Sea project Finished

Finally Completed

Production Report

My task for the sea project was to take care of the Background design, the 3d Animations, the music design, and finally the post production. The project required constant collaboration between me and my team mates, frequent meeting to discuss Ideas that can be developed and a lot of research for the actual design and animation.

When we were given the audio file with the man’s voice, the first step was to discuss the format of the animation. Since the main story of the audio file is all about an incident, it was decided that an interview format would best suit our needs. From then on, we began to research animations that were done in the same format. That way we could better understand the mechanism of those types of videos. I stumbled upon the animated documentary “Waltz with Bashir”. At first it seemed like this movie had everything we needed to complete our animation. The subtle colors and tones, mixed with a nice soundtrack, helped this documentary to deliver its story in a unique way. Also, the mixture of 2d and 3d seemed like an amazing, and yet a very challenging Idea.

Next, we each made a storyboard, from which the initial story was starting to develop. We decided to divide the animation into three parts - the first and last being the interview, and the middle being the man’s memory. A problem concerning the middle part was the style of the animation. Since we wanted to present it as a memory, we considered a cartoony look. At the time it seemed to work.

For the first part of the animation, I had to build the environment in 3d. I started by researching different house designs, that were build in almost empty areas. When I found a suitable look, I recreated it as a 3d model. This is the final look:

Afterwards, I thought about the environment. Since the man had a traumatic experience, it seemed logical to place the house in an almoust empty area. At first I tried to make a desert like scenery. I achieved the effect by using a plane in maya, which was shaded. The I added a bump map and a displacement map. After a lot of tweeking the desert started to look quite nicely. In the sound file it is mentioned, that the incident occurred in “Lanzarote”, so I discussed with my team the idea, that the house can be placed on the outskirts of that town. We all agreed on that, so I made a sign saying “Welcome to Lanzarote” and a little road next to it. Further on, in the developing stages of the project, It was decided that the main character should die in the final scene, ironically after saying “ I am lucky to be alive”. We figured out that a good way to do this would be if a crane hits him. I started working on the idea. I placed a crane behind the house and a little construction building next to it. That way in the first scene It seemed like there was a construction going on, but at the end something malfunctiones, and a giant ball(attached to the crane) hits the house. Finally these scenes were rendered with mental ray. For lighting I used the maya sun and sky option. This created the desired color we were looking for.

The second part of the video was very tricky to handle. First it was going to be made more cartoonish in a sence, but we did want a nice transition between the interview and the memory. So there had to be a an element of realism. Since the characters were going to be 2d animated, I decided to make the sea look more realistic. At first the idea was to make a normal ocean in maya. Because we had to have violent sea scenes. I experimented with different options like wind speed and velocity. After many tests, the idea did not seem very good. First of all, the motion of the ocean in maya cannot be controlled perfectly. It generates random waves. This would make the task of my team mates immpossible, since they had to animate the characters to the sea. I decided to use maya’s ocean but it was not going to be animated violently. Infact it almost stayed flat. It generated tiny waves and ripples that looked perfect at that time. The biggest challenge that I faced were the waves. I had no clue how to make 3d waves. After a long research I stumbled upon “Surf’s up” – another animated documentary. In their production report, they described how, by using rigs, they could animate almost photorealistic waves. So I started watching tutorials on creating rigs and after a long time, I was able to produce my first rig:

Basicaly, it started from a cv curve in maya. Then I added clusters to all the vertex points. After which I created a small wheel. This was the control for the curve. With the set driven key command, I was able to arange a function, which made the vertex points change there position acording to the rotation of the wheel. After every command was made, I duplicated the curves and lofted them. This created the wave's surface. Although the result was nice, the rig had a large amount of problems associated with it.  Some of them involved the surface collapsing when different parts of the wave were bent. The problem was the poligon surface so I changed it to NURBS and the problem was solved. After a lot of modifications the rig was finally ready. Thise are some renders from the final rig:

After everything was animated and rendered, I used after effects as a tool to aid me in the post production. For the  interview scenes I added a camera effect. This helped to present the scenes better. There was also a lens flare, which boosted the brightness of the sun and created a more idealistic atmosphere. For the transition between the interview and the memory I used the sun’s brightness. I increased it so much that it actually engulfed the whole scene into white light. This worked as an emotional effect as well.

For the sea scenes I had to stylize the waves in order to fit the texture with the already animated characters. I thinks this worked quite well, due to the fact that now the waves had a realistic motion and a cartoony texture. For the sky I used a simple gradient, which fit quite well with everything else. The scenes were the main character fell under the water were key. That is why I concentrated on making them look good. Essentially I added bubble effects, to enchance the idea that the character was under the water. Between the transition of those scenes I kept increasing the dark colors, so that it seemed that the character was going down with no way out. I also added an adjustment layer with a displacement map. This effect was powered by a turbolent noise. That and a lens flare on top, helped to increse the dept of the ocean and created an underwater displacement effect.

The colors of the scene were a transition between light and dark blue. The character was also tinted in those colors. These effects helped to present the scene as a traumatic experience.

During the development precess of the short film we decided to add a soundtrack to the animation. We couldn’t use a copyright piece, so we started to search for something that was royalty free and that would fit in. We couldn’t find anything, due to the fact that the there were a lot of scenes in the animation, which required different emotional presentation. That is why I decided to make the music. I downloaded a free trial of the software mixcraft. This allowed me to use virtual instruments. Since however I had no experience with creating music. I started to search for simple songs that I could recreate. After long hours of practice and going through insperation material. I was able to produce a simple piece which implemented the emotion required for our animation. The sound file with the voice was cut in three parts. This created the required silence needed for the key scenes.

Overall, this animation worked quite well in my opinion considering, the different styles and animation types that we used. My team did a really good job animating all the characters properly. This mixed very well with the sea waves, and the interview scenes.

All in all, this project was a very good experience for me and my team mates. It taught us how to work as a whole, make critical decisions and manage our time.