Week One:
For the first week, brainstorming an idea is quite key, as well as setting a brief for our group to build upon and work. Therefore, after discussing with my peer(s), we have settled on a format of TV Opening Sequences, as we have found creative forms of it that allow expressive storytelling.
Project Brief: [TV Intro]
A 3D visual experience in a TV opening sequence format, identifying suggestive language using props, objects, and live characters. The following opening will contain a story that will be told on-screen visually and through auditory means. The partial focus will be on lighting and composition as these can be effective tools in storytelling, whilst other areas will be in story-writing, character/object modeling, environmental design.
Project Outline: [TV Intro]
- https://makemakeentertainment.com/elastic/ [Elastic Studio]
Elastic Studio is a great piece of inspiration as they have been pioneers of TV/Movie Intro Sequences that have been in AAA titles such as Game of Thrones, Captain Marvel, The Crown and many more. Elastic Studio have a great understanding on the concept of story composition through opening titles and to play with objects and backgrounds as a means of storytelling. We believe that this could be a prime example on how to manipulate object definitions, to portray characteristics that could help identify our story through a more conceptual plane; The idea of symbolism through objects and what connotations these objects possess, further pushed by the lighting and placement of the object.
- https://www.forticheprod.com/ [Fortiche Studio]
Fortiche Productions is quite an outstanding studio that comes to mind. They specialize in areas such as music videos, advertisements, television/gaming openings, as well as their new entry into animated television series (Arcane). Fortiche helps inspire us by demonstrating how the studio can tell two simultaneous stories that are juxtaposed in this example. Through videos such as Riot Games ‘Rise’, as well as Imagine Dragons – ‘Warriors’, the studio effectively tells a story through a short amount of time, symbolizing a real-life journey or rather challenge we face to progress ourselves through difficult feats. We would like to use this as another form of example due to the contrast they bring to the table with their animation sequences and would like to create similar styles. We are not heavily inspired by their visual styles, but rather the studios capability to symbolize.
- https://platige.com/ [Platige Image]
Platige Image is a company that focuses on branding and TV/game cinematic. Although their work isn’t heavily specialized towards opening sequences for TV and film, we’ve established that Platige Image has quite an adept style of imagery and creativity. What is meant by this can be shown in an example of Resident Evil VIII’s opening introduction to the game; this is done through means of a parable from what appears to be a children’s book. This inspiration has led us to have a wider dynamic on how storytelling can be told, including through ironic storytelling.
Week Two:
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOSBiptk=/
Week two has been about strengthening foundations and finding collaboration partners to work with for developing this project. I have collaborated with people that may be able to inspire and lead the project in a creative way, mixing with people in Sound Design as well as, Mask/Sculpt design.
Shinji Mikame: s.mikame1220201@arts.ac.uk – Foundation Arts
Jake Slipkovich: j.slipkovich1120181@arts.ac.uk – Sound Arts
Joanna Besarab: j.besarab0620201@arts.ac.uk – Sound Arts
Ingram Stooke: i.stooke0620201@arts.ac.uk – Sound Arts
Louis Atkin: l.atkin0420211@arts.ac.uk – 3D Computer Animation
As a collective, we went over ideas that would help progress the animation by designing a story taking influence from a video game character by the name of “Kindred”.
https://universe.leagueoflegends.com/en_US/story/champion/kindred/
Mask mood board ideas:
Since we wanted to work with a story that had some relevance to a mask to display a shift in personality and theme, we decided to look to Mikame’s skill in creative mask design. His masks are always filled with color and life, and we thought maybe it could influence the theme we would follow for colors and style.
Based on this, we explored mask ideas and did some basic research into some more masks, and build up a mask mood board so we have an idea of what we’re looking for. As well as designing a placeholder mask that would serve as a live example of how we would like to proceed.
Week Three:
Week three focuses on developing a storyboard for this TV opening sequence. We’ve decided that for the TV opening sequence we would like to make a Japanese-inspired version of “Vikings” (2013, Television show). We would like to explore a dark story that pivots around the idea of death using symbolic messaging as its way of storytelling. To put the TV intro into one word, it would have to be Agathokakological. Agathokakological – Composed both of good and evil. When a man loses everything, he loses himself. Who must he become to maintain what’s left of the shattered pieces that he recognizes as himself? He must undergo metamorphosis.
Key Goals and Needs
- Objects + Models – Symbolism
- Fitting music
- Storyboard depicting the narrative through emotive and suggestive language
Key Pains and Constraints
- No reference footage
- Time is limited
- No idea where to begin, or where to go.
Story Context:
- An attack occurs on a peaceful village, killing everyone in its way. A man that was once looked up to as a leading member, is now looked up to in the ashy dirt layered in blood. Breaking his spirit, cracking his soul, he now reaches out within himself to avenge what he has lost forever.
We would like to explore the Yin-Yang concept. The overall story involved two masked characters, one representative of Yin and one of Yang. Various objects in their introduction, are potentially animated (similar to the animation in “The Witcher” opening). The narration of their constant battle with each other and how they need to be kept in balance. Possibly this could be a TV series about them becoming unbalanced and the protagonists of the TV show fixing this.
Overall story – The story begins with a family living a peaceful, normal life. Village gets attacked, the father is the sole survivor. Lives the rest of his life alone (or potentially finds some kind of elderly mentor to train him), ends up becoming a masked warrior? Narrated throughout with objects showing the different events
Potentially show toys/child representative objects initially (objects representing innocence),
show buildings destroyed when village attacked (maybe using simulated shattering of buildings to represent his life falling apart), something in between to show the path from orphaned -> warrior, finally show a real-life shot of an actual warrior (scanned real-life person?) Overall this is an opening for a TV show about this person who is something like a medieval vigilante.
Visual Ideas:
- Shot representing life before, with a tree with many branches to represent his family
- Shot of actual man, hugging his child
- Shot of overall building representative of the village where they live. Man leaves to chop wood, represented with an axe slowly animated cutting wood. Visuals of previous building/buildings being destroyed as he is gone from the village.
- Shot of blood dripping from toy doll
- Shot of several gravestones, with traditional incense sticks/water
- Shot of the earlier tree, this time with branches missing
- Final shot of man wearing mask and warrior attire, wielding the axe he formerly used to chop wood
And we have now created the workflow chart so we know the order of the process.
Week Four:
During week 4, I tried to create a Viking-Esque axe, which I have never done before. Because I don’t have much experience in modeling, I wanted to create a sample model just to teach me the necessary skills going forward. How I did this was by watching a “Speed model” video on youtube and slowing it down to 0.25x playback speed so I can learn how the creator did this.
I tried mimicking the video as best as I could with my own intuitional skills to change up the model a bit more in case I ended up liking the outcome.
I didn’t really have an initial design idea when taking my own variation to the axe, which showed in the design process, making my design look very rough and uneven.
I wasn’t quite happy with the outcome at all, and it was nowhere near the standard we needed, especially because I lacked the skills of understanding topology groups and even surfacing. This would make it quite hard for me even texture and shade because the surfaces are not even, causing stretched imagery in random areas.
Because of this, I decided to remake the axe and correct my mistakes to create a better second axe. This time I decided to get a reference image of the axe I’d like to create, I wanted a Japanese axe that was both for fighting and for chopping wood, similar to how they would have in older times of Japan. So I found two types of axes that would give me inspiration for my final design in an axe. The Ono Axe.
After modeling the axe, I had to try and UV map the axe so that I could then texture and paint it in Substance Painter. I have also never done UV mapping, so I had used Dom’s UV tips and tricks video to help me learn the skills I needed so that I could progress with the modeling stage from here on out.
Week Five:
I lost a lot of time last week learning how to model + UV map, so it has delayed the workflow plan we had made. I was supposed to have a gravestone finished by now too but was too slow.
However, this week would be a lot faster as now I have a strong idea of what I’m doing and can progress quite fast. So as usual, I did some research into Japanese grave designs and began the process of modeling all over again with UV mapping.
This week was intended for creating the Lighting environment in which the models would be placed. I lost a bit of time having to create the Japanese gravestone due to last week’s process. However, because I enjoy Lighting a lot, I feel I would be able to explore this a lot faster.
I found a photography lighting guide cheat sheet that would give me the rough ideas of creating the type of scene I wanted. But I needed to develop a color scheme and atmosphere first. So I did some digging on Pinterest for things that would catch my attention in hopes that we could recreate some of these ideas and make them in Maya as a team.
We discovered that we definitely wanted a lot of the objects to feel like objects, therefore we had to ensure the environment was more of a showcase room rather than an animated scene within a film. We liked the idea of realism and bright colors, so along with the mask design to influence the style we would go for today, we thought this would be good progress.
I used a sample greek statue for its face and detail contours to help me light an overall scene. Using the photography lighting cheat sheet, I went for a “Split/Short” shot but dragged the light a little bit further to give a silhouette effect while still being able to see the model thanks to a key light. I could easily turn off the silhouette light and change the key lights’ exposure and color to change the scene color if needed. This would be the main theme of all of our shots.
Week Six:
Simulation Effects – Gravity effect
In one of the research videos for TV opening sequences, I saw a gravity effect used in a 3D opening sequence. It looked really well done and matched the tone of the video. In high hopes and full of ambition, I would really like to create this effect and make my own variation.
I had my partner create 3 modeled toys that would be the particles in this VFX simulation. So I began using the built-in Autodesk Maya Gravity function in the FX section. I’ve never messed with simulation/particle systems in 3D, so I was unprepared for how intensive this can be, especially when trying to preview.
I managed to duplicate the textured models plenty of times, and create gravity simulations where they would fall with a light collider, allowing them to bounce off of each other and hopefully not clip into one another.
After doing this plenty of times, I had to create multiple scenes as it would progressively get more intense, making it harder and harder to load each time. Meaning I had to bake the animation as a cache, then render the cache, which ate a lot of our time. This was quite risky in the group stage as we should already be close to rendering, but I believe we could have a nice effect that would make the sequence have more depth.
And of course, lastly, I had to create a softbox lighting room that would allow light to reflect in all angles so that the toys are all equally lit with the aforementioned lighting theme we chose as a collective.
This allowed me to play with the lighting and see what kind of cool effects I could achieve, hopefully capturing the elevating moment of chaos that this scene symbolically represents.
I knew it would be a great idea to playblast this scene since it could be wrong (which it was – several times). However, due to the high intensive cache overload, this scene could not be playblast, which caused some concerns for the group in terms of development and whether this scene is worth the time rendering for the project.
Through many corrected iterations of rendering, I managed to fix the gravity effect and scene together.
Simulation Effects – Gravity effect
I also focused on creating a smoke simulation for the gravestone incense so that we could add some depth and tertiary animation for an increased sense of realism to the scene. I went through many variations and formats of smoke, ranging from the built-in Bifrost Smoke, Autodesk Maya FX Smoke, nParticles smoke as well as 3rd party content smoke.
Unfortunately, the outcome was either the smoke could not be rendered with a GPU (which would ultimately be faster, as on CPU each scene was near 14:00minutes + for a rendered frame), or the smoke would be too intensive for the GPU and slow us to a near 11:00minutes a frame, which is equally as bad, as we were doing two 144 framed shots for a total of 288, which would take way too long to render without a render farm. So after many hours spent working on it, this would inevitably be a deleted scene/effort that would not make it into our final cut.
Week Seven:
Music Development
After many weeks, we have only now just got in contact with the sound team, and we’re trying to illustrate the ideas we had.
We went over a simple scene rundown explaining the timings of each individual shot so that we could hopefully get an audio track of something matching and accurate, rather than a misplaced sound. So we made a quick visual representation of what this would look like using some scenes we’ve rendered.
After showing the music team what kind of project we are looking for and the theme we want to go for, we allowed for their creative brains to begin designing what they feel would be appropriate, as our brief towards them was something thematic that could change from calm to dark in less than a minute. Within doing so, they gave us back our first draft.
After we had spoken to the team saying we would like something slightly more engaging, the team was more than happy to agree and they happily produced a final sound for us within a week to match the deadline. They wanted to make something that fit the idea of Japanese-themed and therefore tried to use some recognizable instruments with a modern twist to help elevate that idea.
Week Eight:
Rendering
It’s time to officially render all of our scenes and reach next week’s deadline for compositing and final touches. However, my computer consistently reaches 100% CPU/GPU (depending on the choice of render), causing textures to unload, glitches, crashes, or computer blue screen.
Especially with intense CPU/GPU load scenes such as smoke/fire/gravity, this has caused some problems, delaying us by a few days and causing nothing but headaches. I should have done test renders throughout the weeks prior to having an understanding of any complications that may occur in the future, rather than relying on everything to work smoothly.
After a lot of troubleshooting, I had discovered that the problem was Windows 11. Windows 11 has had some issues with computing power and forcing overclock speeds, causing nothing but mayhem in anything that uses CPU/GPU (which is everything in an animator’s world). So after a factory reset and fresh Windows 10 installation, I have managed to download all the programs and continue Rendering.
I have been tasked with Lighting, Environment design, and Rendering for this final part, as well as compositing, so this forces me to work quickly, loading scene after scene, for a week straight without a pause.
Later in the week, we went into our campus to use the 3D Scanner camera that’s available to rent, and I became the model for our character. I put on some of my Japanese clothing and prepared to look like a samurai from a village to help with that feeling and we took two different shots of me, which would end up being used in our final project.
By default, the renders of me were quite rough, as to be expected with a 3D scanner, but we felt it did the job well enough to illustrate the point we wanted. At the same time, we managed to scan in the mask that our partner made too.
I have managed to render every scene just in time, and a preview of each scene looks as follow:
Week Nine:
Compositing & Final Touches
This week has mostly been transferring files between each other, ensuring that all the images are how we’d like them to be. We had a rough idea of the story, therefore the images we crafted are segments of that. So my partners and I had a group call sharing screen coming up with an idea of how we wanted to order the clips to help illustrate the scenes as best as they could.
Referring back to the composite template we sent to the music team, we were certain this is how we wanted to place the final images for the final sequence. It wasn’t hard choosing how to edit it, as we wanted it to be as raw as we could with little effect, especially since there wasn’t much time left to create these final touches. Furthermore, we didn’t want to over saturate a lot of the color using post FX, so we kept the color correction quite simple.
We decided to cut a few seconds of individual clips, as well as cut some scenes entirely, as some shots just didn’t fit the image we had in mind, or didn’t match the exact rendering theme.
The scenes we chose to cut were:
Week Ten:
We managed to finish compositing, rendering, re-rendering with enough time to spare. Due to lack of communication, we haven’t had time to communicate better with our sound team to get a final music outcome for the video, leaving us with a final draft instead of that we’ve had to use for our outcome.
Pros of the project
We all managed to get out of our comfort zone to create something we normally never would.
We all had different work ethics in terms of organization, timing, skills, knowledge, etc… yet we managed to find everyone’s strong suit, work together and create a final outcome.
There may have been a lot of errors along the way, inexperienced moments, or just a lack of communication. However, we managed to finish and be able to say we’re proud of an outcome, regardless of how bumpy the journey was.
I had never modeled / UV mapped/textured objects / used VFX simulation before, yet I was happy I was able to do this for the first time and create things that were unfamiliar. It took many revisions, as well as a lot of online videos, but it shows you can create stuff if you spend the time to learn and to ask for help rather than keeping a big ego thinking you can do everything alone.
Cons of the project
We would have liked a better dynamic, in terms of design style and of adding far more scenes. But due to a small team with mixed skill sets, we were not in a place where we could adventure freely.
There were some scenes we never got to create due to lack of time, as since only two of us were in charge of modeling/rendering/texturing, this left a lot of unkept variables in the mix, such as rendering, compositing, editing, which meant that our time had to be looked after more carefully.
Some of our scenes don’t match at all due to lighting choices, and cinematography. However, this could have been fixed with a better laid out system on how we plan to do things, as we felt that there may have been too much creative freedom, instead of some basic rules to help maintain unity and consistency throughout the project.
Overall, it was a very nervewracking, intense experience that definitely made me second guess my own strengths and weaknesses, but it was an adventure I’m glad I took. Whether the outcome was amazing or not, when I put into perspective that we only had two people and ten weeks to create a final outcome, I’m glad to see how far we came when we pushed ourselves. It has provided some insight into future development and has helped me realign my own workflow schedule for future projects.
Thanks for reading!
From
Antonio Maldonado III
MA 3D Computer Animation
(P.S. I was here)