moving...

Today i had to take the day of from my schoolproject. Reason? moving out of my apartment and for the time being got no place to live. But ill be back on the project tomorrow, but this will be the end of working home, since i have to pack my home computer down. Hopefully i will get longer days at school in the next 2 weeks. And 1 day away from the project would let me get the final push to finish it all.

jack..

Today i had to make a "usb", "jack", that Valkyrie put's in the computer. I made it look oldschool. Not sure how that would look with a androide in the near future, but hope it will give something to the movie that people watching it can relate to, like the 2 cars in the establishing shot.

Digression, resemblance!

Fast fun fact in a stressfull time.

You ever seen the resemblance between

Lionel Luthor,(Smallville.)      and             harald magnus andreassen,(chief economist.)

Author Dan Brown                            and                     Actor Ralph Fiennes,(The red dragon)

Minor problems

We are at the start at the end of the establishing shot overlooking the city. The render times has been heavy but it works. Tried to remder 1 frame today, and on a quality of aprox 1/10000 of what we like, it took 11 minutes to render it out. I guess the problem is that our particle system that erupts one of the buildings 200 times, also duplicates the big textures on the building and makes it impossible to render, or something else i have overlooked.

11 min. render time on this picture

Two days of color

Our sett this Monday and Tuesday to make the color decisions for our film, or stock if you like. We need to sort out the color as a whole in the film and each object that's in it. So the idea is to sit down infront of a computer, open Photoshop, and force the stock out of it.

Some earlier discusions made us look in the direction of a black and white movie, like Citizen Kane, but as there are few major contrasts in the coloring ofo the movie,(exept white and black,) we saw to Sin City, for more ideas, since the character The Yellow Bastard has a nice yellow color that realy shines through the black and white in the movie. The same type of stock continues through Frank Millers The Spirit and his co-producer Robert Rodriguez is also known to do new experiments to what looks good in the frame when it comes to color desicions, as seen in the movie Grindhouse, part 2 Planet Terror.

Now if NSB could just get the trains working so the rest of my group could get to school, we could start this thing, but all the trains has been incasipated until further notice.

Our movie got a name, sort of!

Two thirds of our movie is done and we were out a title, or even a thought of a title to our movie. We forced a sit down with one of my group members and started to brainstorm around the main characters, Valkyrie and Construct, and the meaning of the movie. The method was first popularized in the late 1930s by Alex Faickney Osborn in a book called Applied Imagination. Scientists has not proven it's usefulness, but as we started the flow of proposal to a title was extreme.

After we got some ideas, around the destruction of man kind,( whats happened before the movie starts,) and the death of Valkyrie in the movie, we tried to link that up to whats happened over the last 250 years since the Industrial Revolution and the way mankind is going at this rate. The theme about mankinds curiosnes being it's doom is a big hidden theme in the movie and that should be reflected in the title.

First word that we thought of was Downfall, but the meaning of the word did not comprehend totaly with our story, Definition: disgrace, ruin. So we continued searching and found the word Decay. At first it seemed like a short, blunt word with no "snap" in it. But after i saw the Definition: breaking down, collapse it could be the first draft of our movie title. Again it tells the historie about our real life now and were we are going, what happened before movie start, and what happend to Valkyrie. It's marveless=)


Heres the brainstorm chart we made

PreViz first draft

How strong is youre computer...

Today we tried to do the enviroment shot "better". with that i meen we tried to use particle system to make all the buildings in the background. That was hard! All the production computers were to low on "RAM" to manage such a big task, when we tryed to duplicate one of the bigger buildings to 200. So what do you do? You turn to youre own hardware and suddenly it whent smooth as soap. So got a earlier file, but with the particle system in place.

Storyboard

This is the last version of the storyboard. As you can see the story as been changed a bit since the 3rd draft of the treatment i posted earlier. A new treatment will be posted soon.

Enviroment work

update on establishing shot in 3D. As you can see with the mountains, it gets the "closed" feeling, so you get some sort of frame around the picture, as shown in our storyboard.

Been using "scanline" render for the past weeks, but thought i should try something new after i looked on a "mental ray" tutorial page. The light looked better and the render time dropped with 1/10 of the scanline.

Sharing on the web

Today we realized that we should get more feedback from sources outside the classroom, and we made a big post on the forum Det store dyret. Here we hope to achieve comments on both what we have done, and what we are gonna do. Hopefully this will improve our end result.

People are genuine nice

For our establishing shot we are going from a city jpeg to a 3d modeled city. We found a perfect picture from the homepage of Simon Ho, a Ausie born and raised in Sydney and, as with many Australians of Chinese descent. Therefor he took a picture from the province of Guangzhou, and specific the city of zhaoqing.



The picture was copyrighted, and as a result we couldnt use it as part of our establishing shot. We desided to wright him an email and ask for use of it, hopefully we could just photshop the copyright logo away.


This is the response we got:

Sure, feel free to use my photo of Zhaoqing.
I've uploaded the full-sized version (size: 2 Mb) so that you can
download it from the folllowing address:

A better quality picture without his name on it. There are some genuine nice people in the world still.

Beggining of the end...of my city

Been working on the post-apocalyptic city for our establishing shot. Looking around for inspiration and i found it on a pay 3D page called turbosquid. Just searching on ruins and other keywords i deiscovered alot of different buildings that has seen better days.

As you can see i've tryd to get the steel structure somewhat intact as some were after the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945.

Concrete and steele is all that's left. So with the basic modeling and a nice dirtmap made by a groupmember it should become the intended feeling of destruction and "silence".

Down periode

In the pasing week i felt the "hole" of the project. With that i meen that it's harder to sit down an do some work, because i've been doing the same idea over and over again. My head just want to do something else. I hoped that 3D modeling production would be satisfying for me, but with tha last 8 months of school without any "school 3D", it's much harder to start producing in high volume. 

With this slope down i tried to find some outer refrenses, to hopefully speed up my motivation, saw half of the top 250 list on imbd.com, tryed to even do more wrokout then i allready do but it didnt help. On top of all this my room mate moved out so started to try figuring how to pay my rent from next month. Thing just got bigger and bigger.

But in the end, it wasnt a guru from Nepal that made me turn around, was a team member who told me to get back up or she would kick me up there herself. That work magic and today i got a new "scene", establishing shot of a broken city paning down to a litle house, and working in 3D is almost fun again. 

So i guess without people around you to help you get going, and back you up, things would seem a lot more difficult to accomplish. 

Thanks for having my back!

1 week off

frakkin technoshit, my cpu seized to exist, can't get shit done. Got a hope to get max up tomorrow....1 good thing thou, had no important files on it...

animatic...

Boooring

Nothing works today, got a 2h delay at the start today cause computers and software wouldnt work. Got some work done until around 1400, but then everything whent down again. I guesss we got around 1h work remaining, but nothing works, so i guesss we are fucked either way.

Animatic nr 3 done but..

Nr 3 is done, but they are to big to post on forums, but we GOTTA have one ready for tomorrow so i guess ill resize that one so i can put it here and on other forums for some feedback.

Today we got some feedback from the tutor, and he basicly said it was good, but we need to photoshop all pictures and have more animation in the animatic. BACK TO WORK=)

animatic tomorrow

Done making first preview of animatic, just need to render it out tomorrow at school!

animatic start

made the first run towards teh animatic today, gonna have one rdy for tomorrow