Veronika's Blog

I applied for an extension because I was not able to render everything on time due to the rigs issue. However, one week was enough for me to finish rendering the rest of the scenes and doing the last adjustments for the final animation film.

Overall, I am very happy with the result. Of course, there are bits of animation that I wish to improve, as well as the lighting, but considering all the complications and the timing I think the result is better that I could have expected.

I am very happy that I had an opportunity to tell the story directing everything myself, also I am thankful for the collaboration with Kieran who did sound design. We were both very pressured with time but managed to do everything on time (almost considering the EC).

I am planning to imrove my animation in the next few months and apply with it for various festivals as I think the idea behind the plot is worth seeing by as many people as possible.

Here is the end result (for now) of my animation “Little Sweetheart”:

This week was about finishing rendering of the rest of the scenes. I have also made credits using a shot rendered from the shop and adding the text in photoshop:

This week I rendered scenes from the girl’s memory/nightmare:

This week I put most of the scenes rendering on our uni computers. I was coming every day and took all free computers. I will be still coming tomorrow, on Saturday to render the rest and re-render some scenes.

The other thing I worked on this week was finishing the scene 12 and the last scene 20.

Scene 12 was difficult only because of the lip-sync, however, the person Im working with on the sound design part wasn’t able to send me a final version of the VO for the lady and since there’s almost no time before the deadline, I deciceded to do the lip-sync myself and then attach the sound they made to the animation, however this is wrong and totally the other way around.

For the scene 20 I was struggling with achieving the desired lighting and render quality. Because if I wanted to do rendering without the noise, rendering time was increased several times which would make impossible to finish on time.

This was my initial idea for the last scene:

In the end I decided to add the closing door to the first scene and render it again. I did like in the end this idea as it would connect the first and the last shots:

I have also finished rendering some of the other scenes:

My main focus this week was to find a way how to render my animations, as it was not possible to do in the university. I tried to render one scene over night on my computer but the rendering time for one shot was more than an hour which would make impossible to render all the scenes in time for the submission. I was not the only one having this issue – my friend and course mate Shizra also used rigs from ProRigs.com. She texted the ProRigs to ask if they have any suggestion how we could use render farm for rendering our projects. We also talked to technicians in our university asking the same thing, however they told us there I nothing they can do. After the whole week of emailing and trying to find the solution, Shizra suggested using Alembic export for the characters. This worked, however there were lots of problems that made me reexport it over and over again, plus will need to apply textures all over again which takes a lot of time.

I tried rendering the 2 scene using alembic charatcers and here’s a result:

I have also rendered the scene 4:

Imlike the render of the scene 4 much more as it is much brighter and looks better, however, the animation is still not perfect.

This week I focused on scenes 18 and 19.

Previs:

As there was no much movement in the scene 18 and the scene itself was very short, animation went very fast: I copied the lady’s pose from the scene 10, only adjusted it a bit and added a blink. The environment is the same as in other scenes with the lady.

As for the scene 19, I also adjusted movements and camera angle from the scene 11:

I have also tried to render scene 8 and 2 as they seemed ready to me.

However, I run into a problem, that I can’t use render farm for my rigs as the university doesn’t have a ProRigs licence.

This week I was working in the scene 8. This scene will reveal the reason why the girl entered the shop.

The previs:

To make the animation more precise, I filmed a reference with my hand:

My first animation attempt looked:

This week I have also talked to Kieran about the sounds and they told me they are gathering the sounds for foley.

This week I got feedback from George on the scene 16:

The finished result is:

I have also got a response from one of the people to work as a sound designer for my FMP! Their name is Kieran Logins and they are doing BA in sound design at LCC.

This week I contacted people in our university who can help me work on the sound design for my animation. I wanted to create a deep and rhythmic music together with detailed foley experience. Also, my animation will need two Voice Overs of woman’s and man’s voice.

I also worked on the scene 16:

My first attempt to animate it:

This week I polished scene 1 a bit more and also decided to make a sign move:

I have also worked on the scene 9:

After added animation:

This week I worked on scenes 1 and 3:

At first I focused on the scene 1. I made a door with a glass inside to see moving objects on the street.

later in the week I asked George for some feedback on the animation.

Scene 3: