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

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

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

Smoke and Fire, First Pass

Earlier this month, Niles utilized one of my flat-color backgrounds to begin testing smoke and fire effects for some of the various campfires throughout Caravan. He is creating and animating the effects from scratch in Adobe After Effects. Below is the first pass of said effects - I apologize for the video compression, blogger ate what was once a rather sharp image. I will try to figure out how to get a better quality upload soon.

Fire and Smoke First Pass


-Mel