Monday Apr. 27th – In the morning I had a blood test appointment so I was out until the afternoon. Then I spent the day working on a scene for one of the FMPs I was helping on. While I was instructed to do cleanup on a four frame cycle, I actually got to do some animation as I had to create the loops on all the moving hair and cloth, I think this will make a nice showreel piece when it’s finished.
Tuesday Apr. 28th – I was given the ToonBoom file for a shot, but I had to export all the different assets myself and I wasn’t given a very detailed brief or a color script of what they wanted. I spent the majority of the time futzing with exports and then deciding how I was going to replicate the camera work in Ae. Then I did some very simple comp which the directors seemed happy with. I think they were on a bit of a time crunch so they just wanted anything that was passable, but I think my shots turned out nice.
For a quick breakdown of what I did; I started with adjustments on the backgrounds to make the contrast a bit starker, and the scene is quite intense. I tent to prefer higher saturation so that’s what I pushed for, while deepening the darks. Then I did an integration pass on the characters, adjusting their colors to match the scene. I also gave each character basic rim lighting from the environment. The directors wanted cel shading however to do that effectively I’d have to go into the animation and draw shadow and highlight layers by hand and we really didn’t have time for that, so ambient highights using an Inner Glow layer style, and strategic masking was the best I could whip up. Then I added environmental lighting coming from the screens and window in the scene. Usually I would give any lighting I do some sort of random opacity noise, but I didn’t really have time to get in the weeds with it. In my own compositing style I also tent to add chromatic aberration and noise as an adjustment over all of my scenes, but since I was only doing this one scene, I opted to leave the overall edits to the directors.
Wednesday Apr. 29th – Unfortunately I’m writing this a few weeks lte again and I cannot remember in detail what I did these following days.
I started the day with a mentor meeting, honestly we didn’t really discuss much productive, but we had an interesting chat about the state of the film and animation industries. Then I had to run to a ‘How to Pitch’ workshop run by the Pitch It team. I streamed it to the Sawtooth discord and we took notes to incorporate into the slides for the Pitch.
I also did my email duties for New Earth.
Thursday Apr. 30th – Frankly, I cannot remember what I ended up doing this day.
Friday May 1st – I was at work.
Saturday May 2nd – I believe I worked on the animation for the film students.
Sunday May 3rd – Again worked on the animation for the film students.