FINAL ANIMATION!!!!!!!....part 1...heh!

Roof top scene

Ive got to the stage in my animation where the character is on the roof.as ive been building my sets as i need them its time to get this one fin. Its the more important of the scenes as it will feature more often and will prob consist of more actual 3d modeling and textureing than the other scenes.

Here is a test from maya of the complete 3d models and textures. I still have to add sky and smoke from chimneys and all that other jazz.

It looks better if you hit the HQ tab the bottom of the youtube player!!

First part of my animation

this is the first part of my animation...still have lots to do. its not fully edited and i think ill speed up the animation a wee bit in some parts.

The pigeon that attacked my patience with a brick!

As you can tell from the title of this post the creating , rigging and animating of the pigeon has taken 3 days of work(original time scale was one day) and was a feckn nightmare.

IF YOU EVER GET ASKED TO CREATE A BIRD......SAY NO AND RUN VERY FAR AWAY SCREAMING "RAPE" AS YOU GO!!!

Anyway...here he is.....animation is a bit crap....to be honest all my animations are crap but this is not what my project focus is on so if i can get away with it looking slightly ok then that will be fine.

Only got a month left!!! I still have to build some models and do a wee bit of rigging but not as complicated as the main character. I have started completing scenes and compositing them. each section will prob take 2 days, which puts me on good track for the run up to the hand in.....i hope!

The image is my workflow for creating and compositing my animation. The first 2 pics are rendered in seperate layers in maya and put together in photoshop( as it is a still background). Then the photoshoped image is put into after effects with the main character composited over the top and then the shadow layer from maya. Im very pleased with the outcome.....now for all the rest.....SHIT! :)

This is my first ever complete scene for my animation. It is only 8 seconds long ( 5.52 mins to go!) but it has taken me a whole day to complete with all the compositing in aftereffects. I wanted to start with this scene as I'm researching symbolism and cinematography for my dissertation. Although the symbolism in this scene is fairly straight forward. The scene is the main characters hallway. He is an elderly man who lives on his own after the death of his wife. I wont go into the story at the moment but the main theme is about letting go and moving on. In this particullar composition i wanted to show some of these story points.

1: he lives on his own. The hallway is unkept with the walls peeling paint and generally dirty. I imagined that his wife would have cleaned the house and so on( poss a bit sexist but they are an older generation). Although the wife is no longer present i wanted to place elements of her in the scene. The lampshade and carpets I thought might be somthing an old lady would furnish her house with. You may not be able to see in this small video but you can see dust particles in the light coming down from the selling reinforcing the unclean factor.

2: he doesnt like to throw things away(the letting go part of the theme). The piles of newspapers and the objects in plastic bags hopefully represent this while adding somthing else vissually to the scene.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Have been getting on with the written part of 4th year as it has been mentioned of its great importance to the overall grade......at my crit last week Paul Harris told me of his great joy of not having to do a dissertation at the time he gained his degree!!

Some of the latest art work for my animation....its getting near animating time...i can nearly smell it on the air.