After reading Graham Taylor’s keynote speech from LA’s Film Fest, this is me taking the time to blog, which I should be doing more.
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.