*Cue anime-style backdrop, stylized hair-do and motions with sound effects.*
*Cue random stage in the middle of nowhere, with head-pounding music that makes little creatures in little balls ready to fight each other tooth and nail*
Well well well. We finally meet, finals department. I’ve journeyed many days to finally get here, and I get a chance to show you what I’ve got.
Before I begin this post, let me tell you that I’m about to go into geekery, for the relation between the coming months now, and the game I grew up with. Let me relate to you that ANP is like the preparation for the Elite Four… Yes, from Pokemon. Psyching yourself out to make sure you’re ready to engage in a rapid battle that won’t stop. No poke-centers, only healing potions and a cup of mountain dew. The only thing that can go wrong is if you screw up, in which you’ll have to start over, or if something miserable happens, like your mom wants you to turn off the console at the dinner table.
Well yes, my analogy is pretty precise. ANP is the month before finals, to prepare for your final months in PCC1, PCC2, PCC3, and DRC. You get everything you need ready to make awesome assets to be on your demo reel.
Basically, this month is to bring to you the important of Pre-production, to make sure that when you start a project, you don’t deviate away from what you need to do.
As a compositor, I was required to prepare a wide variety of assets. For PCC1 I had to find lots of footage for Keying, Rotoscoping, and Tracking. PCC2 and PCC3 are so similar I’ll group them together. Basically they’re the essence of integrating live-action and CG elements to create a final environment. Seamless integration is key in this, and what I look forward to most working on.
Upon intent day, we were to present our many different and diverse ideas to our instructors to get approval to proceed working on. I was very happy that I got all my first ideas approved, and immediately began working.
My daily routine was preparing pre-pro for final turn-in, color and shape tests, and creating two styleframes for PCC2 and PCC3. These styleframes had to be finished and reviewed by third week, and near 90% completion. I was very well prepared, getting my things ready and organized, and worked on many other aspects of the projects, like determining the size of my Digimatte for PCC3 and how I’ll be working on PCC2 (which is projected to be all in Nuke). Oh yeah, something I’m very looking forward to, using more advanced ideas to help my workflow.
In the class I’ve experimented with using the CameraTracker node in NukeX, which makes great use of an auto-tracking way of getting tracking data. In that I’ve also used it to find depth-passes and creation depth-generation from an image sequence with no layers. You can believe me, I was amazed with the potential use of this discovery.
So how did my assets turn out? Well check out my Proof of Concept to see what I’ll be doing. This is a rough-cut of how my demo reel will potentially turn out to show my skills in matte creation, tracking, scene recreation, and 2.5D environment creation.
If you want to check out things like my process books for pre-pro, go to my website at www.endyarts.com and click on my downloads section to check that out.
Now that ANP is over, I dive into what I’ve been waiting nearly two years for. Yes I’m super excited, and if you know me, yeah… I already had half of PCC1 done before I began (I got done with ANP a little early, so I bashed out the key and half the roto as soon as I could) And who knows, I just wanna get a head start on my stuff!
-endy