Post-Production Highlights (MoCap)

This year’s MoCap study has been both an informative and stressful ride, and I will aim to all the techniques I’ve learnt and issues I’ve dealt with upon completion of the last few bits of the assessment in this entry.

Watch a montage of my pre-vis reference videos here

Data Clean-up. I found the clean-up process on Cortex to be the most time-consuming even after splitting the data between us in an attempt to be efficient. We may have been able to avoid some issues such as marker switches, but sometimes miss minor errors until after exporting, most of which were due to using Cubic join too much and unintentionally having markers fly off, causing us to restart the process. Fortunately, we were advised to work on duplicates of our original data, just so there are increments and backup available to prevent us from losing any more time and potentially crucial files. As soon as we finished clean-up I compiled our new data into a folder for everyone in the group, and from then on it was an individual project.

Motion Builder-Maya Pipeline. Throughout this year in my Digital Design course I’ve had a lot of experiences with 3D from previous projects (namely character modelling, rigging and animation). With that said, I didn’t have too much trouble with the supposed complexity of the technical work in the pre-vis so I was able to go through the tutorials and adapt to the techniques quite quickly. I’m not so familiar with Motion Builder, so after I finished adding extra hand animations, I worked on trimming in Maya via the Time Editor, surprisingly a feature I’d never used before, just so I have all my assets perfectly in sync in the farm scene. I wanted to be able to edit my character animations in Maya as I would in a video-editing program and the Time Editor allowed me to do this, but of course this discovery didn’t come without complicated issues, which taught me to be flexible and work around the problem. Regardless, I did enjoy the process in Motion Builder and found this assignment to be a helpful introduction.

Playblasts. I submitted my pre-vis draft for the formative on the 25^th of September, and got my lecturer’s feedback. The only problem he had with it other than the absence of a crowd and a police rifle which I was meant to add in later on, was some close-up shots not having enough head room for my character. He also wanted me to do change my low-angle establishing shot at the start of the scene to something a bit more eloquent, which I did along with other improvements like the addition of audio and laser beams for my summative.

Overall, I am pleased with my first Motion Capture assignment, now having a better understanding of the technical complexity of crafting a pre-vis sequence.

War of the Worlds Storyboard (MoCap)

This year’s Motion Capture assignment brief had two scripts attached, Godzilla and War of the Worlds, one of which we are told to adapt and create a short pre-visualisation sequence based on. The sequence has to effectively tell a story, and should therefore comprise of characters that are motion captured and depicted through virtual cameras on a 3D environment.

In Week 1 I formed a group with 5 other people (Emiri, TJ, Angie, Narjis and Iris) and together we chose to do ‘War of the Worlds’:

Storyboarding. Before production, planning our shots in a storyboard is the first key step. Outlining ideas is my forte and I personally enjoyed this part of the project, producing a digital storyboard that best visualises my take on the story. The WOTW script proves to be challenging with a very specific chain of events, which could potentially to limit us from being original. Thankfully we were granted the creative choice of crafting our own endings to the scene, and so my group thought it best to do individual storyboards for our own separate interpretations. We came up with two alternate endings—one where both the cows and Sanchez survive, and another where they don’t—which we all agreed to capture for everyone to use. I wanted to do a tragic comedy, and so I went with the latter.

Read about my reflection of the capture session here

Read about the post-production highlights of the project here

Motion Capture Session

Much planning and acting rehearsals later, my group (Emiri, TJ, Narjis, Angie and Iris) booked for our capture session, scheduled Friday afternoon, 18^th of August. I was in charge of directing TJ’s acting and ensuring we had recorded every scene needed, starting from what we all had in common and finally the alternate endings. This role was new to me and being a perfectionist means stressing comes easy, but kudos to my group’s competence as well as Javier’s confidence boost and advice, without whom we wouldn’t have pulled through.

Find out what the project is all about here.