, as they were too shadowed and the black silhouetted skin wasn’t as clear when not contrasted with their lit clothes. I also added both these lights to the sequencer so that I could key their visibility in the scene, otherwise they were too bright in other shots and looked odd.
Rendering
Even though I initially set the UE5 levels up in a way that I could have the lighting change during shot 0100 in engine, I kept having issues executing this. Eventually, I decided instead to render both the red lighting and the normal lighting separately, and edit them together later. Once I had set up a duplicate sequencer for the red lighting level, this was pretty straight forward.
For the sequencers, I made sure that the visibility of shot specific lights, alembic caches, and the 2D eyes were keyed so that they would only be visible during their set shots.
Editing
I edited my film in DaVinci Resolve. Most of the work was creating a satisfying transition from the normal lighting to the red lighting. I experimented with different methods (fading in, a glitch effect transition, suddenly changing the moment the main character opens his eyes again), and settled on the red lighting flicking quickly every so often up to the moment where the main character first glances over to the secondary character in shot 0140.
I also added in the sound. Early on in the project development, I found the track ‘Slow Trap’ by Anton Vlasov which I still wanted to use. I did have to cut and edit the track to fit with the film, but I’m pretty happy with the end result.
This week we’ll be splining and cleaning up our Body Mechanics shot.
Body Mechanics Blocking feedback:
Feedback from George:
Arch back more in first few frames
Frame 14: Add in some asymmetry, make sure the silhouette is more readable. Give arms nicer arc
Frame 23: Hip placement feels weird, doesn’t really lift between here and the next frame, it just moves forward. Might be best to delete this pose entirely, or keep it until splined only to tighten graph curves before deleting keys on some of the controls later
Frame 29: Push the asymmetry, and make the silhouette readable
Frame 54: Add more scrunch to the pose, add anticipation before the pull up
Frame 63: More scrunch and curve to the back. Need to feel the effort of pulling himself up
Frame 70-76: Move elbow controllers. On 70, both should be pointing behind. On 76, screen left can be pointing more outwards. On 76 the screen left arm feels too straight and unreadable
Frame 84: The silhouette being unclear is a big thing here. Some unclarity is okay (eg it might be unavoidable to have screen right leg overlapping the screen right arm) but the rest should be as clear as possible
Frame 91: Try lifting the screen left arm. Not a necessity but it might help clear up the silhouette a bit
Frame 91-102: Have screen left arm more lifted in general, and more outwards/behind on frame 102
Next blog posts:
As mentioned in my previous Immersion blog post, I have an extension on the Animation Fundamentals unit and will be doing another blog post before the final submission post summing up what work I did between this week and submission.
As I mentioned in my last Immersion blog post, I decided to buy the M-rig pack from Ramon Arango, and to use a few in this project. They were quite expensive, but I really liked his Artemis and Apollo rigs so I found the price worth what I would be getting in return. I did unfortunately find a few issues with them (mostly issues with the clothes and how they look with various rig poses), but I have already seen Ramon mention on his Discord server that he will be working on any bugs and issues, and releasing updates in the future with fixes. The issues aren’t so big that I can’t use the rigs, so I’m happy with them for now.
Using one of the rigs, Minerva, I started blocking animation for shot 0080 and 0090. I also did the same changes to the base rig file as I did with the Apollo rig to prepare it for UE5 import (removing N-gons, renaming materials, hiding faces, applying materials to the faces and not just the object). I still need to remake the materials in UE5 for the alembic cache import to link to.
Because I have an extension on this brief, I asked Serra what to do about blog posts updates, and she (and Friendred separately) advised that I make one last blog post before the submission post summing up everything I did between this week and submission.
This week we’ll be blocking our body mechanics shot using our reference and planning from last week.
Body Mechanics Planning Feedback:
Reference collection:
Extra reference (from similar jump but new camera angle)
Pose sketches:
Animatic using poses (overlayed on Maya background set up):
Sphere animation (roughly matched to the head, hips, hands, and feet of the reference footage):
Feedback from George:
Some of the arcs feel slow, make them more punchy
Don’t forget to switch hands and feet between IK and FK depending on if they have made contact with the wall or not
Towards the end of the reference shot when the guy stands up and his hands lift off the wall, the screen right hand peels off nicely because of the angle. Make sure to include and push this in anim
