On with the Show!

It has occurred to me that I haven’t been keeping this blog up to date in terms of my progress on the film.

I certainly have been blogging about the problems, oh Lordy Lou, those problems…

But not about the actual work I’ve done on Porcelain.
So it’s time for a statues update!

Here is my current leica reel:

As you can see, all of act one is animated

Zero animation for act two

And the majority of act three is animated. I left out the ending because I don’t really have one right now. I have some ideas but I’ll get there when I get there.

I feel the animation I have done so far is lacking speed variation in the movements and over all feels too slow. I am having a difficult time getting passed the floating, underwater look of CG. However, I think it is getting there, maybe after a few more goes… I also think professional sound design will help it out.

Act two has no animation because it is by far the most complex part of the film. I do not have all the elements ready yet. I feel that the pacing is off. I’ll deal with that when everything is ready in CG.

I need a lot of dolls…

I have been playing with the sound for my reel. Following a brilliant suggestion from the very clever Mr. Martin Rose, I added bird sounds to the music box. I love it! It adds a surreal element that I had been striving for. The music box now feels unrestrained and alluring yet far more foreboding. To counter the music box, I added a clock ticking as a theme for the dolls. I like how the repetitive sound enhances the themes of mechanical, orderly and uniformity. The two sounds contradict each other beautifully, adding levels of meaning to Porcelain that I had always been wanting yet didn’t know how to articulate until now. Of course my sound work is very crude, but it gives me a glimmer of what I was hoping to achieve in this film.

After successfully creating the music box shot, I have been craving more finished looking work. 

However, most of the animation I have done so far can’t be rendered yet due to technical difficulties with the protagonist model. It’s very frustrating to have so much animation, but not be able to render it with textures.

 

I use something called point cache to bring the animation I have done in Softimage to the textured models in Maya.

Look! It’s working and everything is happy sunshine and flowers!

Lalalalalalalala, happy!

But when I do the same process to Anna, she ends up like this. (you can read about how this makes me feel in the blog post before this one. Hint: it’s not happy)

There are a couple of things I could try, but trouble shooting is not a very fun game to play. And every time I open this file I feel a strong urge to punch Anna in her none existing face.

So I’ve decided to change gears and focuses on creating a demo reel. I will still be working on my film, but giving myself a chance to create something to show.  It’s pretty annoying having done all this work only to end up with monster, no face girl.

For the time being Anna McNoface is going on the back burner

And I’ll make dolls

I’m working on this shot

The Dolls 

Here’s some work in progress of the new dolls

Original doll  

I thought the clothes where crummy on the original so I redid them, this is Anna's main doll

Needed more dolls for act two, in the middle of texturing this one 

Just finished modeling this one, Organizing the UVs now. Thought it would look cool in shiny green  for the  time being 

When everything is said and done I want Porcelain to look something like this:

But you know, in CG, not pixilation animation

There’s a lot of work left to do

I don’t know when I’ll finish Porcelain or if it’ll ever get done
But I’m easing myself back into this monster of a project.

As they say

The show must go on!