Evergreen by Yoann Lemoine :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjGlKMcEQk
Fantasia 2000 FireBird -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FWq17CT6Cs&feature=fvst
I wanted to take different approach to this project, I chose the music first without thinking about too heavily about the animation yet. After choosing a few different pieces of music, I showed them to my team partner Antonio Cole and in the end we decided to use the track Time Will Tell by X-Ray Dog because the track ends nicely in the middle.
X-Ray Dog -- Time Will Tell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VOt_Mlrwnc
We discussed different ideas on what part we should animate and what the visuals would be. The music naturally divides into short parts as it has sections where the music fades out and then back in again. We decided that the first one minute and forty seconds mark was a nice section to animate to so once we chosen the segment, we talked about the visuals to place alongside the music. I wanted to go with something simple in shape, but visually pleasing to look at. With this in mind, we finalised our ideas and came up with his part entailing a book with the camera panning around it and the text lighting up. The part that I wanted to do included a crystal with the camera moving around it from different angles and light strikes flying around them. Also, towards the end of my part of the music the colour of the crystal would change to the music.
Below are some rough design notes for my part of the animation. They're to create an idea of where I was going to go with this part and it was easier to show Tony what I was going to do.
I created the crystal in Maya as it made it a lot easier to capture the shots that I wanted to in 3D than 2D due to the experimental flexibility. Creating the crystal turned out to be a lot more difficult than I’d initially expected as I could not get the right look for what I wanted. As a result I searched using the internet for a way to achieve a crystal look to an object and found a tutorial for something similar. After following the tutorial I found that the render time for one frame of the scene took far too long as it used Mental Ray to render and decided to go back to Maya software rendering and light the scene myself without the tutorial. Changing back to Maya software for the rendering did not show the reflection that I wanted, but the rendering time was within the project time frame. Which was an unfortunate sacrifice to the quality, but it was a decision that had to be made.
After rendering out each camera separately in Maya, I took the clips into After Effects and lined the sequence up appropriately with the music. To create the light streaks I used a tutorial from videocopilot.net. After these streaks were all completed, I concentrated on changing the colours of the crystals in synchronisation with the music. Then it was time to add some atmospheric effects into the sequence to bring it all together, I did this by adding in some fog and mist when the camera neared the top of the crystal.
I found this project to be a good opportunity to see what others in the class were good at. Unfortunately, I found myself first in a group that did not get the ball rolling within the first two weeks of the project which was the reason behind working within a group of just two, as we left this group to make our own. This group had been fine until the point that I learned that the other person had not rendered out their part on the Tuesday of the submission week. I was told it would be done within six hours - this was not the case and to my knowledge the render had not been completed on the day before the deadline. Also, it is hard to complete the project as a group submission when the other part has not be completed and so far I have not gotten anything at all back from the person. I found this very difficult to know what to do, but have given them an ADrive account to place their work in so I can put it together. The communication has been something of a problem, but I had hoped for everyone to pull their weight and get the work finished on time. Also the problem with this is that I will be putting the animations together and this leaves me little time for anything to be done if there is a problem with the files. It was incredibly frustrating having to constantly add additional work loads to my schedule as a direct result of the other person's consistently missed deadlines.
The project has been good overall, but it does make me feel that working within a group is very difficult when others do not pull their own weight or have a professional attitude to the project - be it working to deadlines or informing of any problems. If I had the opportunity to take on this project again, I would like to have done it on my own or with a different group so that I could spend more time actually doing the work rather than excessively pulling additional weight. Although the experience wasn't what I had hoped and practiced for, I appreciate that the skills of group-oriented work is important in the industry and am thankful for the chance to be able to experience working in a group once again. I thought it was interesting trying to find a balance between spending time performing well myself and trying to pull the other team.
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