week 8: Final WEEK!?!? :O

This week was possibly the worst last week of a project ever. We scheduled in a 9th week, as stated initially, however we recieved the information that the project ended a week earlier bit too late. By tuesday this week, we were up night and day trying to do in three days what we estimated to take 12 days. We had to make alot of sacrifices and all the hard work putting into be careful to not make mistakes felt like such a waste of time... We were lucky that we had been prepared this week to try and finish it but alow a week for after effects and mistakes, so we hadn't left everything to the last minute which was fortunate. However trying to work well when you are stressed/ annoyed and frustrated was difficult, esp when may decided to close itself down and the worst moments.

Over all i felt the project was still sucessful. Like i said befoire, we actually aimed to finish the animation this week anyway, the only thing we felt gutted about was that we were unable to take our aniamtion into a editing program to make it look awesome on a dvd or something. And lets be honest, that does take a whole week to get it right, so in that respect we felt cheated esp as it was our last project of the year.

Animation over view:

I think that the animation was fine. In fact i actually think that it suited the blocky environment we created. We were able to visualise the envionrment but i think perhaps we didn't plan what we actually wanted from the puma... It works well and walks fine, and Kanika did an excellent job at making it interact with certain things, esp for the three days she did it, however i know that she was disappointed and gutted that she wasn't able to fine tune things so that it wasn't too similar to the animatic version of the puma. However for the unfortunate early ending of the project we had to hand in what we could and make it the best we could for 3 days work. Most peoples opinion of the aniamtion was cool aswell and they assumed we used the same cat and rig fro mthe previous project which was pretty good so i was pleased about that as in theory it only had 3 days work on it.
We both love how the animation in the environment looks. The newspaper birds work so well and move at a good pace that realistic and clear. And how the puma interacts with one is quite cool.
There are many subtle things that move in our enviroment which we enjoy. esp when people notice them after a few watches. i.e. there is an alligator that swims in the water that is difficult to see at first. The intention behind this, you may be thinking whats the point if no one sees it? Is this, in any advert, the onesthat last and are watchable over and over again, are the adverts that have TOO much going on i nthem, so that everytime you watch them you notice something more that is inkeeping with the theme. It makes the viewers feel like they are watching a new advert when they're not... we're such idiots aren't we...
I quite like the London eye animation, the fact its spinning much faster than it should be adds to the quirkyness of the entire scene...

Environment over view:

As said in my of my blog entries i am really please with the environment. It would have been nice to take the scene into after effects though to experiment with particular things.
We tried to blur a blur on the scene to soften the edges abit and to help create the depth we wanted. This was 'sort of' acheived. i think if we had carried on experimenting we would have found the perfect one, however for the tiem limit we were on we had to use the one that did the job and go with it. Again... very disappointing it came to this.
The colouring of the environment would have been improved but what we produced was still aiming towards our intial idea. The sacriffices we made, weren't changing the style, but giving the scene a taste all over of wha tit coudl potentially look like if we had the extra week.

If we had the extra week, what would I do:

1.Take the entire scene into After effects
2.take more time finding royally free music that worked well
3.add more colour to the environment
4.spend more time fine tuning the puma animation

Week7: con't puma animation and finish environment

This week we sort of plodded along. We felt pretty confident in our schedule that the pace we were going wast fast enough to avoid as many mistakes as possible but still allowing us to prepare for problem solving situations plus any after effects experiments we wished to attempt.
Kanika's puma walkcycle was comin galong nicely and it woudln't be long before we could start blocking i nthe puma in the animatic to see whether we got the camera move moving at the right pace or whether the puma would look to unrealistic moving at such a fast pace.
The environment was still unfinished, but not by much. We felt that it still needed to feel 'closed in' and more jungle like. We knew that because of the style, and using toon shader, maya would struggle and lag immensely (which it did) but we thought it was worth the risk if it achieved our goal (which is also did). We enlarged most of the buses to create more depth in the jungle, and also imported more trees etc... to the foreground. This was particualry risky as it may have had an awkward camera move going through an object and inside the object. Luckily we were succesful and the risk was well worth taking. The extra added models at the foreground really helped create a sense of depth and perspective.

week 6: Starting the animation!

This week I knew I wouldn't be too invovled, Kanika is the main animator for the project. Kanika will go into more detail on her blog about what exactly she had to go through but from my point of view, it seemed to be going well still. The book she borrowed from learning resource center seemd to be extremely helpful to do a cat walk and run cycle. My role in the project seemed to be near to an end, as a conceptual artist, i don't really participate in the animating side of things, due to my skills being so dire in that area... However, by the end of the week, I knew that to put all the puma walkcycles together and to get the environment aniamted, i knew i had to get out of my comfort zones and try to do some animating.

close-ups

week 5: animatic! :D

I've never really pulled off a succesful animatic so I hope this looks ok. Like i've said before, i'm not really an animator, more of a concept artist, for environments and characters, so taking the idea from paper to maya is always a challnge for me. And always dissappointing when it doesn't look quite right... this looks quite accurate to the vision of this project. It still needs a lot of work, but you know how it feels when a project is starting to feel like it will work... always a good feeling...

week 5: final environment... ish

Kanika really needed some kind of finished environment at this point to start animating the puma in. So this week was a tough week of deadlines. Here are the images of it starting to come together.

week 4: laying down the foundations (roads etc...)

At this point we had alot of the things we wanted to put in the scene but not the scene itself. Perhaps a very foolish way of doings things but due to illnesses we just didn't have the energy to spend time thinking of the layout just yet. Lukily we saved so much time finding a already built and rigged puma, all of which i had to do was re-model it to suit us. Anyways, this was sucha diffcult part of the naiamtion. We were still uncertain how we wanted to middle to look so it was becoming a bit walking blind. We tried not to over complicate the situation so we worked out how many seconds it would take to reach one end and kept it simple.

As you can see, extremely simple and quite bare at the moment. Kanika modelled a simple, but i think effective cab. It looks quite quirky...? it still needs a lot of work in this scene though! We knew we had to be patient with it all coming together so we continued to just model things and put them in, whilst still trying to think of a narrative of his journey.

Week 3: Random Foliage

This we had to really think about. At first I assumed this would be a pretty easy task to do, model a few random plants and put them together... however, when we did this, it just didn't look like a jungle. We had ot go back to the drawing board and look at plants that really have that jungle 'edge'. Images we found of jungles were, of course, so densed with foliage that if we intended to accurately model a jungle, it would prove aniamtion incredibly difficult due to lag reasons.
I really like the 'pinty' leavs that i'vemodelled here. Again, i'm not going to win an awards for amazing modelling, but for our 'gritty/blocky' animation to work we aren't expecting everyone to be impressed. Check out our other work if you prefer to see more media style modelling...
This bush is just the leaves which i modelled for the trees. We are really trying to push ourselves in not wasting time over little things which aren't seen on the screen for long. ifit doesthe job well, lets not worry about silly things like, is there an accurate join in the middle of the bush with a stem and roots etc... lol

Schedule:

-Start laying down the foudnations and base layout of the environment so we can start putting in the random objects we modelled
-Kanika to start walkcycle tests with puma model
colour tests to be started

street_background

We wanted to incorporate as much 'London' as possible as our background. Original pictures show city landmarks such as 'big ben', London eye and london bridge being quite dominant. after a few tests, we felt that landmarks such as london eye etc... should actually appear i nthe foreground more. Here are a few images ofthe simple buildings we are using for our background. we went for a simple row of shops with very little detail. They need a bit more work, and possibly a bit more simplifying. The only thought so far is that it needs to represent london more... so we may have a different background of taller buildings such as skyscrapers.

week 2: developing idea

Well, me and Kanika are well on our way with our idea. We still haev loads to figure out, such as the actual layout of the environment, so instead of taking ages planning. we've decided to plan and do at the same time. Theirs certain things we want in our environment so we're getting on with them whilst also planning the rest of the environment which is quite a challenge at the moment. We both know how we want it to look but its getting them ideas onto paper...

I think we're both lazy to draw it...

Here are a few images to keep you up to date of the visual style we're going for and how it 'could' look in weeks to come.

Week 1: intial idea 2

This is our second more succesful idea which we found worth developing. Its the jungle slogan, which we were really pleased with.

Story of advert: The Puma begins in his home dwelling which appears to be a cave, but is really a tube station. He continues on his daily search for water, which will end up being the Thames. However on his journey he meets many obstacles which are both jungle and london orientated, a collaboration of the two. I.e. briefcases as crocodile heads. zebra crossings as stepping stones, cars randomly in a jungle etc... We both isntantly knew what kind of style we both wanted to achieve for this project and the colours, which for a first idea was really productive.

We really like the mix of green and white. we wanted to achieve this really 'blocky' environment which almost looks liek it was drawn onto the page. We envision the majority of the page to be white and black, but to just highlight certain things in colour to make the animation more indepth. The background will be entirely of London, but we were thinking of having lamp posts with vines wrapping round them. The main point we want to make is that the jungle isn't dominating the city. They are both working as a whole, and the city is still very much active, so we are goign to have cars drive in and out of the scene and the puma has to avoid being run over like any other pedestrian.

We were thinking of having a traffic light, with the puma brand logo on to emphase the brand being advertised too.

(images of intial ideas on paper)

We want the first scene to be really basic, giving the impression of a puma in his 'natural' habitat. When in fact he's ian tube station, which for the sake of the advert, is his new 'natural' habitat. the viewers instantly discover that the tube is not as it seems. He walks up stairs which have hanging vines on the ceiling etc...

Week 1: Initial Ideas

Here is one of the ideas we had, which i quickly deveolped before we were given the product slogan 'Making life easier in the city jungle'.

We came up with this idea of having this puma water flask in the desert, and a drop of water would fall from the mouth piece onto this scorching sand. the drop of water would turn into this puma shaped drop of water and sprint through the scorching desert at top sppeds, playing on the slogan 'thirst for puma'. Even in the hottest part of world, a puma flask will re-energise you.

This is a full rigged and half-modelled puma.

This idea was good, it gave a strong message to it's auidence, but we quickly exhausted all ideas with this theme. Their was als oa lack of style and originality to this advert aswell.

First post *pop*

Hey! This is my own personal blog to post my own work towards a student project i'm working on. Feel free to add your own comments if you feel it neccessary.

The mainpage for our blog is www.thirst4puma.blogspot.com take a little look to see how our progression on the project is going... hopefully it's going well, but knowing us, we'll be behind... :)

Project so far:
Initial reaction to the project was 'this sucks...' I didn't expect that animation students would be working with product design students to make an advert, especially as most of the product designers had designed sleek and professional looking products, which for aniamtors who want to create little characters who kill each other or explode in humourous ways, producing a sleek professional advert was boring (boring=understatement of the century). We emailed the deisng students who made a flask/ lunchbox item for Puma brand and they gave us their slogan; "making life easier in a city Jungle". :D We instantly had loads of ideas to play with. Although they designed something quite minamilistic in appearance, the slogan itself we could have so much fun with.

I won't post all the ideas we had as some were quite poor, and when you only have 2 weeks to come up with an idea and drawings etc... to present in a pitch, you don't have time to waste.

Ideas that we developed more, and you'll see some of our initial concept stuff will be psoted.