Term Summary

This hasn't been the best term for me. Being without the laptop for 2 weeks, really affected my ability to produce digital work. I tried to create as much hand-drawn as I could, from storyboards, to character designs and the colour script. But it still left me unable to do alot of what i wanted to test out. There were things I will have to do over the christmas break when I planned to do them in term, such as buying a model skull and attatching tracking markers to it, then applying cgi elements to them. I have managed to experiment the last 5 days in CGI tracking in Nuke and Maya, for the technical skills unit.

In some ways it was quite fun to do everything by hand. But being unable to open my files on the college computers due to different software versions was very frustrating. I've also found it really hard to organise my time.

My schedule has been sporadic as I've havent known what to focus on at what time, the idea was far from realised until late into the term and it was hard to work on any creative aspects before that was nailed down. However I've done my best from what's happened and I feel more confident to begin the second term. Probably with a backup computer. 

Filling out the storyboard

The entire project is now storyboarded.

 I gave Emma drawings like these for her to do her concept art around.

Animatic

James has worked really hard to produce this animatic in time for the presentation. There are areas i would like to improve to get a better feel for but this might have to do for now because of time pressures with dissertation.

More tracking testing

Here is a more successful track. All the frame rate is sorted out and it looks better. A small drifting does occur.

Importing these into maya is a pain because of the lack of a ground plane. I think the drift occurs due to positioning. 

Im bored of dinosaurs in ravensbourne now so need some different footage. 

Museum Updates and tests

Went to the British Museum today to survey it, it was a darker day which was good to see the inside. After learning about the motion tracking. I'm doubting if the Aztec room is the best place to try and film. It would be ok if we are able to bring in lights of our own but I doubt this would be acceptable to the museum. There are other locations in the museum which would be high contrast enough for us to track or bringing in blue tacked tracking markers might be another idea. The lighting in the room and masks is so low it was hard to get decent photos with a 50mm lens at 1.8 on a 5D with an iso of 1000. I got some footage to try and track which i will do later.

The room was too busy to take a HDRI which I had planned to do. But I at least got these photos of one of the masks. 

Talks about filming in the British Museum

I decided early on I wanted to film in the british museum. I think if we could pull it off it would provide a brilliant filming location. I had an email discussion with someone who works to provide access for film crews into the museum. They require a fee to accommodate this.

Aztec Characters

I wanted the same for the Aztecs as I did for the conquistadors. Normal proportions. 

I created these designs. 

Then gave the Aztec design challenge to James.