Last night we wrapped our final day of principal photography.  In total it was four days of shooting plus one pickup day where we shot the final scene.  The whole shoot was a blast, it was really great to see how everyone’s work came together.  I wanted to let each artist working on the project be in control of their responsibilities, instead of telling them what to do I wanted them to approach the task like its own artwork.  I think this is most evident in the art direction of the film, I was privileged to have my friends Dahye Kim and Tomo Kobayashi doing the art direction.  Dahye’s art style is littered throughout the film and I absolutely love it, I think it helped set the tone of the film over the shooting days and kept us all on the same page.  I wasn’t entirely aware of the look we were going to achieve until I had seen the footage played back.  Dahye and Tomo created a kind of retro-science fiction look, as if the film was made in the 70′s using a mixture of current and (then) future technology to tell the a story taking place sometime in the early 21st century.  That retro feel hadn’t crossed my mind in planning the film, and I would never have asked for it.  It’s a perfect example of the artists working on the project contributing not just their time, but their style and artistry as well.  When I watch the footage back I see all of our hands in the work.

Luckily we were shooting on DSLRs, so we have lots of pictures to show- there’s a gallery after the jump.

My thesis is well underway by this point, and though I had hoped to post more as the project moved forward it has been hard to find the time. It’s been a gruelling three months since beginning production, but the challenges have been immensely rewarding and I couldn’t be more excited to be working on this project. The script is written, the dates are set, and all that is left now is to actually shoot it. I’ve been designing a workflow all throughout the planning process and I think it’s something that people can really get behind. I’ve been really lucky to have such talented friends to help me with the mountain of work, and it feels more to me like we’re organizing a group of collaborating artists than a film crew. Part of that, I think, is a result of the working environment we find ourselves in. Art school took a while to really make sense to me, and at first I didn’t feel like I was getting much out of it, but when everything fell into place and the community solidified I understood what makes OCAD such a special place.

That was just over a year ago, and since then the quality of work all around has been astonishing. I am humbled by the people working with me, and proud to call them my partners in this experiment. I really believe in the way we’re working, and I think the work will reflect this. It has been difficult preparing to make the film without much of a budget, but a philosophy of adaptation has let us work as a group towards our goal without getting tripped up by the inevitable problems inherent in this kind of project. That adaptation is about keeping the momentum of the project going while also about letting changes happen so that the work can grow into whatever it will become.  Forcing the film to end up exactly how it was originally envisioned didn’t seem like the best way to realize the work, a big part of planning it was making room for necessary changes.

This project began while I was in Paris looking at prospective schools, I had just been to a meeting at one of my dream schools and was invited to sit in on a master class the following morning. I had planned to take the train to a small town north of Paris to look at another campus the following day, but decided the offer was too exciting to pass up. I spent the rest of my day on the patio of a café with a my notebook and a copy of Gibson’s Burning Chrome collection. Over the afternoon I did lots of writing, and all my thoughts started to coalesce into a kind of poetic expression of everything that was going through my head at the time. Brilliant science fiction, anxiety about my future, and an ardent need to be making things again. My pen was furiously scribbling page after page until I had a kind of outline for what would eventually become my thesis work. On the plane ride home I read through what I had written and it really took root, I started extrapolating from that source writing and it just went on from there.  As we flew into the sunrise I snapped the image above.

Fast forward to right now, I’ve just finished my end of term presentation for the first half of my thesis. We did a reading of the script in front of the class and took feedback for what would become the final revision to the script. Storyboards are being drawn, actors are being cast, equipment is being allocated. In less than two weeks we will begin shooting, and roughly four months from now all of us will get together for the first screening. I’m beaming just thinking about it.

More on this project as it develops.

PHOTO.FINLAY.TO

Today I am unveiling some new parts of the site.  As my practice wiggles around and I play with more mediums I find I have more to show, and it’s not just animation. So I’m going to be adding a renewed passion of mine periodically to photo.finlay.to; the new photo section.  This is already where I put albums that I shoot for projects or for friends, but there’s also be a new public section where I’ll put some shots that I think came out well for anyone to see.  The first public photo post will be of photos I took during a recent trip to Paris.  Head over to photo.finlay.to to have a look.

 

DOWNLOADS SECTION

Next up is the downloads section.  In my pursuit of better and better workflows I sometimes write little scripts or applets to automate tasks or processes, and I’ve created what I think are some handy tools that I am committed to making available for download.  I believe that techniques and software should be openly shared, so there are a few handy tools here to download.   I’ve uploaded scripts, applications, templates and whatever else I think people might find useful and will be adding more all the time.  Some of these have been online in different places for a while, but now they have a permanent home where they will always be available.  Head over to finlay.to/downloads to have a look.

 

CLIENT.FINLAY.TO

Finally (and this isn’t really an unveiling because you wont be able to see anything on here) you’ll notice in the new ‘more’ pulldown on the right of the menu that I’ve added the client section.  This is a database system that allows clients and collaborators to log in and participate in the exchange and development of projects, freelance and the like.  So for those engaged in projects with me, there is now a secure place where progress can be documented away from prying eyes.  This might be something worth doing a small post about, I worked hard to build this part of the site on top of my CMS of choice, wordpress.  It’s great being able to quickly throw up download links or project updates to the site in a clean and organized manner while keeping client information private.

This post will cover my multipass workflow, my experiments with smoke, and a whale character from the script including some simulations and the swim cycle.  This will likely be the last Isaac and Isabelle post for a while, as I’m gearing up for thesis year and expect that it will take over my personal work schedule for the next six or seven months.  I’m really excited to work on my thesis project, I’m going to do some live action with a heavy lean on compositing and grading. So lots of post work and still lots to show on the blog, but a very different kind of work.  Something I don’t really show on finlay.to very much, so that’ll be fun.

Okay first up are some new, more finalized renders with the ‘outside’ parts finished and included.  It was tricky to get so much into a scene that my humble computers would render in a realistic timeline, the solution ended up being to have everything on the other side of the window to be projection mapped renders onto simple geometry.  I’ll go into the whole process after the jump, but the result is something I’m really happy with.  Better than just putting flat renders out the window there’s real depth, so camera moves are convincing and depth of field is accurate.

This is going to be a quick post on my progress with the short.  I’ve finished all of the human characters in the short now, the last of which was the teacher.  She’s unnamed for the time being, but she’s got such a small part it’s not really pertinent.  After the jump there’s a 360 of her in her chair and at her desk as well as some video examples of my grading process.

This is going to be a quick post,  just wanted to keep up with the progress on the short, which looks like it might be renamed simply to Isaac, that one’s still up in the air.  So here are a bunch of pictures of the sets, another character called Isabelle, a reworked version of Nikolai the Owl, and some maquette renders.

Between my first and second semester at school this year I had a full month off, and I used that time do the prep work for my second term where I’m going to do a sort of dry run for my thesis in fourth year.  Since most of my projects at school thus far have offered only two or three weeks work time I haven’t done any major projects.  My intention this term was to start with rigged characters and a script and spend the whole term doing little bits for the larger project which will be a short 3D character animation.  I guess I’m a little behind then, but moving the whole project forward is an enormous amount of effort.  I’m going to try to stick to the purpose of this blog and explain what I’m doing as I go along, this post will pertain to rigging.

So this is my rig right now, and it’s the template that I’m going to use for the rest of the characters in the story.  It’s just a matter of scaling the bones to fit the different sizes of characters.  Once everything is programmed the skeletons can be dropped into a scene and with a few hours of skinning it’s all ready to go.  In the short there is a scene in a grade three classroom full of students, in the interest of time I’ll be using the auto weight function of the weight tag to quickly make each student poseable.  Since they don’t need to move that much the auto weight should suffice to pose them in their desks, and morph tags will be my solve to get those characters working quickly.

This is part of the Aiming at Mountains, Shooting at Stars project with Mike. The project’s been slow going but I’ve got some new renders of the whole Isaac body.  It’s still early, but I’d like to rig it before adding the seams and fabric detail on the clothing, I doubt there will be much in the ways of texturing as we want a polished and plastic/plasticine look.  I’m still thinking about using actual cloth clothes versus mesh, we’ll see.  Full shots of the model after the jump:

Last week a friend asked me to help out on some special effects for a little project they were working on, they needed some CG and I was happy to help.  I was tasked with taking video and making a character “shatter”.  So we plugged away and in an afternoon we had come up with a nice little XPRESSO rig to handle our mesh.  I posed the model and baked the projection and set a few computers to render the passes for the comp.

While doing separate passes I came across some pretty stunning renders, especially the ambient occlusion pass (which I was using to fake shadows on my render).  So I got to thinking it might be a nice piece to work on for my Post Production class, in which I had to come up with something for a final project.  This was my jumping off point.
UNDER THE LINK I’VE ADDED THE FINAL VIDEO