Tomorrow is my final and next Thursday I will have graduated from college!!
I'll post updates for my project and then thoughts on my undergrad thesis as a whole Vis Dev Current Progress
Modeling Current Progress
Animation Current Progress
Music Current Progress
Lighting/Rendering/Compositing Current Progress
Thoughts on my thesis: Overall this was pretty much one of the most amazing projects I've ever experienced in school :) I learned a ton about a lot of different areas such as directing, producing, and even modeling. Most of all this project really helped me become more confident in myself as an artist because I have proven to myself that I was able to bring my vision to life and I myself alone carried a majority of this project to where it is now in just 39 weeks. I thought this was the perfect project to have my senior year because it used everything I learned in my previous years. Having taken a lot of illustration classes allowed me to critique and communicate with my visdev team. My experience with design elements such as composition and balance as well as my storyboarding experience really helped when I was storyboarding and doing previs. My very limited experience with modeling helped me a TON when dealing with the technical difficulties I was having with some of the models. Those are just a few of the many skills I acquired through college that became essential to the success of this project. My main criticism of this project was how much time I spent doing everything except animation. It was really frustrating that I spent a whole semester spending over half of my time working on things that weren't animating. I know that animation is at the end of a pipeline and I did enjoy the things that I had to do for the project like directing and producing... But when it's your last year in college and you know you have to get a job in 8 months, it is pretty scary to not animate for long periods of time. Second semester was a lot more fun though because if I wasn't animating at least I was critiquing animation. As for the future of this project, I think it is essential for the program to find a way to give the people helping out on the projects some sort of school credit for doing it. I honestly could have finished my whole entire project by this time if I had a dedicated crew (or even just one dedicated person from each discipline). It took twice as long for things to get done because there wasn't much incentive for others to spend more time on the project. It shouldn't take a month to do 48 frames of animation but when you have real classes to attend to, other things fall to the wayside, and it is completely understandable. Others I have talked to agree that often our biggest obstacles we're the amount that others were able to help out. My advice to SJSU A/I students who do a 3D animated thesis in the future:
So yeah! Super long last post on this blog/practically my diary haha. I plan on continuing to work on this project and finish it as soon as possible. Since I have an internship over the summer, I am not planning on working on this during that time (plus I want to enjoy living in SF!!) so I will start working on it again in the fall. Time for a large update! I haven't posted in a while because life has been pretty crazy lately with school, the BFA Gallery, getting ready for graduation, and finding a new place because I got an internship for the summer! :) Vis Dev
Modeling
Hair Drawover and Final
For class Friday we had to update our animatic for our midterm. I compiled all of the current assets and backgrounds with the animations in Maya. This required a lot of creating planes and putting the layout texture on them and adjusting some of the shader's properties to make sure the image was showing how the painters intended. Then I playblasted out every single shot again and compiled the animation with the previs for shots that haven't been touched yet. Overall, I'm really happy with what I'm seeing! It's crazy to see things starting to fit together!! The biggest problems I see are the discrepancies between the paintings and 3D assets and the lack of animations. Compiling all of this together has helped me really realize where the gaps are and what needs to be worked on next.
These last two weeks have been incredibly busy with this thesis and internship stuff. The whole semester I have been working on school 40 - 50 hours a week and it still doesn't feel like it's enough time. This project has been an amazing learning experience but I would never recommend that someone do a 3D short by themselves haha. Production:
Things are finally coming together!!! Ahh being director is a huge delay of gratification. During preproduction you're like "I just hope this comes together" but once actual production begins it is so fulfilling to see things working! :)
Production
So I wrote out this really long a detailed post only to have weebly log me out while I was writing it and I lost everything... so here is a shorter version, sorry :/
Vis Dev
Previs:
This week was an incredibly long and hectic week and I've never felt stretched so thin. Since I'm by myself on this project (not teamed up with anyone else in my class), I'm doing everything from directing to previs, art directing, critiques, emails, animation, paintovers, and more. I really need an art director or two.
Previs:
Previs:
Previs - Second Pass |
About
At the Wood's Edge is a 1 minute trailer that I am directing. This trailer focuses on a young girl named Ahmi. She is from a tribe that took refuge generations ago in the center of a magic forest protected by Gaia. This forest is their safe haven for the lands outside the forest are warped and monsters run rampant. Ahmi is forced to go on an unexpected journey to perform a ritual that will renew Gaia's energy in the forest and keep her people safe. Crew
Director Kristin Campbell Animation Supervisor Scott LaFleur Animators Kristin Campbell Faranak Keshmiri Chris Larsen Brandon Moore Jessica Tong Hunter Welker Phil Yoon Music Kallan Nishimoto - Flytrap Studios Modelers Russell Alindogan Byron David Producer Allie Turner VisDev Art Director Brandon Coates VisDev Brandon Coates Anna Corrales Eric Garcia Darlene Mapanao VisDev Manager Amanda Hsu Support
Don Ta Archives
April 2016
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