4 Animation & Final Film

After I finished modelling, I sent the squirrel over to Will for texturing and rigging.

Will made some shaders using mental ray materials and car paint, applying procedural textures to make them rusty, and then assigned them on to the different parts. We both experimented using different colours for different areas of the body, seeing what looks best. Combined with the HDRI Will made (below), the test renders came out really well, showing reflections of the ivy in his stomach, and even reflections of his tail at the back of his skull.

I then began the animation process. I started off with the cogs, creating different speeds for the different parts, making sure everything fitted together. I came up with inventive ways to make the cogs work, such as the mechanical arm that moves with the cogs, and the 'comma' style bars that lift up and down, slowly rotating a stand alone cog:

After that I focused on animating the squirrel's upper body, as the lower body would be hidden by ivy. I looked at reference videos of red squirrels on youtube to study their movement. Keeping that in mind, I wanted it to move robotically so I attempted to emulate the twitchy, jumpy nature of squirrels combined with the mechanical actions of a robot.

After Will finished the composite, I edited the clips together and added birdsong to the background for added ambience. Here are some screenshots from the final piece:

This is the final film, 'Forest':

Forest from Elly Hazael on Vimeo.

I'm extremely pleased with how our final film turned out and I feel that it looks pretty polished. Given more time it could have been fun to incorporate more metallic and mechanical components into the forest environment, such as cogs or shiny veins running through the branches, or other robotic creatures such as spiders walking over leaves. 

I learned a lot from working in a group and it was a great exercise to practice our individual skills within a vfx short. To keep our workflow more streamlined, Will and I delegated each other different roles down the pipeline, whilst working closely together for each aspect of production. I did most of the concept work, filming and editing, while Will did texturing, rigging and compositing. We both did modelling and animation for our own robot creatures.

3 Filming & Modelling

Living in London, there aren't many forests to choose from, so we had to go out and find locations. We had a weekend break up in Derbyshire so we took some test shots while we were there - we found some old, rusted machinery which was very useful reference!

We then drove to some forests around Oxted and spent two days walking and filming in different spots.

We narrowed it down to two locations and filmed our piece in both places. I looked back at the footage and ended up choosing the first location - I edited the clips together to get our pre-comped film.

I wanted to get started on modelling, so I started looking at reference for the cogs that would be inside my squirrel. There is an automaton in the film, 'Hugo' which features lots of cogs, so I took some screenshots for me to look at.

After watching some more clockwork models and cogs on youtube, I started sketching my own cogs, trying to think of creative ways for them to move.

Using my squirrel sketch as a guide, I made my model in Maya. We were not planning on making him run or making him do any drastic movements, so it meant that I could design the limbs stylistically without having to worry about them being rigged efficiently. I had a lot of fun modelling the cogs - even though they're not actually connected to the limbs, they still work and mesh together well, so they can keep chugging along regardless of the squirrel's movement.

2 Nuke Practice, HDRI & Animatic

Before we started the Nuke lessons, I thought I'd give myself some practice by trying out rotoscoping. I did a quick exercise of turning a Tic Tac bright pink:

I then furthered my practice by rotoscoping a more complicated object - the hand:

In lessons we learned how to remove green screen in Nuke using Chroma Key. This is the previous footage:

And this is the finished result, using a background film clip that I took in London:

We did another green screen exercise later, using our own footage this time with a photograph of an underground car park:

We then began to experiment with using HDRI. We unfortunately couldn't get hold of a DSLR camera, so as we were just practicing I decided to take a panorama with my iPhone. I then put it into Maya and used it as Image Based Lighting to light up a simple sphere, but realistically.

I then messed around by making some extrusions to the sphere to see how the light and reflections worked on it.

Nuke practice aside, I decided to focus back on our film idea and make an animatic to try to represent what we want for the finished piece:

1 Ideas, Concepts & Planning

For this term's project we're focusing on visual effects in order to make a short 20-30 second polished piece. I wanted to avoid explosions, simulations and excessive green screen, so instead I wanted to try compositing a 3D model into a 2D film background. I decided to work with Will Arterton as a pair, and we knocked around a few ideas and concepts. For example, a space ship floating over London, similar to the film, 'District 9'. We eventually decided to do a piece set in a sunlit forest, looking around the trunks and leaves, to find some robotic animals. I'd like it to be quite atmospheric and to include birdsong, so that it's surprising to see these clock-work animals inhabiting it. I don't want the animals to be too shiny/chrome however, as they should almost fit in with the environment. I want to aim to locate a forest similar to these images:

And have it interspersed with examples such as these (taken from Bioshock Infinite and World of Warcraft, respectively):

Especially love the cogs in the above images and want to incorporate them in our models. I also fancied the idea of using a scrapmetal style, so I looked at some sculptures for inspiration:

Here are some of my own drawings for ideas and concepts:

A rough storyboard I drew up: