DVD Studio Pro & Conclusion

Once i had my work gathered up, the next thing to do was to create my DVD menu in DVD Studio Pro.

The software is quite easy to learn and get to grips with once you know the basics. Before i started anything though i did a rough plan of a flowchart in terms of how my menu was going to be formed and organized and how everything was going to be linked page by page. This gave me a solid foundation plan to fall back on if my menu' started getting messy or unlinked.

As you can see below, i started creating my menu. Because i didn't have much time, i decided to use the preset templates of the initial menu's. This was to save time primarily and really crack on with linking the pages as that was more of a longer process.

Most of the videos of my work had to be converted into MPEG's since DVD studio can't process most types of video format.

The menu is simplified and i created basic buttons to link my pages.

The DVD menu is complete and the work has been added to the pages. I did a little test run just to be sure everything was working fine and there was no missing link. Once i was satisfied i then burned it on a DVD.

This whole experiance of using DVD studio and creating the showreel was actually quite enjoyable in the end. There were a few problems like my laptop not being powerful enough and so at times when i was importing videos the software would slow down and it would take long to render. Learning DVD studio was pretty easy since i had some tutorials on it, there was a teacher named Alex who was teaching how to use DVD studio but for me i had the tutorial so it wasn't as nessecary as much. Overall the experiance was positive and i think if i had to improve or change anything then i would definately design my own pages of the menu's instead of using the preset template, since it's more rewarding and allows more freedom for creativity.

Work that is going into the showreel

Ok i have narrowed down my choices of work that will go into the showreel and here is a brief summary of the things to go in.

3D Animation
3D Character model: Willie Character from Industry Excercise 1
3D animated videos: Team group Sci Fi Environments, Number 2 Ident Animation, Rave Live 2 Ident Animation, Character Willie and Jelly Fish Animation.
Still images of 3D models: Occlusion rendered images of 3D Character Willie and Sci Fi environments .

Concept Work & Storyboard
Character Design: Character Willie Design and sketches.
Environments Concept: Sci Fi environments Concept by me for Team Alpha Project.
Storyboards: Live Action Compositing Storyboard and Rave Live Ident storyboards.

2D Animation
2D walk cycle.
Shoe animation.
Bouncing Ball with tail.

Live Action
Live Action Compositing film from first term work of 2nd year foundation animation.
A short film by me also produced during my spare time.

Life Drawings
Life drawings from the first year of the foundation degree.

My start on Showreel

For the Industry Excercise 3 assignment, we were given task to produce a showreel for the end of year foundation degree. The showreel will consist of all the work we have done through out our 2 years as well as incorporating work outside of this course.

I will go through all the work that i have as of now and pick out what i'm good at technically and also putting my best work up. These videos will hopefully showcase my strength and diversity in the kind of animation work i can produce.

Final Animation and Conclusion

The animation for the Rave Live 2 Ident is complete and i think it has turned out pretty solid.

Here is the rendered video below....

Conclusion

So the Ident animation is complete and its been a mixed experiance for me during this project. There were certain difficulties that i was faced with during the initial part of the ident in Maya, texturing and the lack of UV mapping of my models were one of those things. The texuring was competent but honestly not good enough. For instance the spaceship could have been textured better and made more realistic and the moon also could have had a higher resolution of texture. Secondly i felt as though the animation of the camera could have been a bit more smooth flowing. But in the end i feel as though the initial vision of this animation has been achieved from its early stage of the storyboard. I'm really happy with the models and the timing of the animation spaceship.

Working with Leonard and within a team was a positive experiance. I think our creative and collaborative ideas have really expanded our horizons in terms of how we can tell a story and whether it's technically possible to achieve what we want within the timeframe allocated. Brainstorming and storyboarding our ideas together was the most productive part of our team work. We also looked at tutorials and helped each other out technically in Maya, so overall it was a good working partnership. Our communication between both of us has also been really good since we met up regularly and gave each other feedback all the time. I think the only downside was that technically we could have spent more time together but that wasn't a major problem. So all in all it was a much better experiance this time round working in a team and it has given me confidence in future team work projects.

Working for Rave Live as our clients was a mixed experiance. I think the brief they have given us was fairly decent and what they asked us to do wasn't too much that we couldn't handle. But i felt as though at times there was no clarity to how we should export and present our Ident animation. There was a PDF file which was sent to us stating the information on how we should export but it was still confusing. In the end we had to go our other class mates who were doing this assignment to help us on this. Plus we had to hand in the work within 3 weeks so that didn't leave us any time to spare. But overall it was rewarding experiance since we managed to finish and hand in the work and also in the right format eventually. The people we are working for who we briefly met were nice people and i understand that they were busy at times so they couldn't help us at times, but again it wasn't a major problem.

In the end i learned a lot from this assignment and it was probably my best work so far this term, i know personally for me its the best i've produced so far and that is something i am quite pleased with.

Compositing

The rendered Tiff sequences were taken into After Effects to put together. For the spaceship sequence i did a bit of glow effect on the descending pod, giving the illusion that the raw speed is visible. I also found this background image of stars that i needed for my spacehip animation since the background was black. So i just overlayed the background image under the initial animation tiff sequence. The background star image was used from this website - http://www.crestock.com/blog/photography/13-fantastic-free-wallpaper-images-80.aspx

As soon as all the scenes were rendered again from After Effects, the whole scene was edited using Final Cut Pro. Since i had a little bit of time left, i decided to put music in the animation. Completely aware of copyrights i found this website http://freeplaymusic.com/ where you can buy music and is free to use on student work. So i bought a track of this site and used in my animation. I just quickly put it in because the animation is only a few seconds.

Rendering

The whole animation is complete and texturing is also done. After a few playblast test, i was pretty satisfied with the flow of animation and since i have limited time till the deadline it was really time to push forward and begin rendering. As before, the ident animation will be rendered in two scenes. The first is the flight of the spaceship dropping off the pod near the moon and the second is the landing of the pod on the moon. Those two scenes will be rendered seperately and put together using editing software final cut pro.

Since Ravensbourne have limited computers, the animation will be rendered on my Mac Laptop as Tiff sequence and put together using After Effects.

Animating

Once the modelling and texturing were done, all that was left was to start animating. The spaceship itself was placed on a motion path to allow smooth flowing animation to the gliding model. I then had to animate the pod detatching itself from the spaceship and descending downwards to the moon. I also put one camera to follow the whole animation since cutting will just take up time and this is an ident that is going to last 10 seconds. Once the camera was animated i decided to playbast the whole animation to see how it was paced and flowed.

This playblast looks like the finish product in terms of animation and i think i will probably just tweak a little later on.

Also when the pod lands on the moon, i am going to render that as seperate scene and then put it all together in final cut pro. The reason why this scene is done seperately is because when i tried to land the pod in the other animation scene, the texture on the moon became pixelated and the moon itself just became too big and i couldn't really see anything since the size of the moon was taking all the space in maya. So i decided to do the landing of the pod in a different scene and the just put all together as one scene.

In this playblast, the pod had already landed on the moon and the pod itself finally opens to reveal the Rave live 2 logo. I'm pretty happy with playblast of this scene and i wouldn't really change anything.

Texturing

The modelling phase of the ident animation is finished and now i've began texturing my models.

A glow effect was added at the back of the spaceship to give the illusion that its engine is burning at the back.

The pod had to be textured seperately since it couldn't be textured together. The model also had to be unwrapped using automatic mapping and then stitched together using a specific tool in Maya.

The logo itself was simply textured using blinn and applying black and yellow to the ident.

The moon had to UV mapped and afterwards was just simply covered over with the rocky texture to give the illusion as the moon's surface.

Modelling the Spaceship Ident animation

Once i finished the storyboard and drew my final concept of the spaceship, i then started immediately modelling the spaceship in maya. The whole spaceship was extruded from a simple cube and certain pieces were modelled seperately like the engine at the back and then parented later on. There were no problems or difficulties modelling the spaceship and my drawn concept was of course used as reference. The whole spaceship took 1 day to model.

The pod that detatches itself was modelled seperately and parented on to the spacehip later on. Again not difficult to model and was created from a simple cube that was just extruded and shaped into the pod.

Now the Rave Live 2 Ident was actually produced by Leonard. He had to follow this technique where the Rave Ident had to be taken into Illustrator and drawn over so once exported into maya, the logo will then be interpreted as a 3D geometry and hence the logo appears in 3D form and all i had to do was put the pieces together to form the logo.

The last thing i had to create was the moon itself and that wasn't too difficult. It was just a simple sphere and later on i am going to have to UV map it and texture it.

So all of the modelling is done and now i have to texture the work.

References for Spaceship idea and Sketches of spaceship

I started searching through the web and gathering up reference for my spaceship concept idea.

Since my storyboard consists of one spaceship and the moon, looking for references wasn't that hard at all. The first thing i started searching for were some references for the moon and how it looks texture and colour wise in detail. The below images are just random from the google search engine.

This image below is probably the closest to what i imagined for my concept visually and so this reference image is the likeliest to influence my texture for the moon and how detail it will be.

The rocky surface of the moon and pretty much what i expected it to look like the image below.

A good overall round image of the moon, with certain shades to it colour wise.

The next step was the primary reference for the spaceship since that is the main complex thing i will be modelling in this animation.

I came across this artist called Philippe Gaulier and he worked on the concepts for the 2009 GI JOE: The Rise of Cobra film. The images below were taken from his blog and as you can see he has produced some interesting spacecraft for that film.

The two concepts below are for the one spacecraft and while reading his blog on this work, i found out that he actually produced 3D models for this spacecraft and later just took still shots of it for reference and showcase.

The spaceship has interesting design and the construction of it looks more creature based. I think certain aspects like the wings and the engine at the back could be of influence for my design of the spaceship.

Here is the link to where i found his work. http://philippegaulier.blogspot.com/

The next pieces of work that i came across was an artist named Alexey Karanak. He specialises in creating mechanical technology that ranges from spaceships to weapons. Some of his work are just truly brilliant and i got really inspired by looking at some of his concepts.

This is the link for where i found his work and his deviant website.

http://abduzeedo.com/amazing-spaceships-concepts

http://karanak.deviantart.com/

This image below is the one that i am really looking for in terms of style and its shape of the ship. I want it to look really like a rocket ship that is really generalized. So i am going to sketch some early concepts and take it from there.

I did look at Sci Fi films that have spaceships and the most obvious i looked at was Star Trek. Star Trek has stacks of spaceships on its TV show and movies. And i searched through the net and found this website that deals with the concepts of the spaceships that are on display in the films of Star Trek.

Here is an concept image below from Star Trek.

So after looking at all the references i started producing some thumbnail sketches for the possible design of spaceship. Eventually i narrowed the choice down to the one i believed look more a spaceship and not some weird looking object.

My concept sketches of the Spaceship.

Look below.

The sketch below is my final design and the one i will produce in Maya. Its pretty close to what i mentioned i was looking in a spaceship appearence wise.

Storyboard

So after a lot of brainstorming and sketching of concepts, me and Leonard had to narrow down the choices we had and then take it forward to get feedback from the Rave Live people.

First storyboard is the futuristic speeding bike that drives across the city, which then in turn reveals the city to be the Rave Live 2 Ident.

2nd idea that i chose was the idea of the Rave Live Ident to be constructed in a factory like how a car is created in real life factory. Certain mechanical arms appear and start putting the logo together.

Finally the last idea i put forward was the Spaceship idea below. This idea was the one we decided to produce and so it will be the actual Ident animation for Rave Live, so this idea is a definate thumbs up for go. This is what happens in the storyboard.........

The spacehip glides across a moon and drops off a pod which then lands on the moon. The pod opens up to reveal the logo.

I chose these three final ideas to put forward to the Rave Live people who we are working for. Me and Leonard met the Co-Team leader Emily just a few days after and she looked at all our ideas including the storyboards which i have posted above drawn by me. The feedback that we got back from her was great and she liked all our concepts and ideas that me and Leonard came up with together. Emily told us that ideally one ident animation would be enough but that if we can produce another one on top of that then that would be a bonus.

So me and Leonard went back and thought through which idea we would choose and produce and we decided to to produce two ident animations. The two ideas we chose were my spaceship pod idea which was storyboarded above and Leonard's Bumble Bee idea. The bumble bee was storyboarded by Leonard and you can check out his blog to find more about that idea that Leonard came up with.

The reason we chose those two ideas was because out of all the ideas, these two ideas were ones we could technically create confidently and quickly. Emily told us that the deadline will be the 22nd of April and obviously for me and Leonard that was a complete surprise. That gives us 3 weeks to produce the work and so when we were picking the two ideas that we were going to produce, we had to take into account the limited time we would have and which ones we can realistically can produce within the timeframe given and within our own ability.

So i have decided to produce the Spaceship pod idea, with Leonard helping me on the modelling and Leonard has chosen to produce the bumble bee idea. I will be helping Leonard with either texturing, modelling or animating.

Below are some of the other storyboards that me and Leonard came up with.

Ideas & Concepts

As soon as i decided to produce the Rave Live 2 Ident animation, i researched some reference on ident animations and that soon sparked off some ideas. Me and Leonard have met up consistently the last few days and brainstormed a couple of ideas and rough concepts of what we could potentially come up with and produce.

This is just a brief brainstorm below.



This idea below was to meant to be like a flowing energy that travels through the air and makes it way round the Rave Live Ident to form the number 2. I found out later on that the the number 2 logo for the Rave Live is actually 2 dashes instead of the number two. Quite confusing since i thought it looked like number eleven but that's the full ident and that forms RAVE LIVE 2 channel.

Got inspired by these two ideas below next after watching some BBC 2 Ident animation on Youtube. As you can see below the first idea was like a whole bunch of numbers jumbling up together and leaving behind the number 2. The number 2 feels left out and then comes the Rave Live Ident who befriends the number 2 and that forms the final Rave Live 2 Ident.

The 2nd one in the same pic was an idea of a futuristic bike speeding towards a city and then the camera pans up to reveal the city is actually the Rave Live 2 Ident from top view.

This idea below was from Leonard initially and its just a simple rotation of the Rave Live Ident moving in space in Slo-Motion like the matrix.

This idea below was inspired by the moon ident animation of BBC 1. Its a really simple idea and just starts off showing a flying spaceship the drops a pod on to the moon. As the descending pod finally lands on the moon, it opens up to reveal the Rave Live 2 Ident.

All the concepts in this post was drawn by me, Shuhel.

Research

Since i have decided to create an ident animation for Rave Live 2 channel, i thought i might gather up some reference research to get an idea of how i should approach the look of my ident for Rave Live.

For my research i have been looking at various idents from different channels to get an idea of how consistency is created within a family of channels from the same company.

The image below is the list of channels for BBC RADIO. I have notice that all the idents keep the initial umbrella company ident of the BBC RADIO as well the circular shape.

The same principles are also applied to certain extent to the other channel Idents.

I also searched for some video reference and came across some Ident animations for BBC and funnily enough Cartoon Network.

These videos are very usedful since timing and pacing is important for ident animations. The BBC 2 ident animation on the first video is an excellant example of variety and timing of an ident.

The 2nd video where the ident is revealed on the surface of the moon just sparked off an idea for me. An ident animation in space is an appealing idea so i think i will sketch out something for that and post it later on.