Edwin Nicholson's Year 3 Animation Blog

  A VFX/Editor Commentary

 Scene 3.33, 3.34, 3.35 and 4.11 originally took place in the restaurant set. In older designs the camera had been set up so he was going to swim in the middle of the set. Original 4.11 Camera Shot Original 3.34 Camera Shot in an old version of the restaurant. After review Max decided we needed a new set, an open set where it was just the water and Pavo. This was a relief as this made camera placement a lot easier. The part that took the longest in this scene was the addition of a lighthouse and getting the light to work. I had to make a beam of light going round the exterior of the lighthouse because the glass in the lighthouse wasn't making the light go through it. Also the camera in 3.34 followed the path of the waves so I had to be careful of making the audience motion sickness,  The Wave also was a difficult process. What I did was got a plane, made it thick and curved the shape at one of the corners of the plane. Getting that right took a while. Making the curve correct ...

 In the original script, Every time a anxiety event occurred AKA Water event, their would be clouds to indicate an oncoming storm. In scene 1, this was achieved, along with some thicker Volumetric lighting and some colour changes. A moving cloud was added to the scene. In blender this took a bit to get right as it would cause some small visual issues. One thing I learned id clouds in an indoor environment are kind of tricky to pull of as clouds in a 3d software require lighting to make it more look like clouds. Without the lighting the clouds look more like smoke. On other scene that had clouds was the Void scene which I created in replacement for some awkward camera angles in the restaurant. This was fairly easy to do because the set is technically outside. Sadly the rest of the clouds were removed due to time constraints. I had come up with a potential solution to he clouds, which was to make them in After Effects but this never came to effect.

One of the many jobs I participated in was the official recording sessions in the Audio Booth.  Their was three sessions in total when it came to recording in the studio. The first recordings were Bettys ADR, which is where these photos came from. In this session we established the language of the characters. The language was similar to that of Simlish from the game Sims. The language was gibberished, we tried making every word end quickly instead of ending with an exaggerated vowel sound. Example of Simlish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c379Giun-Co On the first session we also had James in to help us to remind how we use the Studio and also as Zara's booth assistant, helping her project Bettys voice.  The Second session was doing Pavos' ADR and the Waiters, which I voiced. Pavos voice was just my normal voice but for the waiters voice I would hold my nose to make myself sound more naisily. I thought this would work as the waiters main feature was his big nose. Voice acting...

  Editor/Compositing: This job was the one I was looking forward to being and HOD but sadly, in evaluation I was not as involved as I hoped to be. As expected Max was in charge of the final decisions made with cuts and timing. During Pre production I only had proper discussions about the edit with during a pressured time where that Animatic was not completed within 4 weeks. The pipeline of the project was slowly being pushed back more and more, making it difficult to see if we could get out of pre production stage.  Once I got to sit down with Max, me and him spend two consecutive days working on it we had discussions back and fourth about it.  We managed to get it done and make people happy enough to send it to production stage. This was the only time where I truly felt like a Head of Department. I'm disappointed that I was not involved before that point because I think I could of helped. The rest of my Editing career ended up mostly in compositing. I didn't like the fac...

https://www.3dflow.net/3df-zephyr-photogrammetry-software/ Creating the Photogrammetry Fish was a fun process Using 3DF zephyr, I uploaded 50 photos of the three sets of photos Me Zara and Ian took. The first part of the process was to upload the 'cameras' to the application, this will produce the look above, this shows basic mesh points (Sparse point cloud). Then what we do is we make the Sparse point cloud denser using dense point cloud generation, this gives us more points and thus more detail to work with.   After this step we now start with mesh generation. This is not the final mesh but this will now start 'connecting the dots'  Then we proceed to the final stage, Producing a detailed mesh generation, This will give us our final look of the object scanned. The scans above are what Zara's photos produced. Which turned out to be the best scan as her photos had more details and better colour. because the plate was a reflective surface the mesh didn't smoothen...

To start off the Photogrammetry journey, we needed a cooked fish. Me and Zeta went to Pak'n'Save and bought a small but wide looking fish. it was funny when I had to reference the fish from the Storyboard as we designed it as a fish sitting on its belly, which is not how real fish operate. Anyway the day after we bought it Zeta cooked it up with some herbs and placed some lemons on it to make it more appealing. I only had a little taste of the fish and I though it tasted really nice. But sadly this fish was not for eating. We bough the fish into course and I grabbed Zara, Bean and Ian. We took the fish to the Photography Studio downstairs of downtown campus. Me, Ian, and Zara both grabbed three different camera devices (My phone, Ian's phone and Zara's Camera) and started to take around 50 photos each of the fish. This process took around three hours. 3 hours is a long time for a fish to be in a room. The smell was awful. But because the four of us never left the room t...

For Surrealism, Max wanted in the film 'Gross Ups' of Pavos face. But not in a normal Medium. Max wanted something completely of of the ordinary. I came up with this. Max reference to this surreal look comes from the film Mindgame where at some stages of the film, a characters very human face is modeled to a 3d character: When It came to me designing Bradley to Pavo, I originally took a more Caricature approach first. The one thing I needed to have was, Emotion and a Big Nose. Also I needed to work around Bradleys Moustache because Pavo did not have a moustache and the fact that Bradley had not worn a dress shirt to the photoshoot Max and Zara set up. Original Version 1, Normal Eyes Version 2, Cartoon Eyes This Version was Good but it was almost too jarring to look at. So I started to work on a Pavo with a more similar style to Mindgame, However this version was not finished as the style was to make Pavo keep some of Bradley's features. Unfinished prototype The Versions aft...

Writer : My role as a writer was brief but I did get some insight on how to work as a writer as a team. In my opinion discussing a story with multiple writers was quite fun. Being in a room with a group of creative people, bouncing ideas off of each other makes you feel very involved.  My time as a writer started from the conception of Ugly Fish Dinner to the Second or third version of the script. A good two to three weeks of work where me Max, Vinnie, Zara and Bean would go to the Hive and sit down for a good many hours. I have had experience in writing from my studies at school in English where we learned about character Arcs and Plot Arcs, So I wanted to implement a version of this to understand how Pavos Character Arc works, and to see if it fitted a good arc. So I did a few graphs on the Hive white board and on Microsoft Excel. In my earlier blogs you can see evidence of these. Here is the very first one for reference: During this time in writing I did find myself trying to ex...

3D Camera Man/Renderer : Originally I had only planned to be a helping hand in the 3D camera job. As time went on in the project Me and Ian became the main two 3D Camera people as two of the original 3D team members tasked to that Job dropped off. Ian had Scene 1 and 2 and I had Scene 3 and 4. To be successful in the 3D camera field I had to makes sure that I labeled my shots correctly, Referenced the Storyboard PDF at all times and if a shot had movement, I had to make sure that I rendered the right amount of keyframes. Originally I had intended to use The Render Farm (Deadline Monitor) to render Blender shots, which for a time did work. I could use the power of multiple computers to render one shot. However during the renders of multiple frames for one shot I noticed a little problem with weird lighting artifacts. I'm not sure if it was a graphics card error or a render farm error but I decided because Eevee renders are not very resource intensive that I would render shot on one ...

At the beginning of camera set up, these screenshots were given to the 2D animators so that they could animate over top of them. These images have the stunt doubles for character location reference. These are in no particular order: