Cleanup - One for the Log

Did my first cleanup in Photoshop today with the Wacom (as opposed to inking over the pencils on paper) and dammit, it works better. I can onion skin and get in as close as I want to keep the lines tight and in place. Takes slightly longer and involves staring at a computer screen for ages, but it yields neater, less wobbly/boily animation.

Trooper HQ

My constantly expanding studio space. I'm gonna be sad when it comes time to take it all down.

Scene 18

Another 3D shot (partially).

Updated Leica Reel

After the last peer review there were some issues with the film that I'm trying to address - namely that some people got the impression Trooper was alone on the ship, which only served to confuse. So I've added in two scenes I cut long ago to try and fix this problem. I've added them to the leica reel so if you want to have a watch and let me know what you think, that'd be great!

Trooper Leica Reel from Mark Haldane on Vimeo.
Password: possward

Scene 14, aka Deep Shot

The first picture is how the shot starts, when the ball rolls in. The camera then cranes up and looks down the large chasm as seen in the second pic. By this point the camera movement will have tipped off the audience that this is a 3D shot, so I'm not too worried if it looks a bit 3D at the end... just as long as the first camera angle looks 2D enough so that the audience won't notice we've cut to a 3D environment before the camera move.

And here's another angle. It's not in the film, I just want to give another view of what Rob and I have put together. I'm really happy with it.

"Deep Shot" in progress

This shot is doing my head in. Playing with colours and shaders to try and get this 3D environment to look as much like my 2D backgrounds as possible. The pipes are about there but the rest has some work to be done. It's a slow, trial and error process that I do not enjoy. I also have to tweak a lot of the geometry (not visible at this angle) to match the 2D layout that comes after. That is my story.

Scene 4 Finished

For real this time. First scene to be cleaned up on paper.

Really not sure how much camera shake to add to this scene. On a small scale like this, it almost seems like too little, but on a big scale it seems a bit extreme...

Scene 4 in Progress

Cleaned up this scene today (in-betweened by Freya, making such an act possible) and then coloured and composited it. The technique worked well but I made a silly mistake that warrants me re-doing the whole thing. Grrr. Tomorrow's job.

Videos

I know a lot of the videos here still aren't playing. This is a known issue for Blogger and hopefully they'll fix it as soon as possible.

• "Thanks to everyone for all the detailed data on the video display issue. We have enough data now to move forward with our fix, so I'll be locking this thread to keep the house tidy. In the meantime, please keep an eye on our posted Known Issue about this bug, which we'll be updating the second we have more information to share:
  
  http://knownissues.blogspot.com/2010/01/some-users-are-experiencing-problems.html
  
  Much thanks again for your patience!
  
  Gatsby
  The Blogger Team"

Scene 40 Background

Rather proud of this one. Got the colours right. Makes me want to go back and redo some of my others ones, but alas I have not the time for such endeavours.

Scene 13

Warp Speed?

I am sick of inbetweening a slowly expanding fire cloud

Shall need to get some opinions on the explosion... I'm scared that it's not working well on 2s and that I'll have to do MORE 'tweens...

Explosion Shockwave

Having never properly animated an explosion before I decided today was going to be the day I started working on it. And I've ended up spending all my time on a new idea of having a shockwave element.

Ignore the crummy explosion in this video and just enjoy the first shockwave test.

EDIT: Okay, at that quality you can't really see anything. I'll upload a better quality version once I've animated the explosion itself.

RE-EDIT: It'll be interesting to experiment with the sound for this scene. I guess the sound of the explosion shouldn't be heard until the shockwave hits the camera (which isn't obvious here due to the quality and not enough camera shake).

Animatic Update

I've updated my animatic with some minor timing changes. I've added some of the animation I've done so far, as well as the first two pieces of music by Sarah Gillespie!