Images for Final Renders

Here are the images for the final renders. The six scene we have chosen are

1. Prof Gloves, because that is our best scene
2. Prof's Goodbye, because of the nice composition between Prof, RAM and Mort
3. Head Inflation, it's just funny
4. Susie Ending, she's holding the can of Fat Back Bits in Gravy.
5. RAM Dialogue Scene, nice bit of computer animation.
6. The opening pan with the prof walking in, shows our environment.
   

P.S. Simon wanted to replace the images on the wall with drawn ones, so I drew this up.

New Flash Videos

First up is the re-trigging I animated and Harry coloured in of the Prof Walks In scene. I had to move the frame sinto the right places.

Next is the Mort's tooth scene I coloured in for James.

Next is the Head deflation scene with added Fat Back Bits with Gravy Can.

My Susie Scene with Fat Back Bits in Gravy Can

Al Scenes all coloured in.

New Animations and Stuff

Here are a couple of little things that I have done of the last few days whilst completing the inking and colouring of Lewis and Neil's Audience Frames. That is completed by the way. This here is something Simon wanted for the part of the film where R.A.M selects someone from the audience. Apparently Simon can move it and loop it in aftereffects. I tried it in Maya, it didn't work. Above by the way is a picture of a n inside of a mouth got from drhuefner_john_1.wordpress.com.

The crew felt that a 2D banana was better than a 3D banana, so I animated this.

Here is the bacteria and the fly animations for the film, tghey are both very simple.



This is the animation of when the tooth hits the light.

Test of the audience

Here is a test of the audience in their seats. The lighting of the background needs to be fixed and some of the characters are in the wrong colours.

What work I have been up to.

This weekend I've kept myself busy. As well as continuing to ink in the scenes in Flash, all that is left is the audience scenes and James and Al's scenes. They need to be done by next week, I also re-edited my showreel for widescreen and work on these two images for the degree show website.

One is the concept art picture, took me absolutely ages trying to get it to look right.
The other is a final composition images. I slightly blurred out Mort and the background.

Finally, since we decided that the old intro was just to eye catching, I worked on a quick new version of the logo, going from black and white into colour.

Prof Intro Coloured In

The Prof Intro is finally coloured in. Inking the frames was a great idea. It hurt my hand but it took a fraction of the time to colour. Personally, I'm not entirely happy with this scene, but I had to do it in a rush and we are running out of time.

Flash

New Flash scene coloured.

Here are some shots of the flash colouring in progress. Hurts your back after a while.

Colour!!!!!!

I've done a scene in colour in Flash. It was hard because when the files from illustrator where copied into Flash, they came through as different sizes so they all had to be re-sized and placed individually. Also, because of the pen lines, the lines change thickness. Hopefully, this will give it a Ed, Edd n Eddy feel.

Tutorial for Illustrator

http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/Flash_bitmap_tracing_tutorial

Tracing a bitmap with Illustrator

Step1 - Trace the bitmap

Illustrator CS3 has more sophisticated bitmaps tracing features. Here is a very short example that includes a shape tween:

• Open the picture in Illustrator
• Select it
• Now you will have a "Live Trace button" on the control panel on top
• Next to it is a little pulldown menu from which you can select various options, for a portrait you may choose "Color 16"

Live tracing with IllustratorCS3

Once you hit the trace button, the controls on top will change and you can play with all sorts tracing methods and parameters

Live tracing controls with IllustratorCS3

Step2 - Import to Flash

• Copy/paste if from Illustrator with the options: Paste using AI File Importer preferences and untick maintain layers
• You may adjust the size of the stage to the size of the picture somewhat, I chose to add some big margins for a reason you will see later.
• Convert it to a symbol (so that you have a copy in the library)

Step 3 - Break it Apart

• Then right-click->Break Apart
• You have to do this several times, since illustrator produced object groups within object groups (use ctrl-Z if you think you went too far).

Step 4 - Create a new keyframe

• Right-click on frame 20 and hit F6 to create a new keyframe with the same picture.

Step 5 - Distort the picture in keyframe 1

Try everything you can

• Select parts and change the color with the paint bucket. That's actually the only thing I did
• You also can move parts, but probably you then should start with a much simple ray trace.
• Distort parts with the Selection Tool, the Subselection tool and the Free Transform tool

Step 6 - Add a shape tween between the two frames

... enjoy

Tune

• You also may at the very end (after the last keyframe) insert the original jpg picture. Tracing bitmaps is a very difficult issue, since there are many kinds of algorithms you can select from.

Basically the machine must be told how to group similar pixels together into a vector objects. For example, an algorithm can group together pixels with similar brightness, similar color, or try to find lines from similar pixels.

Publish

• In the HTML setting you probably want to take off the "loop" option

You can admire the result

Files: flash-cs3-shape-picture-morphing.*)

Directory: http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/flash/ex/shape-tweening-intro/

Flash Coloured Practice

With all the dissertation work it just feels like term just began. It was suggested to me that we use Toon Boom Studio. Simon and I tried that but couldn't make no heads or tails of it. Then we use illustrator, hopefully using the live trace tool, but that came out fuzzy with broken lines, and it's difficult to colour. I just spent the last few weeks colouring all my frames in photoshop with no luck. Finally Simon discovers that flash will do it just fine. What a colossal waste of my time! Oh well, least I know how to make the film now.

I decided that it would be useful for me to practice flash, so using the coloured frames I did, I used them to do a bit of this Mort scene in Flash. Because they were coloured in photoshop it is a bit fuzzy. Also for some reason the frame rate a bit weird. That may have happened when it compressed the quicktime video. Gotta go two weeks to dissertation deadline.