One intense year of study has come to a close as I have graduated Vancouver Film School and completed my animated short film ‘Growing Up!’

I hope the message of the short film is clear and that it resonates with some people.

I could not have completed this project without the help of my classmates, instructors, and support from friends and family. Thank you!

I’m responsible for all the visual elements of the film. I’m an animation student so that was my main focus in this short, but I also created the story, modeled, textured, rigged, lit, and composited everything myself as well.

I used Maya, Zbrush, Nuke, After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.

When I started this project the end seemed so far away. When I wasn’t satisfied with the initial images I was creating, I remember thinking that I knew what the potential for this project could be and that pushed me to work harder and make dramatic changes by completely remodeling the character and environment. I believe that within my capacity, I took this work as far as I could in the time that I had.

Within the last six months of the program, except for two days of break, I worked every day for the entire six months, that’s 7 days a week and typically a minimum of 12 hour work days, every day, and I don’t regret it. Despite many challenges along the way, both technical and creative, I enjoyed the entire process.

Yesterday was our official graduation and it’s definitely bitter-sweet. It was overwhelming to see my classmate’s work in rapid succession on the ‘big screen.’ I am very fortunate to have been able to work with so many great people this year and have the opportunity to pursue what I love. Thanks for watching!

See more ‘making-of’ things about ‘Growing Up’ in an earlier post here.

Graduation in a movie theatre, it doesn't get better than that.

Run with wings WIP

The biggest news from me recently is I placed 3rd and won $3,800 in the Brisk Tea animation contest. I created this animation concurrent with my school assignments so I didn’t have a ton of time to put into it. I wanted to use it as a platform to take a project from start to finish. Thanks to Tongal and Brisk for putting on the contest and congrats to the other contestants!

Currently, I am restarting a run cycle/jump animation and just finished a short lip-sync below. I finally got around to learning how to composite in Nuke for the lip-sync. I really enjoyed the control over having all the passes in one flow down the node tree where in After Effects I’m trying to manage countless layers and precomps and how they’re interacting.

The audio for the lip-sync is from my favorite ‘break up’ movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” I have another lip-sync I did for this assignment using a “Dumb and Dumber” quote, but haven’t taken the time to polish the animation, texture, light, render, and composite it together.

(Click to see larger)

This one could still use some work, but just wanted to get it ‘shipped’ in the words of Seth Godin.

I also recently attended a screening of Thor with Digital Domain presenting their work on the ‘show.’ I found it interesting when they talked about the movie they called it a ‘show.’

What they did on the film is very cool and was more interesting to get first hand accounts of with working with Marvel and all the shots that did and did not make it and to see all the original footage. It was like a special features DVD on steroids. They basically made two movies because half of their shots made the film and half did not.

For comparison to using Nuke here's After Effects

Almost all the green screen shots with people in Frost Giant suits were not used, so Digital Domain replaced the actors in suits with 3D animated models. There was one guy, the presenter joked, who spent months building 14 different bridges (digitally) for the frost world and none of them were used in the movie.

It’s awe-inspiring to get a behind the scenes look at how much work goes into these films. It really makes you appreciate the film on another level and that’s what would make me a horrible film critic, because I respect the hard work that goes into making films too much to be able to tear them down.

Anyways, I’m separating my YouTube channels from here on out. I’m only going to be putting hang gliding videos on alta8bird and put my animation and other work on LucasRidley.

For this animation I went to a bar and took a photograph of the pool table and shot an HDRI by taking different exposures of a chrome ball, like this and used it to light my animation within Maya.

That’s when the idea for doing 2.5D animation came to mind. I’ve done it once before in a contest video that I did for Kiva.org (didn’t win or even make finals in that one).

After perusing Sewanee’s Flickr page I came up with several photos I thought would be good for this affect, because not every photo may be ideal for this effect.

Working in After Effects

For example, I was looking for photos with only one or two foreground elements which I could remove in photoshop and then place back in a 3D environment that I make from the original. After a lot of photoshopping, the trees were the most difficult, I used the vanishing point filter in photoshop and then brought that file into after effects to finish the job. Videocopilot has a tutorial on this effect here.

It is fairly tedious work to get the camera movement looking natural and to stay within the bounds of the vanishing point image created from photoshop. I enjoyed working on this project and hope you enjoy watching it below and beneath it compare it to the original photos from which I created this video:

Aerial over Sewanee

Rebels Rest first image

Rebels Rest with snow, faded into from the other one.

The cross, the tree in the foreground and low shot made this a good one to use.

Spencer Hall, I had a choice to make since there was a person in this one, I froze the snow in time, then hand animated the person walking at the end when I 'unfroze time' at the end of this clip and the snow started falling again.

Fulford Hall

So as not to have the same delima from the Spencer Hall photo, I just completely removed these two girls walking.

I liked this as the closing shot because it brought you inside and I could create walls with the vanishing point effect where every other photo was so open being outside it only had two planes and this has 5.

They asked me to make an introductory video which you can watch below.

They crafted this wine because they didn’t see any premium wines on the market that were easy to carry. They also didn’t see any wines that were easy to carry, period.

Not only that, this new packaging reduces green house gas emissions by 80% and landfill waste by 70% compared to glass! And you get two bottles of wine in one package!

When they sent me a pouch I thought they messed up, that it was only a one bottle pouch or something because it was so small. But it was actually two bottles of wine in one pouch! I was really surprised. I think glass bottles have distorted my perception of volume or something!

Now that the video is complete, I’ve been enjoying the wine and it’s delicious. It makes me want to go enjoy the outdoors on a picnic or something just so I can carry this along! You can order the wine from their website: http://www.drinkbluebird.com/buy

I used my Canon 7D to film this against my green screen background. The Zoom H4n was used to record audio separately, because the audio that comes straight out of the 7D isn’t fantastic.

One of the hardest parts was selling the fire ball. It took the most time in getting the right take and in post production. I’m no actor so it took me a while to get the right reaction, as if fire was coming out of my mouth. I watched several real fire breathers for reference on youtube. The biggest thing to sell it was the head moving back once you spit, I think.

I had trouble with the lighter on every take because I kept spitting water all in it, so it wouldn’t light because it was wet! Check out the vfx breakdown, behind the scenes, and outtakes in the video below!

Here’s what the fire breathing scene looks like in after effects, what I used to make all this:

This is the green screen I used:

To vote for this video go HERE.

I called in a favor from a local actor, Mark Murray, to help me out and we took about an hour and a half on a Sunday afternoon to film it. I already had everything storyboarded out so it wasn’t too complicated. The hard part came with the post production, which is always a struggle to make your ideas actually work. That is especially true because I was pressed for time to do the post production, because after we filmed on Sunday then I went to Colorado for a week and had just enough time to finish this before it was due Monday (I’ll blog about the CO trip soon).

Mark Murray was nice enough to put his face on a dirty sidewalk for the production of this video - Thanks Mark!

It was a great learning opportunity and gained a lot of experience with trying to motion track things and also just more experience with the Canon 7D and rolling shutter issues. Whether I place in this contest or not (grand prize is $10,000) I enjoyed the process, as I always do.

All the special effects were done using Adobe After Effects and used a combination of the built-in tracker and the Mocha tracker to track in the special effects. That was the hardest part of this whole project and I think I was mildly successful with the end result, but as I mentioned I did learn a lot. The live action effects are from Video Copilot’s Action Essentials 2 DVD and I really enjoy working with their products.

Action Essentials 2 at work on a downtown building

I did a little location scouting way before I even wrote the story board and landed on the location next to the Tivoli Theater in downtown Chattanooga. It was a nice backdrop with the Tivoli sign, and there was a large building across the street so I could blow that up (see above picture). But the key parts were to have a building with a window, so I could put in my own tv there for the news broadcast, and then also have an alleyway for the dog to come out of. Of course, I had to figure out a way to include my dogs in the film, so I thought it would add some chaotic atmosphere to have a dog running with leash dragging behind it.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy it. It was fun to make and I really appreciate Mark’s help on it too!

The winners are selected by a split of 49% public vote and 51% judges votes. The two winners are flown to Cannes, France for a week to compete in a film competition. Other interesting characteristics of this contest were you had to be 18-28 to enter and you couldn’t use any music. That last one was tough since music can play such a crucial role in videos, especially ones with emotional subject matter. This one is for WaterAid.org who wants you to sign a petition trying to get world leaders to stick to what they signed 10 years ago, the Millenium Development Goals. At the current rate they’ll be about 200 years late achieving the sanitation standards they signed on for. So this petition is important, don’t let them drop this issue.

So my idea was to try and play to the fact we couldn’t have music, so I tied in sounds with the issue. It’s tough just to hear someone blabber on sometimes, so to have those sound fx under my voice helps break up the monotony I hope. I am happy with it considering I made it within 48 hours of reading the brief for the contest. Half the battle is coming up with an idea, or ideas, and then picking which one is the best, and then sitting there and thinking, ‘okay this is going to take a while’ and now I have to actually do it. But that personal challenge is also part of the fun. I’ll be interested to see how many people actually entered this contest because of the 48 hour restriction. My other idea was to actually film with my camera and not do animations, but that meant going to several locations (for the alternative idea), ask favors of the location people, and maybe try and ask a favor of a friend to help. Instead, I just sat in front of my computer and cranked this out.

I did everything in After Effects CS4 (I really want to get that CS5 upgrade) except for the ending logo animation with the water drop. That was done in Cinema 4D and I actually downloaded a trial version of RealFlow just to have an excuse to use it and see what it’s like (It costs $1,000!). That animation could have been a lot nicer, but I had to turn things off like Global Illumination and certain aspects of the materials like transparency in the water because it was taking forever to render. After almost 3 hours it had gotten through a ‘first pass’ on about 30 frames (out of 250). So I had to ratchet down the quality just to get it rendered.

The After Effects stuff was pretty straight forward, but tedious. The biggest thing was just trying to come up with some kind of style for it that would work throughout the video. I think it’s a little too grungy for my taste (that’s why I shattered it when it says “You make a difference”), but you can tweak and think and rethink yourself into oblivion with stuff like that, and that wasn’t going to work for the 48 hour deadline. I did enjoy using Red Giant Trapcode’s Particular 2 plug-in. That’s how I created the stick figure scene. I’m familiar with Particular (that’s how I made the cloud finger-tracer effect in my HP video) so it was fun to get my hands on it again, but I wish I had more time to play with it, I think I could have made that piece of the animation bit prettier (see the “4,000″ photo above).

One thing that snagged me for a while was it was taking forever to preview that short sequence and I couldn’t figure it out, then I realized I had selected “Random – Play Once” instead of “Random – Still Frame” for the layer I was using to populate that crowd of stick people. So every frame it was having to repopulate each 4,000 particle, when what I want it to do was produce 4,000 and then just stay there, which was the “Random – Still Frame” option. Enough of that technical stuff . . .

I forgot to mention I only started working on it Saturday afternoon because I wanted to fly in the morning. Then I stayed up all night except for a 2 hour nap and worked on it. I started to go a little crazy when I couldn’t nail the voice over stuff. I had to keep saying “like a toilet” over and over. I still don’t think it works in the video, but I had to stop trying to get it just right because I was going crazy repeating “like a toilet” over and over. You never realize how hard it is to copy your own voice and match voiceovers together, it’s something you never think about, but is the reason getting voiceovers in one or two takes quickly will have the same tone and pitch in your voice.

I might get my reel together this winter, or just keep procrastinating since I keep thinking I want to wait and get a little more material to put in it.

Tech stuff: I used After Effects to create this. Took a picture of an Oreo and keyed out the background. Used Video Copilot’s VC reflect for reflection on the water that I made with the Red Giant Psunami plug-in. I added some live action elements from video copilot’s Action Essential’s 2 collection as well. The most techincal part was creating mattes. Like the one that hides the splashes and cookie behind the wave, animating that wave, creating a bump map for the cookie when it comes out of the water . . . It was a good exercise doing things I haven’t tried before and that’s the point of these 5 second projects, thanks for hosting it greyscalegorilla.

I entered in a contest at Tongal.com where you had to describe the loan process at Kiva.org. I’m proud to be apart of this contest because I really think Kiva.org is an incredible service.

Basically, you get to pick who you give a microfinance loan to, with the minimum you can give being $25. You don’t pick a group of people or an organization that will then give it out. You pick the exact person you want to loan to. If you want to loan to a woman in Africa that is trying to open a grocery store, you can do that. And it’s a loan, not a donation, you get repaid.

While there are risks the average repayment rate across all of Kiva is 98%. See here for the risks associated with lending and Kiva.

To see mine and other videos on the contest website go HERE.

There are two phases to this contest. 1) popularity: videos are ranked and given prizes according to how many times they are viewed (one view per IP address). 2) Judges pick several winners.

Both phases have cash prizes so please pass this blog post around so I can get more views. They announce the judges winners on the 22nd, but the viewing phase goes until Jan 31st.

I’m thinking of posting a tutorial on how I did the 2.5D image effect with the face fading in After Effects. If you’d be interested in seeing that tutorial, make a comment below and if there’s enough interested I’ll record a tutorial on face morphing and creating a 3D scene with photographs in After Effects.

This is my entry into the Dewmocracy campaign. So far, people have voted on new flavors, names, and can designs. Now this last contest will pick three people to each produce a 15 second national television commercial for Mountain Dew with a budget of $200k each.

Voting begins Dec.1st and continues until Dec 13th and you will be able to vote 3 times a day:
_

Contest link: http://12seconds.tv/campaign/dewmocracy

My video link: http://12seconds.tv/v/NZMUH

I made the 3D logo in Cinema 4D and then brought it into After Effects for the particle system (the fizz). I really enjoyed creating that part, not to mention I had a great excuse to go flying. Thanks to Eric for filming that launch. I used the Canon 7D for both shots, drinking the dew and the foot launch, which was in the 720p 60fps mode so I could slow it down enough. (And that’s Scott in the background: “Nice…”)