Wednesday 10 October 2012

Canterbury Anifest 2012


I had a fantastic time going down to Canterbury for the first time. I volunteered to help so I go in for free (because I'm cheap like that :D ). I got to work the lights in the main hall all day, which ment that I got to see all the talks! So all in all a good day! I especially went to see the talk by 'Double Negative' but I also really enjoyed 'Aardman'.


Eamonn Butler came down from De-Neg. He oversees the development of the studios Creature Animation Dept. He has worked on Hellboy 2, Paul and most recently on John Carter. Double negative has worked on other titles from Harry Potter to Inception. I found his talk really helpful as a window into the professional work of Effects Houses. He spoke about using different techniques to create the illusion that actors were riding on CGI 8 legged creatures. The actor would ride on a saddle mounted on top of  specially designed expensive vehicles (although it kind of just looked like a small car stripped to its bones). then the BG was filmed on its own and the vehicles were painted out so that CGI characters could be composited in. This task  seems more difficult to create than it is to explain, because the animators would have to match the exact movement of the rider on the saddle with the creature under it. The creature has to be shown taking the weight of the rider, these subtle notions of physics is what sells the shot. After the talk I got the opportunity to talk to him about what I should show to Double Negative in my show reel, specially for background, scenery and terrain. He said: 'As long as you can set a mood in your work, we can teach you the rest'. So this tells me that I don't particularly need to be the best at modelling, as long as I can show that I work well, combining live action with CGI and can create the correct mood in the shot, It will better my show reel.


Even though I'm not studying stop motion I took an interest in Aardman's talk. According to my research into the history of Effects work, before CGI the Optical effects were created with a combination of camera placement and miniature sets. Creatures were captured using the same technique used in stop motion, and later manually composited into the film by exposing the stop motion and live action together.


Jim Parkyn and Will Beacher came to talk about Ardman's latest film, 'Pirates! In an adventure with Scientists'. Jim has lead model making teams, and worked on Chicken Run, Shaun the Sheep as well as Pirates! Will joined as a trainee animator but is now a lead animator  who has worked on Wallace an Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit and developed the Pirate Captain as well as directing three short animated films. They discussed how they used their many techniques to animate the characters, especially in crowd scenes, where stationary BG characters were simple clay models. To get a feel for mouth movements, they created CGI versions of the models head and manipulated the lips/jaw to create believable speech. The point that really fascinated me was the fact that their set for 'Blood Island' took up about half the space in the hall.


I really liked the design for this set as I watched the film because each shop  or building was named to co-exist in the pirates world. These were almost like side gags and I could see how traits cross over from Compositing believable BGs to building stop motion sets. The attention the detail at first seemed unnecessary to me because I thought, if something is going to be blurred out, in the distance or be panned across quickly, it shouldn't matter whether it looks right or not, because the audience wont remember it. But in professional practice and in my research I see that it is in fact these little immaturities that break the illusion of the shot.

  

They also mentioned that they used to fix the crack between the jaw and head of the character by adding clay, but found that it was much easier to fix in post production. This work falls into the category of visual effects, which means that I can show my skills of attention to detail, when compositing in Post off to a stop motion company as well as a VFX House.

So Yeah, all in all a good day!
 

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