Week 9: Editing and sound effects & Project Summary

This week we rendered the last few sequences of our animation and finished the editing and compositing.

The final result of our animation will be put in the next post. Here I just make a summary for our project and review some of our works.

Editing and sound effects:

As there was a lot of footage, I lacked some ideas at the beginning of the edit.But then I found it was a good idea to split all the footage into several folders in AE and edit them later.

As for the sound effects, all of them are from the website Herman gave us, which is a free website and very easy to use.

Then I also added the credits and end credits song, I think it works very well.

Project summary:

Team members and roles:

Zhenzhong Liang: Script writing; Character Modeling (old man & robot); Texturing and Shading (robot); Lighting; Rendering; Compositing.

Ziyin Wang: Script writing; Layout; Animation (all shots)

Wanxuan Liu: Script writing; Storyboard; Character Design; Texturing and Shading (old man, part of livingroom); Lighting; Rendering; Sound and Editing.

Guanze Wu: Script writing; Rigging (old man, robot, props); Texturing and Shading (scene: kitchen & livingroom); Lighting; VFX (cloth & water sim); Rendering.

Yuehui Chen: Character textures refinement.

Script and Storyboard

At first, we decided to make a cel-shading scifi background animation film, but we were not sure what to tell in the story. Therefore, we wrote the script individually and shared our scripts together. After disgussion, we finally chose one of the script and spent some time to refine it.

Here is the initial script:

In a near-future, robot is widely used in people’s daily life. A computer virus explosion lead to a chaotic, which strains the relationship between the oversensitive protagonist and his suspected robot. A misunderstanding drives the protagonist to fight with his suspected robot, and died accidentally in this fighting. The story finally shows that the robot is not affected by the virus at all. 

Then I drew the storyboard. We discussed about the storyboard later and realized that part of the camera in the storyboard needs to be adjusted. In order to understand camera movements, we shoot a video as a reference for our layout and camera settings.

Modelling

We evaluated the modelling tasks in this project and decide to model the character and robot by ourselves, and other objects in the room would be collected from the website.

The character and robot were modelled by Zhenzhong, other models are searched by me and Guanze. The design and modelling of the robot went smoothly. However, we met some problems when we designed the character. I finally drew concept art for the character, which solved this problem.

Rigging

Guanze did all the rigging after modelling. Guanze rigged the character and robot at first, all the rigging is rigged without any script or plugins. After that he also rigged a newspaper that can be folded and curved.

Texturing

After modelling and texturing, we started to texturing our characters and the scene. We invited Yuehui Chen, who studies character animation in CSM, to help us to do some texture stuff. I finished the first version of character textures and Zhenzhong finished the robot textures. Guanze did the first version of scene textures. After that part of the furniture inside the room were replaced by new models.

Layout

When we were making textures, Ziyin started to build the layout. We were satisfied with part of the camera in the first version of the layout. However, the other part of it still had some problems. Therefore, Ziyin did some research on the camera shots and then finished the second version of the layout. The second version looks much better and we decided to animate based on this one.

Lighting

We then started to light the scene. Guanze, Zhenzhong and I finished the scene lighting. Guanze did the basic lighting, after that me and Zhenzhong refined part of it. Besides Zhenzhong and Guanze also figured out how to make the proper AOVs for toon shading. After that we rendered the scene and test the rendered layers inside After Effect.

Animation

Ziyin did all the animations by himself, which can be considered as a huge work. He did neary 40 shots of animations. He was quite strict with himself and even remade part of the animations. Thanks for his works, our characters starts moving and the scene becomes much more interesting.

Rendering, VFX and Compositing

In the next few weeks, we started to render animations, while Ziyin kept animating other unfinished animations. Guanze and me rendered animation layers, while Zhenzhong dealed with the compositing. Since some of the shots requires water simulation and cloth simulation, Guanze use Houdini to simulate these visual effects.

Sound and Editng

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to ask sound art students to help us make sounds and music. Therefore, we decided to finish this part by ourselves. I finished the editing of the whole animation and the sound. The time was so limited that we only have a chance to make the first version of animation. Though part of the animations can be improved to another level, the final result was still satisfied to us.