Final stages

After I have finished all the rednering I went onto editing the final product. In Premiere I have assembled the still frames from Maya and added the lip sync as well as some sound effects and music like walking sound effect or sad music at the beginning.

3D bump maps

In my 3D model house I bump mapped the frames to make them more realistic.

Process of animating Norman

After I have completed the modelling and texturing of my scene, I have started to bring my idea to life by animating the main characters in our case Good Norman and Evil Norman. At first I decided to tackle the scene with the most attention to animate which was the staircase walk. Before we were introduced to the IK movement, I have used the normal rigging and made Good Norman walk up one stair case however his movement looked uneven and had a stop motion feel. After completing this, our teacher showed us how to use IK movement, using this is simpler because it can have realistic poses, with that I moved onto animating  the stair walk again, this time I bent his back every time he stepped on a stair to give him a tired feel. Animating this scene anew took a good while, due to asking for help which delayed my progress. With what I thought to be a finished scene, I moved onto to animation of Happy Norman being at the top of the staircase and greeting somebody he knew, to animate this I had to make sure that his hands didn't go through walls. Afterwards we were shown how to lip sync and how to put the sound into Maya, furthermore we were shown a neat trick of turning Norman without him looking like a robot which was called 'Redirect'. At this point we have had 3 weeks until the deadline, on the same day I have asked for guidance on how smooth and realistic the animation I made were. After receiving feedback and talking to other teacher I have decided to start the stair walk again and this time using the redirect instead of slowly turning Norman which took too many key frames, which in result looked weird as he turned and it would take too much render in rendering therefore I started to reanimate the stair walk and as I've reached the staircase landing I animated a quick walk cycle and decided to use the redirect. I made sure to check my notes when I started, and at first I couldn't get the redirect to work, therefore I went to the studio the next day and asked for help which cleared my confusion and I was able to use redirect. With the redirect used I continued to animate the rest of the walk up another set of stairs. Afterwards I started to animate the evil Norman scenes, the first animation was the first scene that evil Norman appears. When the scene was completed I wanted more of a zoom on the hand but it didn't seem to work too well. Therefore I chose to create another file with the same scene but with just the zoom. Then I went onto working on the lip sync since it's quite long. It didn't take that much time as I thought it would, I was really happy with the overall outcome of the lip sync. For the last week I have been finishing the smaller scenes. Throughout that process I have set up cameras in the places that i wanted to. After few changes I have started to render the still images for editing work in Adobe Premiere.

Sound Design Final Task *Updated*

Textured scene

Here's my scene textured, there's still a few things to be added like bump maps on photo frames and cleaning up the arch way. I painted the poster, cat, mountains and the portrait.

Lip sync animation

Phonetic sound breakdown

1		21	ie	41
2		22		42
3		23	e	43	b
4	o	24	r	44	e
5	o	25	r	45	e
6	oh	26	p	46	u
7		27	l	47	t
8	n	28	a	48	iy
9	n	29	ns	49
10	o	30		50	k
11		31		51	i
12	i	32		52	l
13	it	33		53	l
14		34		54	d
15	wa	35	i	55
16	a	36	it	56	d
17	s	37		57	e
18	nt	38	wa	58
19		39	a	59	b
20	d	40	s	60	Ee
				61	s
				62	t

Improved (hopefully) stair walk animation

Week 5: Sound design Task 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayIFSQVaTcU&feature=youtu.be

Week 5: First scene animated

First walk in the scene, I wasn't too sure how much of the walk I needed to animate. If it's wrong then I shall change this and make Norman walk up the second set of stairs.

Week 4: Animatic 2.0 (Updated)

Here's the animatic version of the storyboard, this has been done in After Effects. I'm rather happy with this, but I wasn't quite sure whether to do few lipsync frames for the quote or to keep it as one frame, in the end I settled for 3 frames to show how Norman2 is talking. Also at the moment there is only the quote in sound, background noises like walking up the stairs sound and fall down will be added later.

Week 4: Scene in 3D

 Here are some screen shots of my scene made in Maya

Week 3: Improved Storyboard 2.1

This has an updated drawing in frame 9e. This change is better because it shows Norman2 pushing the camera rather than in the previous version where his hand wasn't as extended as it should have been. 

Week 2: Research of props

Since my story takes place in a cottage-like house I think it will need a lot of framed photographs, maybe some old posters (some with flowers), few vases and in the room I would like to place a simple table with a chair, chest of drawers as well as a wardrobe and a shelf with books.                    

Week 2: Improved storyboard

Week 2: Improved story

I have shown my idea and storyboard to Peter, and after a small talk we came to a conclusion about changing a part of story, which I think will improve it.

The action takes place in a house/cottage with many stairs, and wee can see an exhausted Norman walking up them until he reaches the top of them and goes to meet Norman2. Even though he is exhausted he happily moves towards Norman2 for a hug. What Norman doesn't expect is that his friend pushes him towards the door which causes for Norman to lose his footing and causes for him to fall down the same stairs that he walked up. Norman2 moves towards the edge of stairs and says "Oh, no. It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast." (this is a quote from King Kong film from 1933) and strikes a flamboyant pose. We came to conclusion that Norman2 is crazy like Caligula, and that he is implying that he is the 'beauty' therefore he needs to be sort of camp rather than emotionless or disappointed.

Week 1: Storyboard

Week 1: Idea development

The Idea for Transit: my idea for the transit takes place in a house with many stairs, and as exhausted Norman reaches the top of them and goes to meet Norman2. He moves forward and accidentally slips on some liquid and falls down the same stairs that he walked up. Norman2 moves towards the edge of stairs and says "Oh, no. It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast." (this is a quote from King Kong film from 1933) whilst shaking the head in disappointment.

I expect for the ambiance to have warm and cottage-like feel.     

This my idea page where I searched for some stair examples as well as room designs because I think the camera will get a view of a room. I sketched out some views for the scene to get an overall feel of the set. 

Here are some thumbnail drawings of the set with different angles:

Here's the link to the quote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_54wsvvRxoo  ( the quote itself is at 03:44 )