[Personal] - Final Scene: Introduction

Here's a few screenshots of the opening animation.


It opens with the camera overlooking the "VISIT ESSEX" grass on the grass floor. In order to create this effect I had to create a single blade of grass polygon and then use the scatter tool to create seveal thousand copies. As it can be seen from the screenshot, I ended up with well over 100,000 polygons.


2 lawn mowers the drive over the text. I created 2 planes which were hidden underneath the grass floor and were animated to rise when the lawn mower drove over it. This created the effect of the grass being cut.



The camera then zooms in on the text and then moves forwards along the grass floor. I had to do this in order to create an effective transition into the next scene, rather than just having a simple cut. I also had to make one of the lawn mowers invisible to avoid it being seen by the camera when it zooms along the floor.



The scene then ends with the camera a couple of inches away from the characters.

[Personal] - Music

Once we had completed our final animation, we had to decide whether we wanted to use sound effects, music or both.

We all had mixed opinions but in the end we decided to go with music, as we felt that music plays a huge part and can really make or break anything. It could bring so much more emotion to a scene than sound effects alone could ever do. Having both music and sound effects would probably end up causing the scene to be too cluttered with sound, especially over the lawn mower facing and air show scenes as they would require continous engine sounds.

The big dilemma was coming up with a suitable peiece of mucic which would not only suit all four of our scenes, but also give the right impression to tourists considering to visit Essex.In the end, I came up with the idea of using the theme song from the Pixar film "Up" which can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoEMx_-ccR0

I believed that this music fitted our animation perfectly for a few reasons. The main one being that I have said since the beginning that we were all aiming for a Pixar-like style to our animation. So what better piece of music would fit our scene other than one from a Pixar film itself? It was this theme from this particular film because I just felt that it had the same sense of quirckiness that our scenes had.

We were quite lucky with the timing too, as the music stays quircky throughout the first three scsnes and then becomes dramatic towards the end over the airshow scene, before slowly calming down towards the climax of the animation.

Of course, there is the issue of the music being copyrighted to Pixar and Disney. So if our animtion does get picked to advertise our client's webiste, unfortunately either they would have to pay royalties, or find a replacement song...

[Group] - No Interactive Flash

At the start of this project, we had intended to not only create an animation, but also an interactive flash. The idea being that instead of the user having to sit though the entire animtion, they could simply decide which event they wished to learn about and only watch that section of the animation.

Due to time constraints, a little lack of cooperation and some bad luck, we were unfortunately unable to do this. We all underestimated the amount of time that it would take to render our animations. We were rendering right up until a few days before we had to present our final animation to our client, along with all of the other groups. So finding the time to render took forever.

The week before the animation, we did discuss the possibility of creating the template to the flash file and simply slotting in a lower resolution version of each of our sections later once our HD renders had completed. However, we could not come to an agreement. So we had to wait until we had finished our final renders before even considering to create the flash. However, due to one of our members being ill on the final week, we decided to forget about it and focus purely on the final animation.

It would have been nice to be able to submit both a continuous and interactive Essex tourism animation, but in the end, it all seemed to be too much for us.

[Group ] - Group Meeting 07/12/10

Today we managed to stick our 4 sections together into one complete animation, and add effects to it in Premiere Pro. All of the editing work was done by Dan.

Unfortunately, due to Simon being ill, we were unable to complete the airshow scene the way in which it had been intended as he was not there to tell us how he wanted his parts to fit together. The rest of us had to arrange them ourselves.

As well as this, my lawn mower scene had a slight problem. Some of the audience members in the backround would ramdomly have some of the verticies extend to the top of the screen for a few frames. Due to the fact that we completed the final animation so late in the day and that at the time of writing, we have to present this to our client tomorrow, we just didnt have the time to fix it. Luckily, its not that noticable.

Despite these small problems, our final animation has turned out much better than any of us expected. We are all very pleased with the result and hope that our client will be too.

[Personal] - HD Rendering Problem

It was recommended to render our final animation in HD, however I came across an annoying problem when I did. Every few frames, the heads of the audience group underneath the left tent randomly extends to the top of the scene. I have no idea why it does this, as when I render the animation in a lower quality, the heads dont extend.

It could simply be because in a lower quality, the extended heads are just not visible. However , the lower quality renders were only in a slightly lower quality compared to the HD render, so you would think that they would still be visible. I believe that it could be to do with the method of rendering.

As rendering in HD takes such a long time, I had to use another method rather than simply rendering the whole animation on one computer. I had to do a net render, where by I used several computers at once to render each frame individually as a bitmap. This method dramatically reduced the rendering time. I believe that as it rendered it as bitmaps rather than an avi file, it showed these stray extended pixels. This is why they did not show up on my lower quality renders as they were rendered as an avi file.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, we have to present out animation to our client tomorrow morning. I just dont have the time to re-render the entire scene, so they will have to annoyingly stay. Luckily, they are not that noticable, so hopefully they wont draw the attanetion away from the lawn mower racing.

[Group] - Group Meeting 03/12/10

Today, all four of us worked on rendering our animations. They all took much longer to render than expected, and as a result, we were unable to complete the rendering by the end of the meeting.

We have to present our final animation on Wednesday, so we have agreed to finish the rendering over the weekend, meet up on Monday and finish everything there and then.

[Personal] - Linking the Opening and Main Scene Together

When I first came up with the storyboard, I didnt really come up with an effective transition between the opening scene and the main race scene. However, messing around with the camera in the main scene gave me the inspiration that I needed to come up with such a way.

I decided that once the lawn mowers had driven over the words, the camera should swoop downwards and then quickly pan forwards. I would then start off the main scene with the camera in the same position while panning forwards and eventually focusing up to reveal the race.

I did have a few problems with this. The first one being that in the opening scene, one of the lawn mowers were in the way of the camera panning forwards. So once it had moved off screen, I had to make it invisible so that the camera would not see it.

The hardest part was getting the two scenes to link perfectly. I had to make sure that the camera ended in the openeing scene in the same position as it started in the main scene. It took a few tries but I think that I eventually got there. There is a little jump when the 2 scenes are linked together, but nothing majorly obvious.

The lighting casued a little bit of trouble too. Getting the same light effect in both scenes was hard, and I still dont think that I managed to pull it off. However, there is still time to perfect it.