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.

Had a go at animating the shadows to create a timelapse effect. the angle is odd because I only rendered out the main buildings and not all of them......that would have taken all day!! The sky is a mixture of BBC stock footage and filters in After Effects. I think it might run to quickly but then if i slow it down it looks jerky....oh well ....I better model the rest of the scene and start on the others scenes!!!!!

At this point in time I'm just trying to build all my scenes and light them accordingly. I have done a couple of compositing tests that i thought would help with work load but to be honest its not really helping. I have more control over the scene but it takes just as long to render it all in separate layers as it does to just render one image( that kinda makes sense i suppose)