Crunchtime!
10:58:32
Long time since I wrote something here on the blog, sorry for that. The last couple of weeks have been really hectic for us, working early morning to late night seven days a week, that’s crunchtime!
What I have been doing since the last time is focusing on the recording of the live footage, organizing this, finding the best shots, planning what to use for the film and such things. We we’re planning to use a camera crane to get smooth and nice shots, but unfortunately that didn’t work out. And due to the lack of time and working with a five year old girl, some of the shots didn’t turn out as good as we hoped.
So there was much work stabilizing the material and getting the best possible result after tracking.
After that I did the matchmoving, which I can explain a bit more.
Matchmoving is the technique that you use to blend CG images with live footage. It’s the process of creating a camera that mimics the live footage camera as closely as possible, camera settings, position and perspective is very important for a good matchmove. After you have finished setting up the camera in your 3d software you use that camera to render out the CG to blend correctly with the live footage.
To do this I’ve used a 3d tracking program, and manual matchmoving for the static shots.
Planning the shots thoroughly is a really good thing to do, you will save a lot of time covering up your tracks in post, and you will get a better result faster if you have a good planning. Which I of course have learned the hard way =) But experience working with bad material makes you a better VFX artist in the future, working with good material is so much easier.
We have been working hard to render out all of the CG shots, it’s around 30 shots that needs to be set up right and rendered. And of course all of them didn’t turn out as we hoped the first time. So this has taken a lot of time and we have been running around between all of the computers we have borrowed from our classmates. The renderlist that we made was crucial to organize this work and fortunately it all turned out really well. And we could then turn to the compositing of all of it, enhancing the look and feel of the movie.
I’ve also been in close contact with Andreas Grenholm who have written and recorded the music and sound effects for the film. The music is so important and takes the film to the next level, I think it turned out great and I’m really satisfied with Andreas work.
I’m proud of our results even if we could have done things differently, but we have learned a lot and reached our goals for this project. I will return with a project wrap up and post mortem later, the film will be available to download soon, feel free to write your thoughts here. Thank you for your time and interest in our project.
