Skyfall

Skyfall is the latest James Bond film to come out an incorporates a lot of 'invisible' visual effects. These are effects that, while amazing to look at, also look realistic and feasible enough that the audience never notices it is effects.

This also incorporates enhancing backgrounds and creating digital scenery that looks real. Double Negative really excelled in creating effects that go unnoticed by the common eye and it is something that I would love to do myself.

Final Crit

This is the footage that I showed for the Final Crit. Obviously there is a lot that needs to be done before I submit.

The backgrounds are far tool low quality and needs to be re-textured with a higher resolution texture. I also need to render out reflections and shadows for my robot, right now it looks very super imposed. There is no sound, which needs to be added quickly.

most importantly I need to track the screen footage to the spaceship and the robot in all the scenes.

Despite needing a lot I got a lot of great feedback that will help me improve my film for the better.

Rhythm and Hues

Rhythm and Hues are a visual effects house responsable for the effects in Life of Pi, Django Unchained  and The Hunger Games. Or at least they were. Rhythm and Hues have been in the news rather extensively lately for going bankrupt despite Life of Pi winning an Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

It has sparked a lot of controversy over visual effects companies not being credited in films and people working to a loss for working on Hollywood movies. It certainly doesn't help that before properly thanking Rhythm and Hues when accepting the Oscar, Bill Westenhofer was hurried off stage to the theme of Jaws.

It certainly highlights what a bad way the industry is in and how brilliant effect work is not appreciated in Hollywood.

Rendering

When rendering in Maya it is important to render out elements separately. This allows for a greater degree of control when editing in After Effects. It is possible to do shadows, ambient occlusion and colour separately by creating layer overrides in separate render layers.

It is also important to render out in the best quality using Mental Ray. This will ensure the best looking footage to show in the shot, though it is important to leave a lot of spare time as rendering can take a while.

Screens

The screens are separate video files that I animated in Flash. Originally I was going to make the screens animated textures in maya, but a lack of knowledge stopped me from doing that.

I tracked the footage to the screens by animating the corner pins to match the screens. I believe this works well for the scenes with less movement. However in the more energetic scenes it looks a little shaky.

Teleport

For the teleport effect I wanted Luca to go up into the air transforming into squares. As I am not used to After Effects I instead used Flash to animate the effect.

I traced over a screenshot of Luca teleporting away. I then split the silhouette into segments using a grid and placed them in there own layers. I then shape tweened these into squares and motion tweened them up.

Using software called Swivel, I converted the SWF into a Quicktime video so I could use it in After Effects.

I then made a solid mask to create a yellow overlay on Luca, which I faded in when he is hit by the beam. Finally I added a little 3-D movement in the teleport effect to make it look a but more interesting.

Robot Models

I have completed the models for the robot the spaceship and the interior of the spaceship. The robot was difficult to model as I had to place holes in the geometry for limbs. This also made the UV mapping hard as I had to work around a lot of overlapping geometry. I greatly struggled with the rigging and weight painting however I eventually got it done.

The Spaceship was a lot simpler to do as it was essentially a cube. I feel that the texture could be a lot better on this but I 'm afraid that I won't have enough time to make a better one.

One of things I like about the Spaceship is the spinning bottom, which will be looping infinitely. This gives it a much more spacey feel and not make just a floating object.

I had to tone back my interior design due to time contraints. Originally I was going to have a fan and screens in the background, instead I went for a basic motherboard texture.

Filming - Indoors

For the indoor shots I teamed up with Luca, Alex, Tom and Sophie to film in the lecture hall. Unfortunately we were plagues problems from the start. The lecture hall was unavailable and we wouldn't find a suitable replacement to film in until 12:00. We instead filmed in the photography suite which was much smaller than the lecture hall.

Once we got filming however things started to smooth out.

I helped out with the boom mic with other peoples films, afterwards I directed what I wanted Luca to do for my shots. I used my printed Storyboard to help me frame the scenes. Unfortunately we didn't have much space to have diverse camera angles, but I feel that I acquired the shots I needed adequately. Despite all the problems we had, we still managed to get done at 4:00

Cloud Atlas

The film Cloud Atlas had caught my attention with its whimsical story and great looking visual effects. 

The visual effects were created by a company called Method Studios, who have also worked on Argo. I love the effects on the futuristic city and I find it especially interesting how they changed the race of actors for different parts of the story.

Final concept art

I have finalised my concept art for the robot. I am quite happy with what I have made and I think it will be okay to model. I may have to change elements while modelling for a cleaner model but I;m sure the core design will remain unchanged.

Blend Shapes

Along with using rigs to move and distort objects in animation, there is also blend shapes. Blend shapes allow you to transform the models by referring to duplicates that have had there vertices moved. By connecting them together a slider can be used to smoothly blend into new shapes.

While this is a very useful tool for animation, I will not be using blend shapes in my film. This is because I am using robots and machinery in my film and blend shapes suit a more organic model in my opinion. I will definitely have to look into this for different tasks at a later point in time.

Storyboards

For my Storyboard I initially created a small set of images to demonstrate what I wanted for the shot.

The basic premise of the shot being the actor would be beamed on board, The robot would try to kill him, but before it can, the actors flash from the camera would electrocute the robot.

With the basic plan set out I started making a new storyboard in word, so that I could print it out for the indoor shots. I also showcased my idea for the teleport in this storyboard. I planned to have the actor transform into pixels and have the individual squares come aboard the ship.

Filming - Outside shots

As we were using all the same footage for the first half, we all came together as a team to film the outside scenes.

I helped out by bringing in my Clapper board. Clearly an incredibly important role to fulfil in the filming process! I also played an extra for one scene. We decided to use multiple actors for the shot so not all the pressure was placed on one person.

While at first I was not in the mood to film (being a cold winters morning) I eventually started to cheer up and it was fun to get some filming done. I feel that the footage is really good and will be more than enough when it comes to editing it together.

Concepts

Looking at TV robots I have made some basic concepts for my alien. For the spaceship I have decided it will be a retro TV set, this will help with modelling as it is a very simple shape.

Double Negative

The industry is full of talented houses making visual effects for films. One which I saw at the Bradford Animation Festival is Double Negative, who have worked on Total Recall and Harry Potter.

At the festival they showcased some of the software that they used and they worked in so much detail with large cities. They explained that it was important to show imperfections so it can mirror real life: never have straight lines and warp reflections in odd ways.

The effects they do is brilliant and work perfectly for bombastic scenes and huge vistas. It is also impressive how well they can merge live action scenes with CGI to enhance the scene.

Mindmap & Initial ideas

We have begun a new module in OUDF504: Visual Effects And Animation for Film Production, with a brief of creating a one minute effects shot about an alien invasion. Thinking of the brief, I didn't want to create another alien due to the last module, however I soon found out that the 'alien' could be anything we wanted. I was quite interested in doing something with robots, so I began creating a mindmap with various robot designs from  film and video games.

I looked into many robots and saw that there were many variations on the basic idea. I knew that I wanted a more human looking robot in anatomy but not necessarily too complicated. I particularly liked the robots with a screen or television set for a head, such as the robot from FLCL. Other things I took from this was the use of basic geometric shapes to form bodies and the use of an arm cannon.

The TV head style is something that I think looks really nice and it will help me avoid complicated head models and rigging. I also feel it will give the character a more unique look than more traditional robots.