This is it! The link to the final version of ‘Bright Side.’ The idea for this short started over a year ago. As a scribble on a few posted-notes, after a brainstorming session alone in my bedroom. Now it’s it as a fully CG 4 minute long animated short, which is very exciting.
It’s been a tough trek developing the idea over 8 moths or so, but now the feeling of accomplishment makes the blood, sweat and tears all worth it.
The overall narrative from start-middle-end has stayed relatively the same. Though the project was able to grow from feedback and guidance, all which I am grateful for. I am also grateful for Natasha agreeing to come on board and help me make my idea into a reality.
I thoroughly enjoyed each stage from start to finish. I was able to show off my skills in areas such as modelling/texturing which I have a keen interest in. As well I enjoyed developing my skills in other areas that I did not have as much experience in, such as animating and rigging.
I’m thrilled to be able to share it with animation companies at the end of year show… but also thrilled to be able to finally present it to our lecture’s and friends/family as they have been a big part of this journey as well. Helping me through the stress and late nights with their support.
I plan to defiantly incorporate the film into my showreel and enter it into various film festivals. I am so pleased and proud of the final outcome and it’s message… ‘imperfections are what you special see and you CAN be happy and feel fulfilled, even if not with tea.”
I edited the short! … and at first assumed this would just be taking all of the rendered clips and putting them together, in order. However this turned out to be a much more time-consuming and challenging task. I ran into numerous unforeseen hurdles that I would have to overcome in order to make the film look ‘complete.’
Post Production Effects
To add some dazzle to the short a few post-production effects were added. These included:
Outer glows to emphasise important details, such as the sign on the outside of the shot as this would act as the opening title.
Lens flares to add realism to the short and to make it look more cinematic and exciting.
Background blurs, to add depth and create a centre of focus.
Colour Correction
After
Before
I gathered ‘final’ rendered were not always final and required further tweaking in After Effects in order to look correct and to match surrendering shots.
The suns flames were a big problem because when the sun was animated and a projection of a 3D object it came they came out orangethough when the 2D texture was applied in other shots they came out very red. I had to use the ‘Change Colour To’ effect to match these colour values.
Lighting as a whole had to be increased in numerous shots as well using the effects ‘Levels’ and ‘Brightness/Contrast.’
Post Lighting Effects
From the start I liked the idea of having the cinematography compliment the narrative. Having the light ‘warm and vibrant’ when wanting to evoke happy feelings from the audience and then ‘cold and dull’ colours when wanted to evoke sad.
Rather that adjust lighting settings in each scene I thought this task would be easier completed in post. I upped the saturation for the start and end and then reduced it in the middle.
This allowed for an emotional journey.
Roto
A small amount of rotoscoping was necessary for some scenes throughout our short. Such as in this scene when the shop keepers hand moves across the Sunny’s face when he’s closing the till’s drawer. As these composted shots were built in layers, I was able to take the background layer and duplicate it, placing it on top of the teapot and sun later. I drew around the hand so that this was the only thing visible from this layer key frame by key frame using a mask.
Sound/Sound Effects
Thankfully we were able to get Calum McCormick to score our short for us. We were very thankful and grateful. So we did not have to try and work a track around the short as he scored the music to the animatic.
Editing sound was challenging in other ways. Sound effects for example were tricky as we needed these sounds to match the actions on screen. A lot of sound effects I was able to find online from the like of YouTube e.g the shops doorbell however the more unusual and perhaps less popular sounds I had to record myself and then edit into the short, such as the noise of removing a teapots lid.
I paid careful attention to the audio levels so that all sounds complimented each other and made sense. I had the music at a default setting and the sound effects I adjusted accordingly e.g if something was further away on screen I reduced the intensity of it’s sound.
We managed to get ‘finished’ for the final presentation and were the only team to do so. Getting ALL of our animation and rendering done to a satisfactory standard… before going on to make small changes for the hand-in on the 14th May 2018.
In this we were given the chance to demonstrate our the progress from the year and our current progress to the lectures and to the class for the last time. We were really proud of being able to show something that could be considered done and we really appreciated the round of applause. The feedback we got was mainly positive, though Alec, Mike and Helen were all able to give us some really good advice for how we could go on to better the movie which we appreciated as well and which we would heed…
We talked about changed we knew we wanted to make ourselves and talked about the intentions we had of taking on the feedback we would get from this presentation and how we would incorporate it into our completed version.
We talked about changes we had made to our previous version of the film.
We gave a brief comparison of the finished version and the first animatic, talking about the major development in narration
We spoke about our mission statement.
We talked about our consistency in design.
We mentioned our intention to keep the idea simple, as we knew our own levels and although we planned to push ourselves and learn this year we also wanted to be realistic and plan a project that would be doable in the time frame we had.
We pushed the fact we were the only team to meet the deadline which was this presentation as we though it demonstrated how hard we both have worked and how we were able to managed our project and time efficiently.
We also pushed the fact we did it ourselves with no outside help from other classes etc. with the exception of some rigging help from Blayne and Alec.
We rendered the short with V-Ray and used Google Zync. Rather than wait and leave rendering to the last minute, we thought it a better idea to render as we went a long. Meaning rendering for us was a process that lasted a few months. I’m glad we chose to do this as we were able to get everything rendered for the final presentation and because we ran into many rendering problems that we were able to fix along the way so that we didn’t have to make fixes at the last minute which would have held us back. It also meant we were able to learn from our mistakes and meant we didn’t make the same mistake from one shot through to another. I believe we manged to achieve pretty nice renders, which I would be more than happy to have presented in my showreel.
V-Ray
As at the start of the project, our own laptops were our only resource to render as we were using V-Ray and were the only machines to obtain a license. However Alec very kindly was able to get us two further licences that helped speed this process along.
Google Zync
Using Google Zync was also a massive help, without it I don’t think we would have been able to get finished rendering as quickly as we did. At first I was hesitant about using this because I was afraid a lot of technical knowledge would be required, but it was very straight forward. I was one of the first people in the class to start using it and ended up actually helping a lot of others when they started using it too, I ended up with the nickname “Zync King” … which I gave myself.
This was the very first rendered shot of Bright Side, in which everything worked and looked good. I overcame all previous TECHNICAL issues.
I animated, composited and rendered this shot to an overall standard which I was happy with, so the steps that I competed to create this would be the steps I would continue to take to create every other shot that required the sun animation/compositing on the teapot.
I turned this into a sort of trailer for our short, as a sneek-peek to what our short would result in looking like. It gave us something to work towards and benefiting us as well with something we could show off and advertise.
I composited all of the suns animations onto the teapot!
This was a reference diagram I made to look at if ever I got confused to which stage I was at with rendering as it included a lot of layers. It helped me keep track and understand where I was at with each shot. Each illustration acted as a check box at the start of the composting before I got used to doing it and could do it without.
Layers
4.
I then rendered a specular layer, meaning I removed all other assets in the scene to let the lights affect only the teapot. I applied a new texture here with a black diffuse and setting so the highlights/glossiness would mirror that of a real porcelain teapot. I would then bring this rendered layer into After Effects, placing it on top of all other layer and changed it’s blending mode to ‘screen’ so that the clack from this layer would not show leaving just the white visible.
3.
To get rid of the grey/black that surrounded the sun on this layer, I created to ‘colour key’ effects that got rid of anything that wasn’t the sun. I had to play around with the values on this depending on how big or small the sun was in each shot to make it look correct.
2.
I then animated the sun to camera and rendered this as an image sequence. Using a projection map in MAYA I was able to project this rendered image sequence onto the teapot geometry and render this out as a tiff. sequence meaning only the sun on the teapot would render, so I could bring this into After Effects as a layer that would line up to and go on top of the background teapot layer.
1.
I started with a render of the background and teapot (with no specular.) This layer could be a single frame as the sun would be moving on a separate layer. However it would have to be an animated sequence if there was any other animation involved such as animation from the teapot itself or from the human characters. Though this later acted as the base layer no matter what.
All I had to do now was to increase the intensity on our dome light and spot light to finish:
Sixth Attempt
Now that the eyes were back on track we got back to lighting. Turning the dome light and spot light on together was got us very close to our desired look. We had him looking 3D and had that subtle shadow around the outside which was what we wanted however now he was looking a little too dark:
Fifth Attempt
What we then did was take a screenshot of the sun beforehand and brought this into Maya to match each eye’s sizes and positions. This fixed the problem, meaning he looked like his old self:
Fourth Attempt
It was at this stage that Natasha and myself realised the suns eyes were a bit BUG-LIKE, as changing the yellow ball from a squished sphere into a full sphere made them more apparent and bulging. So together we tried reducing the size of the eyes by the centre scale though this made them too small and close together and just look wrong:
Third Attempt
I then added a dome light and took away both the spotlight and ambient light to see how this would look, this gave the light a nice spread over all of the geometry though made it again look a bit flat:
Second Attempt
Here I added a spotlight, taking away the ambient light, which gave a nice gradient. Having light in the centre of the sun and a shadow around, the edge which made it clear it was a sphere. HOWEVER the shadow was way too black:
First Attempt
Initially I had just included an ambient light, however this did not give the sun enough depth or detail making it look VERY 2D, which was not what we wanted:
I modelled and textured the ‘tea-party’ environment. I also composited these shots to make it look/feel like a different time and would then also complete most of the animation in this scene…
Artistic
This was the kitchen scene I created. I modelled/textured the chairs, tablecloth, tray, biscuit tin, sugar bowl/sugar cubes, spoons etc. though to save time I reused the teacups and saucers from the Charity Shop’s china cabinet. I incorporated the ‘Bright Side’ colour scheme of blue and yellow in here to tie it to the rest of the story (the shops sign is blue/yellow and also the bedroom is blue and the sun is yellow.)
I then added a sepia filter, gaussian blur and faded black border in After Effects to give it that flaskback/memory/dreamy look, hopefully this filter would differentiate between past and present.
I wanted this room to look like regular dining room and feel quite homely. The birds on the walls were to suggest freedom as here at this time Sunny was ‘free to make tea’ unlike how he feels back in the shop which is trapped.
Artistic Planning
These were just some references of a ‘kitchen tea-party’ that I found that helped me model/texture the kitchen/dining room setting
Technical
To incorporate the cracking I simply animated the scene without the crack and then brought into After Effects. I then brought a picture of a cracked piece of procession I found online and added this as a new layer on top of the footage. I created a mask around this layer and with each tap of the spoon touching the teapot I simply made the mask a little bigger each time, whilst keeping in mind the size/position of the resulting chipped piece that I already had modelled into the teapot. This was the progression which I think works, especially with added sound effects:
Technical Research
I realised I could create a cracking in others ways, and drew influence from the short ‘In A Heartbeat.’ I thought about drawing a crack or revealing different parts of one one from a layer on top of the footage in post-production which I ended up going with.
At first I had planned on creating cracks in the actual geometry and having it shatter, though soon realised after watching some tutorials on how that’s done that this would be extremely technically challenging and perhaps unnecessary.
Research
Anton Ego Flashback – Ratatouille
I wanted this scene to play as a flashback, rather than just a memory. So I used Anton Ego’s flashback scene from Ratatouille as influence when planning, animating, and editing this scene. I liked how the flashback is arranged into stages – with a trigger, effect and result. This inspiration helped give structure to what may have been a complicated scene, it terms of understanding. I was afraid at first people might not understand the time travelling aspect. However Ratatouille demonstrated how to so this sort of shot off successfully and how to make sense of it so that audiences would get it.
Result
The result is the realisation of what has happened that leaves the charter feeling something else, a new emotion the flashback has let them to:
– for Anton, he results in a feeling of nostalgia and glee
– for Sunny, he results in a broken feeling both emotionally and physically
Effect
The effect is the flashback to an important and particular time that’s relative to the overall story:
– for Anton, he transports to tasting his mother’s home cooking.
– for Sunny, he transports back to a time he was able to brew a pot of tea.
Trigger
A trigger would be what causes the character to flashback:
– for Anton, it’s tasting the piece of ratatouille.
– for Sunny, it’s seeing the crack.
Lotso’s Story
Loto’s background story helped a lot with how to use colour and transitions to create a passing or travel in time.
I lit the scenes in ‘Bright Side’ using a combination of V-Ray lights. These were the final results:
Exterior
Interior
Progress
To brighten up the inside I added some more area lights that would act as the shops lights, again added a warm yellow tint instead of just white.
I added some area lights outside with a yellow tint. This helped create the illusion of a sun being outside along with the nice direction shadows it created on the walls.
I increased the intensity of the outside light but this still did not light the inside in a way I wanted. The shadows still were too dark and the shop felt very cold.
This was the interior with just the dome light, as you can see this did not emit enough light into the shop, it was very dark.
V-Ray Lights
These were the light set-ups I used to achieve the overall look. They included
Area lights
Dome Light
Light Sphere’s
Dome Light Textures
I applied images to the dome lights to project the correct type of colours via reflections etc:
Exterior
Interior
Research – Technical
These are some tutorials I followed to help me with some technical issues that were occurring, I also overcame these by asking some of my friends in JAM who have been working with Vray lights a lot longer than I have.
Research – Artistic
These were the types of images I had in my mind when trying to light the inside of the Charity Shop especially. I wanted it to look like midday almost with the sun shining outside, very bright letting a lot of light into the shop. On top of the artificial lights that would be turned on indoors.
Outer glows to emphasise important details, such as the sign on the outside of the shot as this would act as the opening title. 
This was the interior with just the dome light, as you can see this did not emit enough light into the shop, it was very dark.
Dylan Cooper 