I found this artist today, what an amazing background designer. I love his sense composition, love the colours, love the subjects, love the lighting and love the skill.
Makoto Shinkai, is a Japanese director of Anime and former graphic designer. Apparently, this guy is sometimes compared to Miyazaki in reviews of his work. He is best known for a number of Japanese Anime titles such as 'Voices of a distant Star', 'The place promised in Our Early Days', '5 centimeters Per Second' and 'Children Who Chase Lost Voices'.
These paintings have tho look of industry concept art whiles retaining their illustrative style. Mokoto is obviously well trained on practiced and demonstrate some fundamental painting skills that Feng Zhu always talks about through his online tutorials. I must continue developing them myself.
Today I received three sample pieces of music from Marc, my good friend who has agreed to have a go at composing some music for my film. This is the second lot of music he has sent me. As I am already working with another musician, namely Greg Ryan, and so I have asked Mark to create his composition specifically for the tunnel scene within the film. Marc has my animatic for reference. I ended up asking him to do this because of how well the last piece of music he sent me fitted with the tunnel scene, despite the fact that I had asked him to have a go at producing the theme music for the film.
The three samples Marc sent me are very atmospheric, they are very ambient and I am interested to see how they fit with the film. However, I do have a preference at the moment for one of the pieces he sent me. The only issue I can see is that these pieces of music are quite long and will need to be cut down to use for the film, this is why I have a preference at the moment for one of the pieces. Have a listen.
Over the past few days I've been revisiting my animatic. With the help of some friends who are great producers, Greg Ryan, and 'Marc Withasee' - I have managed to add music and sound effects to this new cut. This cut also includes two of my little voice actors, the real Ben and George Caluan. Both Ben and George, came to my place for one day to record the script for the film. It was a tiring day but had some great results.
Unfortunately I wasn't entirely happy with all of the voice acting, But this was mainly due to time constraints. George found it a lot easier to get into character for the voice recording over the day. and so Bens recording did not quite make the final cut. However, I fully intend to re-record Ben and George at a later date after my submission. This will give me a chance to spend more time on the voice acting over a number of days when they are available. At the moment my schedule is very tight and I need to push on with things to get the film finished, and so I've had to compromise on the voice acting and use my own voice for the character Ben in the film.
I also see much of my animation having to be compromised for my submission, all of my animation will end up being quite minimal and the most of it will be done on 4s to save time. My main priority right now is being able to submit as much of a complete and coherent narrative as possible even if some of the scenes have minimal animation quite like an animatic. If this were a professional project, then I would consider this to be a decision base on the budget available.
I'm becoming increasingly aware that the look and finish of this film through the composition and background painting is becoming quite important to me. I seeing this film is an opportunity to produce and present a body of work primarily reflecting my skills and abilities in digital painting and art direction. I'm therefore quite naturally spending a lot of time focusing on this.
I just thought I'd do a full post on the perspective tool in photoshop, and explain a little bit more about how and why I am saving so much more time after discovering it. I had been previously working out my backgrounds by hand, using general perspective techniques such as creating vanishing points and horizon lines for the desired angles. This technique is definitely reliable but unless you have ample experience with perspective in general, it takes a lot of time to calculate where your vanishing points are. Another reason this takes time is because a lot of the time when working out vanishing points, these points can be well off your page and you therefore need to create a much larger document to work out your perspective lines.
This is because all of your lines have to meet that vanishing point, and it helps to be able to see it at all times especially if what you are drawing is very linear. So until you are finished calculating your perspective you will need to be working in a larger size document, before cropping it down to the require size.
With the perspective tool it eliminates a lot of these problems because not only does it work out the perspective for you, in doing so it automatically creates a preview window that is bigger than your document. You can also come in and out of this preview mode when ever you wish to use the perspective tool to work. However you still need to be aware of the general principles of perspective to be able to work out your vanishing points. This is especially true when designing a scene from your head and you have no real life perspective guides go by for a vanishing point.
Once I've use the tool for a basic set up, I can take advantage of the warp tool to exaggerate my perspective and make the work less linear. With earlier background paintings, I spent a lot to time working this out freehand, so this is a big time-saver now that I've really got to be geting on with things. The Vanishing tool has also been useful when appropriating textures to apply to my paint compositions. Painting something as intricate as brickwork can be a very tedious task but can be rectified with a simple texture as an overlay over a painted layer. This allows me to concentrate more on depth and values rather than detail or before detail.
This is the video link I found which demonstrates the perspective tool and help me to start using it. The image used provides nice simple guides for working out the perspective planes.
Okay that didn't work, might be a bit hard to see why in this preview because of the video quality but sadly I didn't export a higher quality preview before moving on.
However, I found something better. I managed to find out a bit more about the 3-D capabilities of photoshop. Using 3D I've converted my background layout into a 3-D object and used the perspective within the 3-D plane to create my background pan. This has produced a much better results and now I can just work on some final tweaks such as a motion blur, which I can still apply to the 3d background layer. Much happier with things now.
I'm trying to create a motion blur for my tunnel scene right now and am having some difficulty. This is the scene where Ben and George are walking through the tunnel and Ben holds the torch, leading the way. This is more or less a tracking shot. The problem is that it is not your usual 2d background pan where you would use a solid side view for a pan. Instead the shot is actually at an angle and follows a line of perspective. Therefore, if I create a background I need to work out how I can get it to pan along with the perspective line so that it works with the camera angle. This is definitely no easy task in Photoshop and I am not sure how I would do it in After-effects. I'm not very good with after-effects and I don't really want to waste time trying. Alternatively, I might have to get a friend to do it or even my brother, who seems to be quite good with it. However, anyone that helps me with this, might need a lot of guidance and a lot of my notes.
I have given something a go so far but I'm not entirely happy with it. I've used two layers that act as a flat background. They are copies of each other and I'ved shifted one up a bit and then animated that shift using the timeline feature. I also altered the opacity of the other layer and create keyframes for that opacity. Then the timeline feature allows me to alternate between the two Layers, switching between them. This gives the sort of illusion of motion for a background pan and the sort of desired effect that I'm looking for, but I'm not quite happy with it. It's becoming a frustrating ordeal.
My next attempt or plan involves using the perspective tool within photoshop. It's something I've only recently discovered and am now using it to create a number for my backgrounds for the film. With the tool I can create my own perspective plane for an image to be placed on that I can use it to create an image for the tracking scene in the tunnel. If I can create a background long enough and large enough, which is already in perspective I should be able to use it like a typical flat background pan and key a move from left to right whilst still keeping in the plane of perspective . Lets find out.
This is a quick post to say that I'm now planning to continue posting on here using my hip new iPad, some features on here may help me with time-saving, as I never seem to get around to posting even though I document all my work.
I'm now hoping that posting will become a regular thing for me. It seems the only down side to using this blogger app is formatting of images - when inserting an image to a post, it seems to pend at the bottom of your text and will ultimately be posted after a body of text. This leaves me no option for annotations specific to a certain image. Make me wonder why they even bother making these kind of limitations on apps, as it only prompts you to bypass them and use the safari web browsers as usual.
