More New, Completed Shots!

More New Caravan Shots 3-30 from Mel Miller on Vimeo.

A couple new favorites from the 35 completed to color & final composite shots from Caravan so far. Music by the tremendously awesome Larry Larson. Onward!

Cheers,
Mel

Shot 26 Progression

Shot 26 Progression from Mel Miller on Vimeo.

Rough animation, clean-up, and final color for shot 26 of Caravan.

-Mel

Caravan Girl

Curious Miss Mia from Mel Miller on Vimeo.

Shot 009, rough & clean animation

Clean up from today. I still have a few alterations I want to make to the final line here before I shoot it for color on Friday, but, it's well on its way, at least! :) Mia is so terribly cute when curious. Also, just for the fun of it, here's the tune I was blasting on repeat in Senior Studio today: Goldfrapp's aptly titled Caravan Girl.

And so it goes,
- Mel

Composited Caravan Clips

Composited Caravan Clips from Mel Miller on Vimeo.

As I mentioned previously, I've come far along enough in Caravan's production that Niles has been able to begin compositing a couple of shots from the film together - very exciting! We've got just over a minute of the film put together so far, an will be compiling ore this weekend. Through all of these shots, Niles is beginning to address a number of visual effects that he is interested in adding to the film - smoke, fire, water, film effects, among other things. For anyone interested, the character animation and backgrounds are entirely hand-drawn, and colored digitally. Hooray for quality Vimeo video! :D

-Mel

The Clean Up Process

A cleaned-up still of Nana Besnik from Shot 079

It's been an interesting feat, trying to figure out exactly what the proper way to go about this film's production might be - particularly when it comes to what order to do everything. I've been told many times that the standard means of production for students would be to do rough layout first, rough animation next, clean up after that, complete the backgrounds, and then composite the whole mess together in the end. This timeline, to me, just seems... awkward. Doing things sectionally - all rough animation at once, for example - is for me, at least, too wrought with the risk of burn out, and with burn out, of course, comes a drastic slow-down in production. I, personally, have been skipping all over the realm of production: For a while I was rough animating and doing backgrounds at the same time, and now, I'm rough animating and doing the clean up at the same time. If I get sick of one, I move immediately to the other, and vise versa - and things continue to get done. I also questioned the logic of doing backgrounds last - why on earth, if one has finished animation available, should compositing have to wait on the completion of finished backgrounds at the last minutes of a film's production? As such, I completed all of my backgrounds before the semester even started, and, throughout the rest of the semester, while I continue to rough animate and clean up, Niles will be able to take animation as soon as I complete it and get it composited - weeks, even months ahead of time. This gives infinite amount of time for feedback and critique on the film we're compiling to give way to improvement, as opposed to hurriedly cobbling everything into its rightful lump the week before graduation.

Not that I believe this is the full on right way to be going about a student film production. Frankly, I don't now - I've never done this prior to now. What I do know, however, is that the vast majority of projects prior to this who have adhered to more of a "sectional" strategy in production have, at least where CCS is concerned, frequently failed to reach a polished level of completion. Then again, I may fail utterly as well - I'm certainly as open to it as anyone! I'm just trying to avoid the like... hopefully I can manage, in the end!

Anyway, sleep deprived rambling aside, I am indeed doing clean up animation as of this week. I thought I'd post the stages I'm going through to get my intensely scribbley roughs into some semblance of coherency. Nothing I'm doing here is in any way out of the ordinary, but for those of you viewing who are less familiar with the animation process, the stages are rough animation, tie-down animation, and the final clean-up stage.

Mia, Kelsey and Hoobler at rest from Shot 079 - Rough, Tie Down and Clean Up stages

I'm hoping to get a couple of shots fully composited this weekend, including the one this entry's artwork is from, so keep an eye out for those. :)

More again soon, as always!
-Mel

Shot 030 WIP

This is Niles' first-pass at compositing for Shot 030 - Anya, Kelsey and Mia rest by a dwindling campfire, after an exciting day of introductions between Mia and the Gypsies. As always, I apologize for the lack of definition in this clip - Bloggers' compression rate is absurd. When we start to get final versions of these shots, I'll post them to Vimeo, and link to them here, which should provide HD video clips for everyone to view!

♥Mel

Caravan Shot 19 WIP

Sadly, as per usual, Blogger ate this video clip alive - most of its subtle SFX are not visible here, HOWEVER, I've uploaded a crisp, high quality (and bigger!) version of this video to DeviantArt for your perusal. Please check it out! ♥

Shot 19 of Caravan, in its latest Work In Progress stage. While we (Niles and I) are still fixing a couple of hitches with this, it does give a pretty spot-on idea of what the film will look like when it's completed. (For the record, I'm doing all of the animation and background renders, Kat Bongard has helped me with background color flats though not with this specific shot, and Niles Bontrager is doing all composeting and SFX.)

Notes on Effects:

Niles created the smoke and fire, water animation and camera effects from scratch in Adobe After Effects. I adore working on film projects with him, (I worked with him on his Senior Thesis film, Code Monkey, this past year) as our intuition towards each others' aesthetic sensibilities is so keen. He nailed the nostalgic look I was going for with this. You'll be amused to note that a little clip from Code Monkey is playing on Stu Bogey's television there at the left.

Things in line to be altered/fixed/improved.

1) We may slow this down more, even still, to allow the viewer time to take everything, as the camp ground is a bit of a clusterfuck of imagery - they are wanton to be!

2) There is some clipping present in the smoke on the right most campfire, near the Kavenaughs' camper. Must fix that.

3) We're still working on getting Charlie, the fellow fixing the pickup truck, to "pop" enough to be visible upon immediate viewing. At the moment, he entirely is not!

I'm open for suggestions! Also, I'll definitely post the completed version of this shot when we get to it. Thanks for your support, guys!

♥Mel

Caravan Fall09 Semester Progress

I have my end-of-the-semester review of my film's progress tomorrow afternoon, and as per usual with any student review, I've cobbled together a quick reel of a healthy portion of the work I've done throughout the semester (although this is hardly all of it - I could only fit in so much!) It's a little difficult to make out some of the rough animation in such a tiny dimension, I do apologize for that. Hopefully, however, it gets the point across well enough - The film's truckin' right along!

Put together in about 3 hours, throughout today, amidst my Maya and Sound Design classes.

Caravan Fall09 Semester Progress Reel

♥Mel