After just having finished the second phase within the master I figured it was time for a new blog post. The focus on this phase was to work as we if were a small studio, we were given assignments given to us by companies in the Netherlands and we had to chose ourself how to divide ourself and split the tasks.
The first project I was a part of was given to us by submarine channel they wanted to explore storytelling potential for film-makers and game designers working within the same theme; the Amsterdam ferry. This project is open for everyone to participate in no matter their experience, to see other projects within this project as well as read more about it you can check their website here.
Due to the open nature of this project we started off with very many ideas which we tried to narrow down. So eventually we agreed upon two very different ideas to focus on Lethe and The Interplanetary Ferry. These two projects and the work behind them can be read about on our blog.
I worked on the Interplanetary Ferry which can be seen above. This was together with Juan, Lucie, Aser, Iris, Mansur and with extra help with animation Federica. As I am more confident in 3D I mostly worked on the low poly modelling of the ticketbox, sign and trees, UVing everything except for the interior of the ferry, applying textures that Iris made and animating the landing of the ferry and as it spins away from the earth. Early on I did also help with making the space background and stars.
The second project we were given we all had to be part, it was given to us from the dutch adobe office. We were given a story which we had to read to kids. After each chapter they were going to draw a drawing based on what had happened and afterwards explain to us what they had drawn. Our task was to redraw the scene using the kids drawing as inspiration. Being in a country were I don’t speak the language, however, I got a drawing from one my classmates as she had manage to gather a group of kids. I got the drawing from a girl names Souraya, you can see her with her drawing below.
I have a lot to learn about drawing but nevertheless it was fun to work on. It was not clear to me how much liberty I could take with the original drawing so I tried to keep all the elements and just changed the angle and composed it in a way that I preferred.
The third project I participated in was another very open project. It was given to us by filmding a company specializing within making marketing films. Filmding with some other companies had gone together to create visual lab which is a gathering of companies that work towards other companies in some way. They wanted us to make animations that used their space at the same time as it illustrated that they were an adaptable company. The space they wanted us to use to our best abilities was filled with screens of all kinds of sizes and shapes.So we decided to use that to our advantage and have the logo in a simplified state move through all the different screens changing a bit in each screen as it is effected by each individual world that exists within the screens. This we decided could be a good way to show the potential of animation as well as the adaptability of the company. It also gave us the opportunity to use different types of media and divide the screens between us in a way that worked for us. This meant that this became a very different form of teamwork than from the submarine project. Due to technical issues we did not end up with being able to play all the animations synced in the end, however Raphael made a film to show it was suppose to have looked which you can see below.
As can be seen there was a lot of screens so some people worked on several screens as well. The order of the artists as their screens are shown can be seen here: Daniel, Geert and me, Linda, Raphael, Jos, Geert and Paulina, Daniel and me, Jelle, Jos and Paulina, Iris
Within the filmding project I worked with 3D elements for two screens the space world with Geert and one medieval world with Daniel. The screens had very different visual styles making them very interesting to work on in different ways.
For the space world I worked with Geert, he illustrated and designed the world while I modelled the planets and the astronaut. The astronaut model can be seen clearer here. The astronaut also had to be rigged and animated. For the planets we did it quite easily with some spheres with texture and bump map that Geert provided, I only needed to make them seamless and attach them.
In Daniels medieval it was a bit of an unknown territory for both of us with him never having worked with 3D and I have never worked with so abstract and illustrative objects before. Nevertheless, this was a good opportunity to experiment with combining the 3D and 2D. I started off testing how it could look in 3D by taking one of his drawings and trying to model it. Underneath you can see the early mushroom test. Here the texture was just planar mapped on so we knew that if Daniel wanted movements in the camera so you saw it from the side we needed to make proper textures. Later on Daniel made some squares with textures that we used to scale the uvs within to try and avoid seams.
Another early test was to show Daniel what you could do in 3D and how moving textures worked. We were planning on using this as a way to make a river in our landscape, however due to time constraints we ended up changing the idea.
I realised early on that this could be a lot of work so we got Paulina on board to help model and texture some mushrooms. In the end though it still seemed to be a bit risky due to unfamiliar territory. I started importing and spreading the objects within the scene and made a camera that were suppose to follow the river mimicking the movements as if it were laying on the water, but we decided it would take a while to make it look nice and how we wanted. Therefore in the end we rendered out the objects and composited it together in after effects instead.
It was an interesting experiment and if we had more time it would have been fun to try and complete the original idea. However it was a very new territory and we needed to discuss and visualize quite a bit to each other to show what we meant which meant everything took longer time as well.
Below you can see how the final version ended up.The music has been added later on to add to the mood.
Though this period I got a lot of experience with working with very different people. When I have been in group works before with people in my bachelor it felt like I was with more like minded people who also works with technical and artistic and seems to have a tendence to prefer to work at home. This did crash a bit at times when we worked in such a diverse group as especially in the submarine group. This was however also very useful since I probably in the future as well if I can manage will be working with modelling from drawings that illustrators have made. It will still be nice to have more control and less opinions to take into account for the next phase. Since we are now starting on the final phase and our final projects which we will be working on until September.