24/05/2010: intro is finally ready!

Joy! Shots 7 and 8 are ready, so the intro is ready!

A lot of stuff was done during the last 10 days:

• 9 background drawings (1 background is eventually not used) 
• 4 car drawings
• And some custom drawing for scene 6 where the car door opens and one can see inside the car.
• Redrawing and rigging Simon in Anime Studio (the Illustrator import is not working great, so I had to redraw) in a 1/4th and 3/4th look
• Voices and sound recordings (eg. door that opens, knock on door, footsteps on wood, footsteps on concrete).
• Most own sound recordings were processed in Soundbooth, like changing the pitch or removing high frequency sounds due to the soundcard/microphone.
• Some sounds were found on the web: old car driving, old car stationary, car door that slams, sounds of night animals, ... 
• Video recordings: candle, getting out of a car, knocking on a door, picking up a letter ,... Those video recordings were sometimes helpful to create animations :)
• Animation of 8 shots: the animations consist mainly of camera manipulations and moving/scaling/skewing/... objects. Figures also have a skeleton that is animated by means of bone transformations.
• In some shots I did also animate the blur and shadows. The blur animation gives the illusion that the camera has to focus, the shadow animations give the illusion that an object passes a light.
• Compositing 8 shots: all compositing was done in After Effects.
• In most shots I did mainly music and sound compositing, playing with the volume levels and so on.
• In shot 3 some basic text animation was done. I know it could be a little bit more cool, but there is no time left to do cool stuff :)
• In shot 5 some lens flare effect had to be used
• In shot 8 I used a video of a candle and keyed out the background (by means of the keylight 1.2 plugin).

Okay, now I have three to four weeks left for finishing the game (still a lot of work to do), creating an outro and wrapping it all up in one nice DVD.

22/05/2010: intro it is

Yupz, still working on the intro.

Shots 1 to 6 are finished (except for some spotlight effect that will be added if there is some spare time on Monday), shot 7 needs some sounds and shot 8 needs some animation :)

A compilation video can be found here:

Shot 5: with a lens flare effect. Oh, After Effects is soooo cool!

21/05/2010: Still working on the intro

Yep, still working on the intro :)

Anyway, I start to like doing what I have been doing the last couple of days: making shots for the intro. Djeez, that is really, really, really a lot of work!

The end result is getting closer and it is quite nice: one can believe the story. Making animations is also more fun that I initialilly thought but it is not always easy with the toolset that I use.

Will try to post a new video tonight or tomorrow.

 Wall-E and M-E

Note: the background for shot 6 has been dropped. The new background is shown in the Wall-E picture above and also hereunder:

S

Shot 6: new version

18/05/2010: adjust, preview, adjust, preview, render, read mail, ...

The subject of this post summarizes the activities I have been performing the last couple of days :) Until now, 3 shots have been 'finished' and compiled into 1 composition:

Mainly my workflow for creating one shot consists of the following steps:

1. Create a new shot folder
2. Grab the corresponding background (see my posts of last week)
3. Save every layer in that background as separate PNG's (eg. one for the sky, one for the landscape, one for the road nearby, one for the trees, ...)
4. Open Anime Studio and create a new HDTV project - 1920x1080 pixels.
5. Import every PNG and give is some Z value between 0 and -1. Images that have a low Z value are further away of the camera.
6. Notice that the PNG's are not ideal -> redraw a bit
7. Import the music (which has first been roughly cut in Soundbooth) 
8. Plot out the main move of the camera
9. Plot out the main points of the action (= keys)
10. Create perspective views of the car in PhotoShop, since the car is imported as a PNG I need to manipulate the image to give the illusion of changing perspective. But sometimes that illusion is not good enough, so I need to create different views of the car in Photoshop (see the 3 figures of the car here under). 
1. A 3D tool would be handy here, but it would take too much time to create a 3D model of a car.
11. Refine the action (= breakdow/inbetween)
12. Preview and prelisten :)
13. If it seems okay: render the whole thing
14. Wait, wait, and wait.
1. Note to myself: I need a fast computer. Rendering 10 seconds of animation takes 15 minutes!
15. Notice that the render is not what I expected
16. Say 'miljaar' 2 times and refine the camera move and action.
17. Goto 12 (not considered harmful here)
18. After a hard day's work: create a final render that can be sent as an attachment (< 25 mb). 

Example of 3 perspective views of the car that had to be created for shot 3:

Note about the creation of the car: the car was first drawn on paper and then imported into Photoshop where I did draw it again with the Wacom tablet and gave it initial colors.  Warning: bad drawing ahead...

To draw the car I was inspired by an old photograph of a 1929 car which was also part of the moodboard that was created last year:

17/05/2010: Working on the intro (shot 1 animation)

Today, I finished the animation of shot 1 ... pffew. No special effects yet, will only be able to do that if there is some time left tomorrow.

Anyway, Anime Studio is quite fun to work with but it's not ideal for movement in the 'Z' axis. On the other hand, it is quite easy to fake depth in Anime Studio ... so I will fake it :)

16/05/2010: Working on the intro (part III)

Status for today:

• Did initial voice recordings for the intro (see the credits - in the outro - for the cast :)
• Drew one more background that took me quite some time, but I'm happy with the outcome of it.

 Shot 8 (inside the house)

Tomorrow, I will have to draw a car, Simon and the car driver. Will probably first model models/puppets in 3D to have the correct dimensions and perspective. Maybe I will do some video recordings too, to act out some shots.

15/05/2010: Working on the intro (part II)

Three fresh backgrounds added today! One or two more to go: (1) Simon inside and (2) the letter background. The last one is indeed also a background which I completely forgot :)

Shot 5

Shot 6 (shot from above)

 

 Shot 7 (at the door)

14/05/2010: Working on the intro

Okay, last saturday I got a lot of feedback on my project. In fact, it was so much feedback that it will have impact on my timing...

Anyway, I will continue to work at the current pace since some minor health issues are coming up... Those health issues are eye-related: spending so much time on a PC/laptop screen puts some strain on the eyes! I got myself some eye drops and they seem to work :)

So what did I didgeridoo those last couple of days? Well, I drew 4 backgrounds for the intro scene of the game. Since, the intro consists of 8 shots, 4 extra backgrounds have to still to be drawn... I will do that tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. As such, next week will be spent entirely on the intro animation and working on the feedback of last week.

Of all stuff I have already done up until now, drawing backgrounds is one of my favorite activities :) The main tool used for this is of course Adobe Photoshop. To draw repetitive trees a tree brush pack was used; the other trees have been drawn by hand. The top 3 Photoshop tools that I used are: (1) gradient fill tool, (2) layer effects like emboss and (3) filters like sponge, rough pastels and smudge stick. To draw the shadows a multiply layer was created, with an opacity of 30% on which I painted with a black brush. Luckily, I have a Wacom tablet ... that makes drawing fun!

Intro - Shot 1

Intro - Shot 2

Intro - Shot 3 (panning shot: camera will follow the car)

 Intro - Shot 4

05/05/2010: game sounds

The last couple of days were spent on the search for and the creation of all kinds of sounds. The tool Adobe Soundbooth helped with all common audio tasks such as cut/paste and noise removal.One cool feature of this tool is the 'Spectral Frequency Display' (see the colored part of the screenshot) which can be used to modify the sound. This is handy to remove some pops and clicks or other sounds that shouldn't be there.

Adobe Soundbooth CS4: the waveform of a crow.

The sound recording was done with a Sony dynamic microphone. The microphone is good, but the mic input on the laptop is really bad: recording sounds and voices also includes some unwanted strange high frequency sounds. Connecting the microphone to a creative X-Fi card on my desktop is a complete difference: sound quality is much better.

Not all sounds were recorded of course, since I don't have animals here in my living room. Luckily, some sites exist with free sounds: http://www.freesound.org, http://www.grsites.com/archive/sounds and http://soundbible.com. These sounds cannot be used out of the box; some manual modifications are still required.

Since I only have only one week for al game sounds, it has to go fast... It is amazing how much work goes into the sound part of a game!