Progress

My last shot took me 6 days to animate, most shots are animated in one or two days (disregarding the time it takes setting up the set).
Right now I'm preparing the last 3 scenes of the movie (about 14 shots). These shots are some of the most important ones for my film.

 A still from my last shot:

So there's alot of pressure to get them right!
Besides preparing the shots I also have alot of post-production work to do. 95% of the shots are shot with a greenscreen, and not all shots key out that well. Sometimes I get holes in my robot, which I have to patch up.
Otherwise some shots may look like this:

Notice the small orange dots (click to see it better), sometimes there's alot, sometimes there's none. Kinda looks like acne.

Some behind the scenes pics:

 My animating table is a huge mess as you can see. Lot's of mouth/neck replacements in this shot.

This is him after finishing the shot, I don't think he's that exited about animation anymore than I am!

Sneak Peek

I'm still very very busy with animating, at the moment I have 4 scenes left, about 14 shots to animate.

I've had some camera troubles a few weeks ago, almost had to send my 60D for repairs, but luckily I found out that there was something wrong with my usb cables. Apparently when you use a usb extension cord it can frak up your camera connection on the newest imacs. The stupid part is that it cost me about a week to fix the problem, so hurray for wasting precious animation time!

Anyway, I have a small making of/teaser video for you guys. It's basically a timelapse of how I animated the robot's walkcycle, and the rough end result. It's the uncomposited version of the cycle since I really wanted to show off some animation, but I don't want to spoil anything of the film.



The cycle looks a bit jittery now, but it looks better when it actually moves forward :)

Pics

Some pics of animating the 2nd walkcycle:

And one of a shot I recently completed, I'm not going to show the real shot, so here's a shot from a different angle:

Walkcycle

At the moment I'm really busy with the robot walkcycle. I took some key positions off of frames I shot with the robot. Now I'm making a test animation in tvpaint to figure out the timing and the spacing.
If all goes well I can animate the robot using the pencil test as a guide, it's pretty tricky though since the robot is a bit clunky and large, so there's a possibility that he can't hold all the positions like in the pencil test.

In a day or two I'll find out!

Robot pictures

It's been ages since I've updated, alot of stuff has been going on in the meantime, which distracted me from posting any new stuff.
Currenty I don't have my own workspace, haven't worked on my film for over a month now due to the Christmas vacation, and the fact that my school has not assigned me a new workspace yet (apparently they don't want me to graduate?).
I have been enjoying the time off (which I really needed) and been working on some freelance stuff. It's gonna be a little tough to start up again, but I still need to set up and animate more than half of the shots for my film.

Anyway, some more robot pictures in this post.

Replacement mouths for the robot.

Robot on rigging block for torso shots.

Robot ready to be animated.

Time-lapse

A short time-lapse, this was a 9 hour animating session for about 8 seconds of animation.

Robot in motion

I've finished two new shots this week!
They are the first shots I animated with my robot puppet. I try not to show too much, so instead of showing the shots, I will show you one of my test animations as a teaser. I will try to post some time-lapses too, when I get the time to edit them a little.

It's not much but that's all I can show right now without spoil too much.
I did some more little tests like this to get a feel of the puppet. The animations in the final shots will be better :)

Set Building & Animating 3

I feel really original making up these names for my blog posts.

I've moved from my father's studio to a room in my school, I had to move ALOT of stuff, materials, props, setfloors, equipment, etc. This forces me to leave my house to actually work on my animation, instead of sitting at home like a hermit. So I guess that's awesome!

I've animated a few scenes so far, still too few according to my "schedule", one I haven't updated in weeks since some stuff happened that "slightly" delayed my shooting schedule.
Anyway, here are some obscure (and blurry) photos of the studio and the set.
I try to resist to not post all of my final shots, since that would ruin the final animation I guess.
So that's why I'm posting these here photos instead, yes!

Animating a warning sign for my first shot.

Setting up a post-apocalyptic shot in the city.

Unpainted city ruin props, I already have alot of them (both foam and paper), but I still needed lot's to fill shots and for matte paintings.

Set Building & Animating 2

Some photo's of the set from the previous post, from a different angle.







The size and proportions where all done by hand, looking through the image capture application. For the dirt road I used string and needles so I could adjust the road to get the right false perspective, before actually painting the road.
For this shot I had to create some mini props, like the rocks you see in the distance, and the streetlights. The most fun however was trying to make an even thinier car wreck than my other car props.



The material is quite delicate, so cutting out the tiny windows was quite the challenge. If I had the time I would have put some wheels on it, but the car is too far away to notice that anyway.

Set Building & Animating

Finally, animating!
I started building the first (and might I add the largest) set for my film a few weeks ago, unfortunately I got ill for a few days, so the process was a bit slow.
It was quite tricky because it's a false perspective shot :)

The following shot is the first shot of my film.



To show you the scale of my set.



It's still the raw unkeyed and uncomposited version of this shot, but here it is, I animated the focus-pull by hand. Check the full HD version!



My next post will feature some making of pics of the set, to show you how the set looks from different perspective.