Surreal Friends Blog

Film's Been Done for a Bit

2006-05-17T10:38:00.000Z

http://www.morpthefilm.co.uk

Watch it here!

I think we're... no... we might be? Are we? No... Hold on

2006-05-02T22:23:00.000Z

So, I think we finished today although I'm not entirely convinced, there must be something wrong afoot. Films don't just finish like that. We're taking the film to an editor tomorrow to see if she point out our errors!

In the meantime we ponder.

*Update - I've put it on my iPod! It looks hotter than a hot thing.*

Nearly There!

2006-05-01T22:45:00.000Z

I've just finished rendering the last few frames of the film and I've composited them and put them into the mighty timeline 'o' Morp in Premiere. Overnight Premiere will be rendering the post-production effects onto the footage so in the morning we're have pretty footage to sync the sound up to. I'm pretty excited about polishing up the sound and editing! In the last post I put up some screenshots showing the process from rendering to compositing to editing.

Now its time to turn off all the other PC's apart from mine, they have earned a rest after a good few weeks of continuous rendering.

I'll be up bright and early to get that sound done!

Nick out.

Rendering compositing editing

2006-05-01T19:17:00.000Z

Further completion!

2006-04-28T19:22:00.000Z

Today we finished all the tweaks that we had time to get done prior to hand in. This means all the seriously dodgy bits of animation, giant holes in the ground and other errors have all been fixed. We're just rendering it all now which should all be complete by about Monday or Tuesday of next week.

The sound is ready to be tweaked and re-synched when the visuals are finalised. All good.

Nick (with an A in GCSE English, not like Matt down there. Oh no.)

Animation complete!

2006-04-25T18:56:00.000Z

As of Sunday the main animation was complete. We finalised our dialogue sound yesterday, and have a long list of tweaks to complete to get the film ready for hand in. We are now reanimating dodgy bits, sorting out any glitches and adding new camera angles to dull and lifeless scenes. So we'll be busy until hand in. We have 4 computers re-rendering our stuff which is quite cool! (Watch your grammar, boy - Nick)
If you wanna see what it was like three weeks ago read the next post and click on download here.

Matt

First cut rough edit

2006-04-11T11:54:00.000Z

OK then, here we have the first cut of our film. This is what we handed in as work in progress. As it stands we still have some sections still as animatic drawn bits and as maya default playblasts which will be replaced with pretty cg renders later on down the line. There is sound on there, but this is still being worked on, most of the sound effects are there (except the pings after the spits, they're going), and its just the synch of some of the sounds and voices at the end that are still wrong, needing to be fixed, oh yeah and some newly animated bits have no sound! The file compression has reduced the sound quality too. As for the animation, these are first renders to check for what is wrong technically and for us to refine the animation, so nothing is final, some of the animation needs some serious tweaking other bits are OK.

We want feedback from you dear readers on the film: which bits you like, which bits you don't, whether you understand the vague story, which bits need improving and any other feedback you want to give.

Here's the link, it's 35 meg so it could take a few minutes (like downloading a movie trailer), go on, you know you want to.

download here

Cheers,

Matt

More behind the magic

2006-04-06T17:58:00.000Z

You see!

We see!

2006-04-05T15:45:00.000Z

Hark at the Other as he prepares himself to rain terror upon the poor Large.

I have been animating today, getting ready for the first cut crit on Friday. Prepare yeselves for an update.

whew! It's been a while!!!

2006-03-27T17:58:00.000Z

Right so here we are back onto animating. After time off,and getting the bloomin dissertations done. Today i have been animating the fruit picking scene, it's going well, think the Large is pretty much there, now have to start on the Other. Nick has spent today editing sound to our animatic, and it's scared us a bit just how long it takes, soooooooo we have unnecessary scenes nominated, we'll leave these to the end and if we can't get them done in time they are cuttable. We've altered bits at the beginning as well: Other now bends his spikes when he impacts the ground at intro, which is one of the reasons he so angry, and i now know how to do the Others ranting bits as i had no inspiration for it before. We streamlining animnatic too, for the first cut hand in on friday. ULP! Think that's it for today, the pic is a quick one from the fruit picking scene, look at the Other he so angry!!!! (when is he not)
and note to people reading this: go to annecy this year!!!!! WOOOOOOO!!!
Matt

2006-03-16T15:40:00.000Z

Now is the hour of the dissertation and so the film must rest once more. When its out the way we shall recommence production tenfold! Full steam ahead!

In other news, Matt and myself have submitted audition footage to Codemasters games in application for a position as animators in their core art department. To be continued... ?

2006-03-12T23:21:00.000Z

It worked! This is so cool! I'll stop now.

2006-03-12T23:20:00.000Z

Hello! This is Nick, I'm just playing about with a new widget I got for my Mac that posts messages directly onto this blog! Excellent.

Not much happening on the film over the weekend, as I've been at PC World and Matt's been working on his dissertation but things are back to normal as of tomorrow morning.

Time to find out if this little gadget works.

--==COMING SOON==--

An interesting revelant post.

Nick out.

Watch me!

2006-03-08T12:31:00.000Z

Here we have a quick sequence.
These are first renders of the scenes, so some are prettier than others. And none of this is final. Please give us all the feedback. Rip it to shreds if you want, but also tell us what u like so we don't remove it. There is switching between day and night which is gay, will have a whitish background. Any bits too fast or slow, any dead bits of animation or twinning that annoys ya we will sort out. In the first shot the first head lollop has already been removed coz its terrible, and that shot only has a preview render. right, enough from me, start the feedback!
Matt

Behind the magic 2!

2006-03-07T18:41:00.000Z

I was away this weekend and Nick dissertationed it (yes its a verb too). So back to work yesterday with some voice track recording. All done, we still debating whether to get all sound ready and on animatic now or later. Too much to do.
Still animating, but the animatic almost has a full segment, the bits still need some obvious tweaks, but we trying to get the majority of animation done asap. I'm on scene 6, and nick doing scene 1. Today you lucky readers get to see behind the magic of the technodrome. The first pic is roughly what u will see in the film for shot 6 (a bit dark tho), and the other pic is the bodged together shot showing you how it's achieved. What a mess! hahaha. oh well.
matt

The Excitement

2006-03-02T22:02:00.000Z

Look heres a pic of me posting on our Blog!

Sound Recording today with the Happy Squirrel.

2006-03-02T19:09:00.000Z

Today we have been Sound recording. WOOOOO! Which has been lots of fun, breaking stuff and splatting stuff and eating lots of fruit. The good ol happy squirrel has helped us in our noise making task. We think we have all of the sound fx. They just need to be layered and changed to sound like they need to. Making the tree sound like we want it to is going to be a challenge but it shouldn't be too difficult. Here are some pics of us sound recording. How exciting. These will be added to the animatic (the sound fx not the pictures of us recording), which is filling up with renders and playblasts. Then we are going to record all the voices (well grunts and noises) later on tonight. coolio. Then we will know if we need to get anymore sounds and then we don't have to worry about sound until editing comes along.

Matt

Progress!

2006-03-01T18:54:00.000Z

Matt has been away today, playing the part of a handsome young music teacher in a comtempoary life action film. But all is not lost, I've done a little walk!

There's still some heavy tweaking to be done, but this will eventually lead to the opening shot of our film (with some rather more exciting cinematography than this fixed shot).

I've been trying to get the idea that he's nice and heavy, with these big heavy hands. I used reference of elephants walking to get an idea of how his feet should pick up to support all that weight in his stomach. Thank you YouTube.com ( Elephants!)

Anyway, Here's a little clip to let you know how things are developing.

As always, I welcome everything you have to say about it.

Nick x

Webcams have the focal depth of a b*****d!

2006-02-27T20:23:00.000Z

We have been playing around with reference recording today, after our lecture on friday. Which was very beneficial, after the codemasters animator looked at our stuff and told us exactly what bits needed improving the animation looked much better. we shall post a before and after avi for you guys to see for urselves.
As for Today I have been overloading Nick with heavy bags so he can feel how its like to be and move like the Large! hehe, it was fun. Pics are posted here, hahaha! But we did learn that we need a better camera coz webcams are crap, bring on the technology!!!!
Anyway, I am finally done with scene 5 WOOP! and Nick has finished his scene too, two more down. This week we will be carrying on animating on our next scenes with reference recording!
Matt

Scene 27 Playblast

2006-02-27T13:01:00.000Z

Can be found right here

Update

2006-02-22T18:32:00.000Z

Went into uni to get feedback today. Got some good criticism of our animation being too static with the characters standing in one place too often and not pushing the keyframes enough,so we shall have to rectify this in the future. I'm still on scene 5, it's a long one folks, but I've retweaked the fruit growing scene (08) thanx to comments, so now the tree bends and springs with each fruit sprouting, so it has a lot more energy and life to it, much better. It was noted that scene 25, the heart crumbling scene, may be too long, so we'll try to rectify that. We were trying for slow pacing of the gag, but it seems that this may not work.
So all is well, woop,
Matt

PURE HORROR

2006-02-19T22:11:00.000Z

The day the compootah died!

2006-02-19T18:23:00.000Z

I have been animating scene 5 since thursday. Then today the computer died. Thank God for backed up files. Have new power leads going to my hard drive now so it all fixed. Was having difficulties getting the Other to throw down the heart the way i wanted it but i think that the heart throw and 4 jumps on the heart are looking ok. will render it tonight to see what it looks like. Should finish this scene on tuesday.
Matt.

Todays news at 8

2006-02-16T20:33:00.000Z

Today we have been animating all day. I.m working on shot 5 and Nick is working on 27. I got to do some proper character animation today, he is still only really a bunch of keyframes but he shall be tweened tomorrow and at the weekend. We've already got 4 secs of animation rendered and finished, with another scene rendering tonight. Not much else to report.
Matt

&%!%&%!!&

2006-02-15T20:20:00.000Z

TODAY I SOLVED SOME MAYA PROBLEMS. THINGS WENT WRONG. THEN I SOLVED THEM. THE RENDERS ARE NOW PRETTY AND FAST ALSO.

But seriously, I solved a big problem with motion blur kicking up huge render times. This was solved with a nice little plugin for After Effects that does it in post at MUCH faster speeds.

Animation Today!!!!

2006-02-15T20:02:00.000Z

Matt: Today i got to animate!!!! woo hoo, and we have the first 5 seconds of our film ready to render. The fruit growing scene is in the bag baby. And we have got all scene elements in place now. Nicks scene of the tree erupting is looking very nice, the rigs are intuitive to work with, which has been worth all the time we spent developing it. Now starts the long hard animation process. Today we have a pic of the set for the latter half of the film, complete with tree and Milton's impact crater. Oh yeah Nick spent the entire day sorting out all our rendering probs and wide screen difficulties. And he has managed to allow us to have depth of field and motion blur, with pretty colours, all in under 2 min 30 secs per frame, what a lil genius maya monkey he is.

Animating NOW! but not for me.

2006-02-14T19:08:00.000Z

I've been building the sets today, no animating for me. :( . But they all set up. A few problems with animated textures on blend shapes, and the deformers on the fruit acting weird, But they are sorted now. Got to build some more cracks and then I can start the animating!!! woo hoo. Nicks already started. boo to him. Today some pics of the tree.

And another

2006-02-13T01:35:00.000Z

Oh how the tables have turned

Nick out

No pics today my arse

2006-02-12T23:48:00.000Z

Good Evening!

I've just finished messing around with the rig and though I'd make a nice wallpaper for all of our fan. (This one's for you Matt T).

Enjoy!

Peace from Nick

Animation Tomorrow!

2006-02-12T18:48:00.000Z

Today we have sorted stuff. We are prob ready to animate tomorrow. Both characters fully rigged. We had little problem with the Larges stretchy IK, when we scale him up to be bigger than the Other his Stretch IK's FAIL!!!! so we gonna turn them off for now and wait for a reply from someone who might be able to help. If this doesn't get sorted though, no real problem. I'm having probs with the texturing of cracks but have solved it now, mwuhahaha.
oh yeah, we ate lots of chocolate fingers too. yum.
No pics today, sorry.

Milton has been skinned ALIVE!

2006-02-09T18:56:00.000Z

Bad news all round. I went to a funeral and Nicks PC imploded. No data lost, we think, although Nick still rebooting. However in the mean time, i think i've finished the rigging of Milton, few more pose tests and we'll know that he's done. So here's a quick pose, with 'gasp' a crazy facial expression! Thats it for today.

Matt

The Dissapointment of Technology

2006-02-07T22:35:00.000Z

Today was going well. Then my PC broke. A lot.

Nick

Rigging today!

2006-02-06T18:56:00.000Z

Matt: After the horror of making the blend shapes i thought it would be plain sailing. DOH! today i have been experiencing the joys of skin painting. Its going well, 'ulp', with the upper torso done just need to paint the weights on the legs now and he'll be ready to pose. After that we just need to assign the face shapes and tidy up the outliner, create a few handy buttons and we are ready to animate. woop.

Heres a pic of a quick pose while u waiting.

The madness of blendshaping

2006-02-05T16:26:00.000Z

This is what I've been working on (Matt) for the last few days. The wall of faces!!!!!! these are the faceshapes for all the characters expressions. Thought i'd post it to show u how they've driven me crazy now. But its done. sigh. bibble.

THE JOYS OF RIGGING

2006-02-03T19:34:00.000Z

Solved!!! He sure is delighted that he's not a flayed pile of hate anymore! Too bad about that wrist Pedro! Thats going to have to wait until after tea.

Lions, tigers and bears! Oh my!

Today we had feedback

2006-02-03T18:47:00.000Z

Today we had a work in progress session on our film. Showed our new swanky animatic that people understood better, stil needs sound tho. That will be done next week then posted. Issues were raised about some of the textures, so we'll rejig those once the rigging is out of the way, then we can finally get down to some actual animation.
Today we have been playing with facial blend shapes and rigging (with a funny disaster) which can be seen below. More to come on sunday!

THE HORROR OF RIGGING

2006-02-03T18:17:00.000Z

Right well we're onto character setup today, its all being going quite well, the large character is nearly complete so we thought we'd put him into a Kong-style pose for fun! However when we applied an expression to his face, the HORROR that you see at the top occured. We were quite taken back but we think we're ok now. We've learned an important lesson.
This was the simple mistake of adding the blendshapes to the character before skinning him. Its alright we can just go back a few saves and sort him out (SAVE SAVE EVERY MINUTE YOU MUST SAVE).

SAVE.

It's Alive!

2006-02-03T18:15:00.000Z

HAHAHAHA! The Other is coming to life with facial expressions. Here are two of the extremes he can go to. soon he might even be moving as well! Now just a few more blend shapes......

Stuff we have been doing this week.

2006-01-31T19:13:00.000Z

Woo Hoo, here is Pedro and Milton in their full colour glory. They are pretending to be airplanes, they so kooky. U can see a bit of the background too, there will be some sort of nice backdrop sky behind them at all times. We might play around with the colours, a bit, but this prob how they will look. They not smoothed, nor posed, that fun will be here soon.
And here is the lovely fruit that will be responsible for lots of aggro, mmmmmm tasty.

More coming soonly.

More of the Other

2006-01-27T22:56:00.000Z

Here's the latest model of the little Other man. http://homepage.ntlworld.com/nickrodgers/otherRevolve.mov And here's the revolve

The Other

2006-01-23T18:44:00.000Z

Here are some designs for the Other character. Prob gonna be a modified version of the one on the right.

Animation tests

2006-01-23T15:29:00.000Z

Test test test test test.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/nickrodgers/matttests.mov

Now he's sad

2005-12-09T00:19:00.000Z

Damn taxi drivers, who could miss a giant purple guy...

New Facial Rig

2005-12-09T00:17:00.000Z

New face action! Vids are on the way

Stretchy Guy

2005-12-09T00:16:00.000Z

We've worked out stretchy rigging

New Animatic and the Character Picker!

2005-11-21T17:31:00.000Z

Here's our new animatic, with modified beginning abd end. Done away with the Sun creation, coz it didn't tie into the rest of the story. And now hopefully the ending has more of a build up to a climactic point of no return. Still rough, but hopefully the story comes across.

NEW ANIMATIC!

We've also got this lovely little Flash character picker! Go through the combinations and see which ones you like!

CHARACTER PICKER!

Yar har! Thar be new tests at sea lad.

2005-11-15T10:53:00.000Z

Ahoy, shipmates. Thar be a fine new character revolve over at
Here!

His new name be "Pedro, thar fancy Primative".

And a ho ho! What be this? A test to see if ye can layer textures to combine a 2D splat wi' a thareee deee model? yar har!

SPLAT!

New Script! Revision 2.0

2005-11-05T00:11:00.000Z

Behold the new script!

Not a massive change, but its one of the final pieces in the puzzle solved.

In short, we had trouble with the old script as the large character suffered from a break in his personality by suddenly turning on the little angry guy, so we've balanced it out.

We think it works! What do you think?

Pete the Primative gets a dodgy eyyeeeee

2005-11-04T21:33:00.000Z

Pete the primative wants you to see his new eye, and I'd do what he says, he looks squinty...

More shiney renders!

2005-11-04T20:53:00.000Z

Today we did some more rendertests. Some of the ideas we had today for the story involved fruit being chucked at our character so we did some test to make sure we could do multi-layer texture so here's a

Velvety ball with a splat on it!

We're also playing around with the idea of eyes, so I made one and tried a few rendering techniques from the subtle to the stupid.

Simple Eye
Stupid Eye
Behind the Magic

Early Animatic

2005-11-01T22:54:00.000Z

Hi there all,

Matt and I have been working away to get a seriously rough animatic put together ready for tomorrow's feedback session with Johnny. The timing unfortunately isn't perfect, but we hope to get a proper animatic up by next week ready for Matt Gravelle's feedback and timing advice.

Early Animatic

Large Rendertests

2005-10-27T14:25:00.000Z

Large Render Tests

For those of you wanting a close up on the latest rendertests, download this handy zip archive!

Primative Character Revolve

2005-10-26T18:31:00.000Z

Revolve Test (QuickTime)

This is a test for the lighting and the materials we might use in the final film.

This is NOT a representation of a final character in the film! Its just a primative to get the poly counts up.

There's some artifacting around the eyes and mouth and on the back of the head that will be corrected when we've got a final model.

New Script!

2005-10-26T18:03:00.000Z

Latest Script

There it is! Comments welcome

Render Testing Day!

2005-10-20T18:07:00.000Z

Today, in between storyboarding, we tried some more rendering techniques. Behold! The results! Pour vous, Monsieur Richie. More Balls.

More small character designs

2005-10-14T15:32:00.000Z

More 'other' character designs quickly scribbled in class

Some more sketches

2005-10-14T15:30:00.000Z

Some more ideas for the larger creatures (top) and also the initial sketches for the small character

Concept Art is fun!

2005-10-10T16:10:00.000Z

Here are some quick bits of concept art. The first image is of some of the character designs for the harmonious couple characters (there'll be two identical creatures) these guys will be big, slow and graceful,, think brontosaurus for movement if not size.The last three kinda came about while we discussed idea, just images to illustrate what we had in mind, and we whacked a bit of colour on to prettify it for the viewing public. Let us know what you think of the designs: one's u llike + why, ones you don't, refinements that could be made. Other little dude designs still to come, as well as the actual plot which we are working on as I type.

Negotiated Proposal

2005-10-10T16:08:00.000Z

Negotiated Proposal

Premise
A story of prejudice, jealously and exclusion.

Outline
A social outcast’s attempt to destroy the harmony between a happy couple.

Treatment
A narrative, humorous, computer generated piece.
Visual style shall be simple, drawing from contemporary design aesthetics.
Two simple symmetrical characters with a signature movement to counterpoint the tertiary characters’ polemic design. These will be simply modelled (think Henry Moore) and simply rendered. The rendering shall adopt visual cues from that of photorealistic rendering techniques such as depth of field faked global illumination and faked SSS (think Boring 3D).

Roles and Responsibilities

Pre-production
Idea (N+M)
Point and objective (N+M)
Concept Art (M)
Plot (N+M)
Script (N+M)
Character Designs (M with N critique)
Set/prop Designs (N+M)
Storyboard (M)
Animatic (Drawing by M, timing by N+M)
Sound scripting and scratch recording (N+M)
Drawn revolves of characters (M)
Physical clay models (N+M)
Character and prop Modelling (N+M)
Texturing and materials (N)
Render tests (N)
Character rigging (N+M)
Animation Tests (N+M)
Dynamics Tests? (N)
Animation Reference Recording (N+M)
Layout animatic (CG chess-piece style) (N+M)
Agree on organisation and format of files textures, scenes etc. (N+M)

At this stage, there should be a film without animation. We hope to have no confusion as to what is happening in each scene, and each rig.

Production
Scene breakdown i.e. Who does which scenes? (N+M)
Customise and synchronise working process (N+M)
Scene Setup (N+M working individually)
Production-quality sound recording (N+M possible outsourcing for music)
Animation (N+M working individually)
Rendering (N)

Post-production
Compositing including any SFX (N+M)
Colour correction and image treatment (magic bullet) (N)
Foley sound recording (N+M)
Editing (M)
Titles and credits (N+M)
Broadcast Preparation (N with some outside help, Johnny, Johnny Luu)
Promo material (M)
DVDs authoring (N)
Website (N)

Introduction

2005-10-01T07:00:00.000Z

Hello Everybody,
With the power of the internet a new Blog is created! This one however is for Nick and me to document our progress in our ongoing third year final film project. Lots more fun stuff to come, aren't you excited!