Production Diary

Group Project Diary

Meeting 1

First, a presentation was conducted to explain the brief. The class must form into groups of 3 or 4 and produce an advert for one of the items’ named of the list. Simon, Sunny and Angelina formed a group, limiting the original list to the ideas that were most interesting to them. These were an advert for:

-Drink

-Bullshit detector

-Time Machine

After contemplating seriously over their options, they decided that the best option to choose was to create an advert for fruit juice as it was most realistic and can easily be related to the audience. They got together and looked at a range of drink adverts such as ‘Krushem’ and ‘Ribena’, which helped them to form an idea of creating an advert for a drink, advertising different and unusual tastes to attract the audience. Angelina came up with the idea that the advert should consist of an animal that the audience can relate to e.g. like the cats in the ‘Krushem’ advert but changing the animal to a lion. Simon and Sunny expanded the idea and suggested that the character should show positive changes after consuming the drink to show the audience the benefits of the product and the outcome that could happen to them, which was referenced to ‘Pop Eye the Sailor Man’. Angelina created a brainstorm for the initial ideas, whilst Simon produced a PowerPoint presentation to present their ideas to everyone for the next week.

Meeting 2

Sophia (me) joins the group. After hearing the current ideas from Angelina and Simon, Sophia suggests change the advert slightly so that it is promoting a fruit juice, doing something similar to the ‘Vimto’ advert, which shows fruits in a car that rocks up and down, causing the fruits to hit together and splats into fruit juice.

It was finally their go to present their ideas, going through their initial thought processes and the final idea that they wanted to work with. The feedback from the lecturers was positive so the group decided to plan the storyboard for the advert. This is the story they wanted to follow:

-A lonely lion walks through the jungle, tired and thirsty from its journey. The fruits of the jungle become playful and jump off the leaves of the exotic trees, hitting into each other, causing them to burst and their juices to fall into water of the oasis. The lion struggles to the edge of the oasis, where he takes a drink and is suddenly filled with energy and is rippling with muscles.

The advert would consist of both 2D and 3D properties - 2D for the lion character and 3D for the background.

Tony kindly suggested creating cuts from the lion to the fruits to help build the first of the character.

The roles were then allocated to each individual

-Director – Sunny

-Project manager – Sophia

-Character Artist – Angelina

-Environment Artist - Simon

It was decided that Angelina and Sunny will be responsible for the 2D aspect of the advert whilst Sophia and Simon take up the 3D side.

Angelina worked on the lion character design and possible poses. Meanwhile, Sophia produced a quick sketch of the appearance of the environment, constructing it by using a lot of reference images from the internet and composing it into one piece. After that, she made a script that detailed on the series of events that were to take place in the advert and handed it over to Sunny, who began roughly sketching out the storyboard.

Meeting 3

Sunny was not present for the first half of the meeting for personal reasons so the rest of the group carried on with their designated tasks. Angelina resumed to drawing the lion character, concentrating on poses during its worn out stage and the facial expressions to express its fatigued state. Simon and Sophia began sculpting trees in Maya and were playing around with different methods of how the leaves should be created for the scene. The best method was to apply leaf textures onto plane with segments, as an alpha map, so that only the painted leaves were visible. This method will make things more time efficient.

Sunny arrived after and the group conducted the meeting with Meg and Tony, thoroughly explaining their expanded ideas on the advert and their current progress within the making. Sunny gave them the rough storyboard that he created, whilst Angelina showed the sketches that she did for the lion character for feedback. Tony responded by giving Angelina a few tips on how to maintain the shape and the size of the character.

Meeting 4

Simon did not attend, due to short notice of scheduling the meeting. Sunny presented his storyboard, taking on Tony’s advice on switching the camera from the lion to the fruits to build the lions thirst. Sophia and Angelina pointed out a few changes and amendments that were needed to be made on the storyboard to make it more fluent.

Meeting 5

A workshop was organised for the group to get together to do work, which everyone attended. Sunny worked on the storyboard, changing the advert slightly towards the end. The ending changed from: the lion drinking the oasis water and suddenly becoming muscular, to lion drinking the oasis water, whips his hair out, blows water off of his paws in a charming way towards the birds on the trees. Angelina began creating test animations of the lion during the beginning of the advert, when it is wearily make its way towards the oasis edge.

Sophia began creating the environment for the animation. First, the floor was created using a plane and the vertices in the middle were pulled down, forming a ditch for the oasis water. It was then textured to look like a jungle ground. The oasis water was also made by applying an ocean shader onto a plane but there were some issues that were encountered because the settings for the water was very hard to change. Also, Sophia wanted to create a sky dome and build the environment inside it so that it wouldn’t look flat but there were major issues with lighting as it wouldn’t shine correctly. Simon assisted Sophia with the environment creation but also continued experimenting with creating leaf textures for the trees.

Meeting 6

All group members resumed to their designated tasks whilst waiting to receive some feedback from Meg and Tony. Sophia discussed with Simon the issues she had with the sky dome and they both came to the conclusion that the best method to tackle this problem was to use a default sun and sky, changing the settings around slightly to give a sunset sky, and to create a mountain border around the environment to stop it from looking flat. Simon began working on the grass textures, playing around with colour and shape from the references that he was looking at on the internet. Sunny showed Meg and Tony the changes he has made to the storyboard and was advised to change it again slightly. The lion should emerge out of the water, flick its hair back, squeeze the bottle of juice in its hand, which will then burst and reveal the logo and the name of the drink.

Meeting 7

Angelina did not turn up to this group meeting but the rest of the group members attended. Sunny began working on the animatic, drawing out the beginning shots and experimenting with the art style and colours he wanted to use. He finally decided to go for a quick and sketchy style. Sophia continued to build her environment in Maya and began texturing the mountain border that she built for the environment, adding bump mapping to make it more realistic. She also created the waterfall, experimenting with a few different ways of approaching this but decided that applying an ocean shader was best suited to texture the model. To give the environment a bit more of a jungle image and to give the illusion of a waterfall, she added a fog volume within the scene. Simon started modelling the fruits that were going bounce off the trees. He started off with the kiwi fruit but immediately found it difficult to texture it and explored different methods of approaching it, trying to make it look realistic. The outcome was to unwrap the model fully so that each individual part would be textured slightly differently to each other so that it blended in more.

Meeting 8

Simon had finished modelling and texturing the fruits, which consisted of a lychee, a strawberry and a kiwi. Sophia and Simon decided to work on the environment together, where they focused on trying to populate the jungle with leaves and trees. They found a way to use one of the functions within Maya, called visors, which contains ready-made textured models of plants. Using this, Simon and Sophia took turns into applying these into the scene.

Meeting 9

Everyone met up in the Wacom room to finish off their designated work. Simon and Sophia continued to work on the environment, aiming to finish the scene by the end of the day. Angelina continued to clean her animation drawings and Sunny continued perfecting the animatic.

Meeting 10

In this meeting, everyone but Sophia attended because of personal reasons. Sunny, Angelina and Simon presented their work to Meg and Tony, showing the progress they have made so far. Sunny explained his responsibility with the animatic, showing the additional shots that he has drawn between the key frames of the storyboard. Angelina displayed the extended rough lion animation that she had continued to work on, where she attempted to perfect the poses of the character. Simon showed the 3D models of the strawberry and kiwi that he created in Maya, which would star in the juice making process.

Meeting 11

Sunny and Angelina thought about possible names for the fruit drink and decided that the name ‘Fruit Blast’ was the most suitable. They also had a workshop session where Sunny carried on drawing stills for the animatic and Angelina began cleaning her animation.

Meeting 12

Sunny continued to work on creating stills for the animatic, whilst Angelina tidied the lion animation.

Meeting 13

Sunny and Angelina did the same as last meeting. They both had a workshop where they worked on their respective parts of the advert production.

Meeting 14

Simon did not attend to this workshop because he was ill. Meg and Tony requested to see everyone’s animatic and a presentation of their work progression. This was very difficult because Sophia was missing for a week because of personal reasons and could not submit screen shots of her work in progress and Simon was off sick for a while. The presentation was quite unorganized but the group was still able to present some of their work to show everyone their progress.

Meeting 15

Sophia and Simon met up to work on the 3D environment and had completed importing the fruits into the scene and have it animated. The issues that we still had with the 3D environment was: the textures on the floor because it was not convincing enough, the lighting in the scene was too strong and ended up bleaching the animation, and to get maximum results for the animation we should render the animation in mental ray but could not do this because of the visors that we used in the scene. In order to fix this quickly, Sophia scheduled professional help from Mat Garey.

Meeting 16

Sophia and Simon attending the meeting with Mat, discussing the issues they had with the 3D environment. Mat made a few suggestions to fix the issues:

-Lighting: there were still lights within the scene that were present even though the physical sun and sky was deleted. We needed to delete the excess lights and play around with their properties to adjust the brightness.

-Floor: The floor had to be textured again because it was not suitable for the floor.

-Mental Ray: Mat advised that it was best to delete the visors because they consisted of too many polys. He suggested repainting all of the textures onto planes and adding segments to them so that the shape can be manipulated. 

After the meeting, Sophia and Simon began making the improvements to the scene. Sophia worked on rebuilding the trees to match the branches to the old visors, whilst Simon began playing around with the light properties.

It was decided that the two will go away and come back with textures for the scene: Sophia needed textures for the leaves and Simon will have textures for some leaves and the floor.

Meeting 17

Sophia began creating planes and applying the plant textures that both she and Simon made, bending and scaling the planes so that it was the correct shape and positions within the scene. Simon took over and applied the new floor textures. Sophia took over again and textured planes with the red flowers that Simon created. Simon positioned the flowers on the floor along the oasis, whilst Sophia positioned some of the flowers in the bushes.

Meeting 18

Meg and Tony reviewed the work but decided that the light was still not good enough since it was bleaching out the strawberry during it close up. Also, some of the fruits were not lit properly, making it dark and difficult to identify the fruits. They advised that we should work on the camera movement during the close ups because it was moving too much, making them feel queasy. They were impressed with the appearance of the environment, stating that to look a lot better. Sophia and Simon began changing the properties of the lights again and played around with the ‘incandescence’ settings to help illuminate the object better. Angelina carried on with cleaning her lion animation and colouring it in. Sunny began creating a short animation of the bird in the trees.

Meeting 19

Sophia and Simon changed the camera angles and movements to make it smoother. This was quite simple to do. An extra camera was also added to film a medium shot of the fruits colliding with each other. The animation was the left to render over the weekend in top quality.

Meeting 20

Because of the quality of render, it has taken much more time than anticipated so this meeting began with waiting for the file to render. Angelina worked on her lion animation a little more but has just completed it. Sunny is still working on the bird animation. When the rendering was finished, Simon rendered out the appropriate files for Angelina as the background.

Meeting 21

Everyone had attended this meeting. Simon and Sophia began putting the rendered animation into After Effects, fixing it together so that it matched the animatic sequence. As they finished and waited for the other parts to finish, they began downloading sounds and music for the advert, applying it to the appropriate places. Sunny had finished his bird animation and gave it to the 3D team, pasting it in the correct order. Angelina had also finished her animation but because the images that were given to her were stills, the water was not moving and did not make it look as good. She requested help from Eva, who taught her to mask a video of water underneath the water image, creating the water wave illusion. This was finished and then put into After Effects for some additional editing.

Meeting 22

The final part of the animation was the colour transition of the waterfall and oasis. This took an extremely long time to complete as we underestimated the work we needed to do for this part. Sunny took on the role of completing this task, along with a little help from Sophia, and had completed this by the end of the day. Sophia continued searching for sound effects for the animation and made sure that the animation sequence was correct to the animatic. Simon investigated on way to try and improve the colour quality of the animation, attempting to make it brighter. Simon took the animation sequences back home to put together and put in the title and slogan for the advert in Premier.