Final Renders of my two shots

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Tweaks to tracked shot

While this shot was being rendered and it was being looked over frame by frame, it became apparent that there were some glitches in the animation which needed amending. There was a slight jump from one frame to another, this may have been the animation or the tracking, but I fixed it up by changing the animation slightly and I raised the third plane up a bit. This was because it was really close to the ground and we wanted it to look as realistic a possible so these slight changed will hopefully get it there!

Here is a test render of the new shot, again it's not a final render but you get the idea of the changes I have made to it:

Cancel of shot 3

That didn't last long. I started it, set up all the referencing scenes and everything. I just have too much work to do with all of the other projects I am working on at the moment, and now I have to do E&E for next week. I would like to carry on with this shot, but other things are getting in the way and I wouldn't have it finished for the render date. I will do it over the summer when we start to work on this film some more.

Shot 3

Today I had the idea of having four planes all in a line with a camera over head so they were all diagonal in the shot. Each plane (starting from the outside one) would bank off and fly our of shot one by one. This will be another fully CG shot with matte painting and clouds etc.

Finalisation of shot 2

Here is my finalised version of my tracked shot. I am really happy with how it has turned out and it's all starting to come together with the textures and comping now too. This isn't a final render, it's just to show the animation of the planes:

Update

Feedback that I got was good from the director and producer. They both seemed really happy with the shot and liked the concept of it too. I just have a few alterations I want to change, such as animating the flaps and the timing of the third plane etc. here is what it is looking like at the moment:

Shot 2 (Tracked)

For this shot there will be 3 planes flying over head and into the distance. I will spend a bit of time trying to get the timings right for them all because I don't want to just have them all fly in shot and our of shot together as that would be a very boring shot! I also want to have each plane at a different distance to the camera, the third being the main one as this is what the camera will follow round because it is a panning shot across a field. Uploads will be sent to the producer and director again for feedback as well.

Finalisation of Shot 1

So taking into consideration all of the comments and tips and bits of feedback I got from my first draft, I have now finished the shot! This isn't a final render, its still work in progress at the moment but you can kinda of see the general shape of things and how it is going to look. I am pretty happy with how the animation turned out!

Update

So I have done a draft of this CG shot and sent it away to the director and producer and now have some feedback!



Overall they were both really pleased with how it was coming along and had a few points each that they wanted to touch on, areas that they think I could improve on it with. Here is what they said:

- Over steer as it loops back up
- Get the flaps animated and working right
- Smooth out the top of the arc
- Turn a little more on the way down
- More animation on the second plane
- Nose angles up more as it starts the loop
- Role rate = slow to fast
1) Nose goes up
2) Tilt into bank
3) Then goes up for the loop

These are all really good key points, and coming from a plane enthusiast, it is really helpful to hear these changed as they will all add to the realism of the final shot!

Shot 1 concept

Things have changed quite a bit from our early storyboards. My first shot will be fully CG and I want to play with the weight of the planes. I came up with having one plane loop over another plane in mid-air. I think this will be quite a nice concept shot and will give me a change to show my animation skills to the director as well. Each step I do, i will be sending over to the director and producer of this film so they can see my progress and give me some feedback on what they think needs changing, what they like and don't like etc.

I think for this shot I need to master getting the plane flying steady going forwards as this all had to look really realistic. Then I need to really look into how they fly up, instantly allowing them to loop over in one swift movement. I wanted to put a second plane in this shot to give it come depth and also a hint of narrative. If there is just one plane looping over in the air, its okay, and the animation may be spot on, but if I add a second plane just flying beside it, I feel it will add an extra 'character' to the shot, plus it gives me something to work with as I loop the first plane.

Reference material

In order to get the right weight for my shots, I had some serious research to do. I know next to nothing about planes, let alone Spitfires, and with our director being a Spitfire enthusiast, the pressure was on! I bought Pearl Harbor on DVD and watched lots of videos on YouTube of footage of Spitfires in flight and some CG material that people had done which I really liked. Here are some examples of the videos I used to help me understand how they worked a bit better:
















How do they fly?
In order to make it look photorealistic, we also needed the small touched to be in there, so I had to research on how the plane wings/flaps move according to what its doing in the air!

Animation test

Here is my first test at the first draft of the referenced rig. My animation is terrible, I know. I need to get used to animating planes and research into how they move, fly, react with the rind and how the flaps work etc! Weight is key!

Filming Day 2

Hot and sunny again! I looked up another location on Google maps and used street view to see if it was suitable. Here is what i found:

I showed the group and they were all really happy with our new location so on we went! This time it had us running from sheep, cutting ourselves on barbed wire fences and admiring the beautiful Kent country side with some brilliant views!

We wanted to get the landing shot and the intro shot done today. First we found a location for another flyby shot, so we filmed it for tracking. Then we came to a flat open field where it was perfect for our Landing shot! In this field, we filmed another flyby shot too, but this time much lower so we could have the planes fly really close to the camera, and we wanted to include 3 or 4 planes into this shot.

We also took some photos to get the lighting right, so we spray painted a ball grey, to act as our lambert in Maya, and we help it up to use as a reference for the lighting! pretty clever if I say so myself.

Filming Day 1

 I knew a really good location that was close to my house that would be perfect for filming our shots. We packed up all our gear and took to the road! We set up in the middle of a field which had a slight incline in it and trees surrounsing it. we could see Biggin Hill from where we were, which is where our pilot Tuck was actually based! In order to tack this shot, we had to set out tarcking point, markers if you will, so that greg could use this to track out the shot into 3D space i the computer which let us animate to it.

We had fun pushing 70 of these into the hard ground. The sun was crazy hot and when we came to filming, we couldn't even see the markers because there were too small! Eventually we had to use ourselves as markers by standing in each corner of the 'grid' we wanted to create to track from. With that said, we got a nice piece of footage that we were able to animate too. This would be for our flyby shot.

Planning of shots

Okay! So we have our brief, we know what we have to do so lets let started on some shots! First of all we wanted to show off the plane, so we thought a nice intro shot would be really nice as this gives us a chance so get some really nice animation in there of the plane banking and flying along steadily. Just this simple shot would need a lot of reference material to support it because I have never animated planes before! Here is a storyboard for the first shot we came up with:

 

Its only a really rough storyboard, just to get the camera shots planned out so we aren't animating from a blank canvas. The model is at its very first basic stage but we are using referencing in this project via dropbox, so I can animated from the start, and the model, textures and rig get updated as we go, meaning we are all working on our parts at the same time! Took a while to get my head around it but its really good and I would defiantly reference whenever I can. This shot will be fully CG as it is in the air. We will use matte paintings for the environment and the clouds as well.

Here is our second shot we came up with. Its a flyby where the plane just fly's from one side of the screen to the other, but quite high up. We plan to do this with live action footage that we will go and film, and then track the shots for me to animate in.We will use our directors camera as it is of high quality and a proper production camera. here is our rough storyboard for our flyby shot:

Shot number 3 is a landing shot. We figured if we have an intro, a flyby, we now need a landing shot! We plan to make this one live action with CG in it too, because we can film it standing on the ground, panning round as the plan comes into shot, lands and eventually comes to a stop. Here is our storyboard for our third shot:

Now we have these sorted, we can start animating tests after we get the first rig reference.

Brief

For this Project, our group are working as the VFX team for a client who is a Director from Framestore. The writer and producer is working closely with us also as I have been told he has a lot know-how when it comes to planes and especially Spitfire's! As for the film, it is based on a famous Spitfire pilot called Tuck and we will all help to produce 3-4 shots of the planes doing different maneuvers and movements etc.

Ollie has discussed the brief with Chris (Director) and Greg (Write and Producer) and is keeping close contact via emails throughout our progress on this project. We are pretty much their Research & Development department. As this film hasn't started production yet, they aren't sure how to shoot it and whether its easier to make fully cg shots or to film on location which would mean a bigger budget! We have to make this plane look realistic, so a lot of work will be doing into researching how they move and how they work. As an animator I will need to get loads of reference material and just watch it over and over and keep doing tests so that I can get the weight and movements right.

From what I understand at the moment, we will be doing both live action (tracked) shots with CG in them and fully CG shots.

Team roles:

- Myself: Animator

- Nick Georgeou: Animator

- Ollie Kane: VFX supervisor, modeler and texturing artist

- Stephanie Joy: Compositor and Matte Painter

- Sanjay Sen: Rigger and Lighting

- Greg Martin: VFX TD and Tracker