Ember Process 4

So yes, this here is the tree that went by the name "TwistyTree" throughout the filmmaking process.  Until that one fateful moment where my friend Jean-Samuel Roux decided it needed another name.  He really kept pushing for it, so I've just given in.  So there you have it: The "Jean-Samuel-Roux" tree.

The Jean-Samuel Roux tree was the one tree that I had the most fun with and spent the most time on.  It is based of the "Knotwilg".  A tree that you see a lot in The Netherlands.  Originally, there were supposed to be two separate trees, but then when I was researching, I stumbled upon this image which inspired me to do something very different  Drawing the whole thing out was great fun, since I loved putting all those little swirls, patterns and wooden textures on it.  Making it all appear balanced was tricky though.  I kept on having to get rid of details in places where I went overboard.  The Jean-Samuel Roux tree was also one of the last trees I painted, so I used the experience I gained from the other trees and applied it there.  A large problem I had with all the tree layers was that they would all enter the water in a straight, horizontal line, making them all appear flat (which they technically were).  The only solution I could really come up with was to have the trees exist out of many different layers that got smaller as they came forward in Z-space, which, of course, also helped with the multi-plane effect I wanted.  I went back-and-forth between Photoshop and After Effects for this one a whole lot.  So yeah, that's the Jean-Samuel Roux Tree.

Also, check out Jean-Samuel Roux's blog here!

One of the last trees to show up is an oak tree.  I mainly added that one because we had a giant one in our yard when I still lived in The Netherlands and I remembered it for having cool-looking leaves.  I never had to paint the top, but I had fun with the part of the trunk that did show up.  And of course... all those blades of grass :D

Then here is the last tree of the film.  I honestly don't really know what type of tree this is.  I just went with the same visual style of the other trees.  I was mainly interested in that circular shape, so my main focus was on getting that to work with the oak tree in the background.

The lilies, or so called "Gele Plomp lelies", are the things the salamander uses to move over the water.  Here they are as seen from above.  I wanted to make many more not-as-detailed lilies to add in the background, but time ran out.  These took quite a bit longer than I anticipated, but oh well.

Here are some of the non-tree objects in the film.  Well, technically those are tree roots.  The flowers that the dragonfly stands on are "Gele Plomp" flowers that have not yet fully bloomed.  The lantern-sticks are... made up.

Lanterns from scene nine.  The lanterns in the film are actually based of a flower called... "The Lantern Flower".  Yup, they're real.  I painted these particular ones in a super high resolution, since they each would appear on-screen really large for a split-second while the camera trucked-out.  Of course, that only ended up being for about a single frame with ginormous blurs on them, so in the end it didn't even matter.  Lesson learned, but at least I get to upload them here in high resolution, so there's that (Still not even half as big as they really are :P).

A close-up of the Jean-Samuel Roux tree, painted for scene seven.  I applied a small blur to them for the final film though, so here's a slightly more detailed view.

Right, so for the following scene I actually spent a long time painting all these little thingamajigs for in the water.  It was so much fun, and I was so excited to apply these slight wavy filters in After Effects that I had planned for weeks and to make them all move in a direction to make the water really 3-dimensional and cool-looking!  So...

It was way too distracting.  Really, it was quite ridiculous how attention-grabbing those things were.  And since they were in no way the point and focus of the scene, I had to tone down the movement and the opacity of those underwater-particles a lot while also blurring them so they wouldn't attract to much attention.  Another lesson learned.

And finally, here are a whole bunch of remaining trees.  Some are only visible for a split second, while some are partially covered by other things.  That seems to be a thing that comes with multi-planing.  But still, I had a lot of fun creating all these trees, because, well... I just really like drawing trees!

Previous Ember posts can be found here:

Ember Process 3

Ember Process 2

Ember Process 1

Ember

Ember Process 3

This post and the next will feature the trees and background elements that I painted for Ember.  I was super excited to start designing and painting the trees, and had to keep myself from going overboard on the storyboards.  I did the design-and-line work for all of the backgrounds between October and December 2014.  I spent that following Christmas break doing a large part of the painting.

 The first tree is the main tree that the salamander starts on.  This was actually one of the last trees I painted, which is what I planned on doing.  I did the other backgrounds as "warm-up", as I wanted this particular tree to stand out quite a bit, along with the originally called "TwistyTree" which is in the background for the majority of the rest of the film (that particular tree has since then been renamed, however, but more on that later).

The main tree also got a special lighting treatment that appeared after the first lantern was lit.  I planned on having "special lighting treatments" all over the place when a new lantern was lit, but there simply wasn't time for that.  Still, here's the main tree with its highlights:

The original stage I used for the storyboards looked like this.  I had to continually alter it for the different horizon line levels I had planned for in the different scenes.  And yes, the first lantern was originally going to be on a stick.  Also, the salamander and dragonfly were going to be walking on rocks in the water.  However, the environment was going to be based on elements from a Dutch landscape, and large rocks aren't really a part of that.  Those rocks instead became lilies and tree-roots.

This is what the WIP line version of the main background looked like.  The trees on the left were done for the end credits. I had very particular shapes that I wanted the the trees to create through multi-planing, so this is more or less how I went about planning that.

The grass at the beginning of the film was also tricky to put together.  Not so much in creating it, but more so in properly planning and compositing it.  I split them up in ten different levels.  There was a lot of back and forth between After Effects and Photoshop for pretty much all the background elements, but the grass required the most tweaking.  Actually, no, the TwistyTree required even more.  Oh well.

I later separated all those blades of grass, plants, and cattails so that I could use them as fore- and background elements in other places.  I created a little library of them all.  This is said library:

And here are three background elements.  I painted all those blades of grass in the film manually.  I was too stubborn to turn them into brushes or copy and paste sections of them.  Plus, I liked the way it looked :D

That's all for now.  Part two should be up not too long from now.

Previous Ember posts can be found here:
Ember Process 2
Ember Process 1
Ember

Ember Process 2

I knew very early on that I wanted to create a large multiplane environment in which I could use multiple camera angles.  I looked a lot at Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends to see how the levels were put together.  I would literally enter a level, find a particular area with water and move left, right, up and down on the spot for some hours.  Man, they really are gorgeous games.  Anyway, I discovered they created some sort of horizontal water-plane that had vertical planes with artwork that intersected it.  That is what I wanted to do for Ember.

It sounded simple enough, but actually executing it was very, very difficult.  Anyway, here is the first After Effects test that I did in August 2014, where I was discovering camera settings like "Depth of Field".  It's all fun and games when working with three small layers like here, but when there are 200+ levels of high resolution artwork to be processed, After Effects gets a little grumpy.

People kept on mentioning that I needed to add reflections.  I kept looking around on the world wide web to see if there was a way to make the water plane reflective.  Alas, I just couldn't find a way.  I ended up doing exactly what I was trying to avoid: duplicating all those layers so that I could flip them upside down under the water level.  After Effects will keep up.  Right?

Nope.  I ran into a LOT of technical problems.  One thing that I just couldn't solve was the water level randomly popping up and down during camera movements and depth of field changes, resulting in the reflections partially showing up above the water levels:

In the end, I decided to just render the final credits without the reflections.  Partially through that render I decided to export the After Effects file to try it one more time on another computer and... it... worked?!  I don't know how, but I immediately cancelled the first render and started rendering the credits with the reflections this time.  Rendering those credits in HD took two full days on nine computers.  Yup...

So now onto some dragonfly stuff.  I wasn't quite sure how I was going to tackle the four wings.  Animating them by hand would have been fun, but I really wanted to create a particular blurry look for them when they were in flight.  Early on, I tried creating a basic 3D-wing rig in Toon Boom.  Blurs were not being helpful at first, but after a lot of tweaking, I was able to get the desired effect.

The dragonfly has four wings, but whenever it flies, each wing multiplies by three for a total of twelve wings in every flight frame.  All of the wings have different blurs applied to them and all together they were able to get the look I was after.  The inner tips of the wings all come together at one point, which became the point of attachment on the dragonfly.

And to end this post, here's quick 1.5 hour animation test done to see if the whole idea would work.  Thankfully, it did :)

Previous Ember posts can be found here:

Ember Process 1

Ember

Third Year Film

This is a big post.

First, the film:

So, there was a looot of time put into this.  I was one of the production managers on this project, which means it got pretty hectic at times.  A lot of the work I did over the two semesters during my third year can be seen below.

Here's a beat board.

Patricia did the other three :)

Next up: storyboards!  I did a lot of these in the first semester.  We divided our entire group in three smaller groups: character design, layout, and storyboarding.  So as you may have guessed, I was part of the storyboarding group.  Many late hours were spent on this, but it was fun and helpful to collaborate and solve story-problems with a group.  Some of the stuff here was cut, as we simply had too much going on at some point.

Some colour keys here.  We didn't end up using these, but they were fun to do.  And good practise too!

Here are some of the rough character designs I worked on beside working on the storyboards in first semester.

An expression sheet I did for Edgar.  This was at the end of first semester and we were all super busy.  I did these all at some late hour.  In pen, haha (except one!)

Speaking of that end-of-first-semester rush, we had an animation journal to write for our animation and stop motion classes.  We also had to draw something for each of the ten topics we were discussing.  I used our film characters for this.  They were all drawn super fast and I must have been pretty sleep deprived at that point.  It's funny to look back at them now though, so I compiled them all here:

Backgrounds I did for the film.  I sadly didn't get to paint any of them, but I did put in the blocks of tone that could then later be coloured.  I only did the workbook of the third one here, so that one is still rough with some... uhm... discarded storyboard drawings in there :P

And yes, I animated too!  I wish I had some more time on some of the scenes, but there were other things that had to get done too.  I didn't do the clean-up for most of my scenes, so I worked on them up until the tie-down stage, which you can see here.  It was a pretty quiet video, so I added some music from the film to it :)

And as a little bonus, I tried doing a whole bunch of "Scary Edgar" drawings, for when Edgar loses his mind towards the end of the film and sneaks up on Bob.  Everyone kept saying I drew him too cute, so we didn't end up using these.  They were interestingly fun to do though, haha!

And that is all (I could find)!  I worked on almost all of the sound and music in the film too, which was quite a bit of work as well.  I learned a lot from it though, so that's great.

I have some zoo trip animal drawings I could upload, but I'll save that for another post.

"Tiger Forever"

So yeah, this is the post I had originally planned to write at the end of last semester.  Then sometime during the winter break.  Then sometime in January.  And now it's the end of February and I'm finally ready to post my action analysis!  I learned so much from this though, and that is awesome!  Here is the final thing:

Yup, an upshot of a striped tiger sidestepping: no big deal (extreme sarcasm).  I've never done something this hard and I had a lot of difficulty drawing the tiger from this angle.  Part of the reason I went with a tiger was because I wanted to force myself to learn more about feline anatomy, which worked out well.  I had quite a bit of group-film stuff to work on, so the action analysis became kind of a side-project during the last two months.  Whenever I had some free time to work on it I would slowly progress this thing, hence my friends started naming this "Tiger Forever".  Anyway, I have a lot of people to thank for this assignment.  People helped me by explaining how rice paddies work, how to get more appealing poses, how a cat would act, what colours to use, etc. etc.  The list goes on and on.

I did a lot of little character development drawings at the beginning of semester 5, so I put a bunch of them together here:

Then here is the workbook for the layout.  I made quite a few changes in the end, but it was a start.

Concept drawings for the final look of the whole thing:

Then the rough layout.  This one changed quite a bit before ending up with the final version.

The animation itself took the longest.

Originally the tiger was going to be a white tiger, but since the whole thing ended up being an upshot, I figured it was better to show the tiger's belly as a separate colour for readability.  And then suddenly the tiger became orange!  It actually worked nicely with the colour scheme of the background, the final painting of which is here:

I ended up breaking this down into about 50+ levels, meaning After Effects was not too happy with me.  Neither was Photoshop, actually...  Oh well :)