MY OWN GROUP"S OVERALL ANNUAL EVALUATION

As a scuba diving guide I often get to guide a group of people that I have never seen before on an unknown terrain. This is a hugh responsibility. There have often been strong currents against us or we had other issues connected with mistrust, lackage of self-confidence or experience. There were several times that I simply wanted to stop and surface, but so far ... I have always pulled myself together and brought them all safe and sound to the end.

I have feeling that guiding my final year degree film team throughout the year was prety much the same thing. I was given a chance to work with people that I have never worked with before. There have been many troubles (from personal to technical) and there has been a lot against us, but we didn't give up.

Despite all the pressures we managed to finally pull ourselves together and create a beautiful film. It is true it is not finished yet, but it is done.

Thank you for that all! And I wish you a very successful future.

MY OWN 3RD TERM SCEDULE

WEBSITE

I am still in a process of building my own website, which will include the whole section solely devoted to our final film. I will of course credit all the people who contributed.

the website is called www.anjatolar.blogspot.com

and there you can see also other projects and associated work that I worked on through the years at Ravensbourne.

Other project promotional material:

Logo and business crads

NOT SO FINAL OUTPUT

rough film

This is still not a final version of a film as I did most of the work myself and I am still improving it. There is lots left to be fixed. In general I simplified it, so it is more "understandable" for the viewer, but gaining descriptiveness it also lost its very abstract look from before, which, to admit, I slightly regret.

PRINTS FOR HARVEY to give a feel and COMPOSITING

PRINTS FOR HARVEY AND COMPOSITING

Althoug one meter long prints is the last thing on earth that a busy worker would like to do when trying to finish the project...it kind of turned out great experience as it is for the first time for me too see how 2D animation fits on the top of 3D backgrounds (later on when compositing, 2D was actually planted "in-between' 3D rendered layers wit a help of camera tracking).

TITLES AND CREDIT'S DESIGN AND EFFECTS

Titles and credits

I have several ideas for these. First I wanted to develop my own type, but then I found some nice ones on web and also compositing different elements I created the "peace and harmony" seal stamp, which is the part of film logo.

film promotional material. I did a few versions of title and credits, going from more simple to complicated and back again!

CREDITS NOW:

CREDITS BEFORE ( a bit confusing for the eye):

COMPOSITING AND CAMERA TRACKING

Experimenting with animation techniques

The initial idea for this film was, to achieve the synesthesy of different animation techniques; 2D, 3D and live action. The reason for that was to achieve viewers involvement with the story, but also feel the tactile quality of the with material (paper). This lead from photo collaged backgrunds to 3D environments with 2D animation composited on the top. Live action was firstly expressed through photographed frames of hand movement. I had an idea of 3d crane being animated with live action hands, but after speaking to some experts and I excluded that idea as it would simply take all my time to be solved and I couldn't afford that. This is why I decided to completely abandon the idea of having a live action involved and simply concentrated on marriage between 3d and 2d.

camera tracking

There is no way to properly track the motion of 2D animation to fit 3D camera move. It was always jumping around, no matter how hard we tried. So I needed to do the camera tracking. Camera tracking is done with the help of a poly plane placed on the spot where would otherwise be 2D animation. This plane is assigned a texture with high contrast pattern that is easily definable from near or far for the tracker to lock onto. Tracking can be done nativly within After Effects, using its point tracking system, which gives varied results. It would be better to use Mocha, which is AF plugin and offers planar mapping system and gives into account the whole image data (planar tracking instead of point tracking ).

I used tracking because the other option where I assigned the 2D animation onto a plane in Maya as an animated (.mov) texture. The problem was that Maya didn't take opacity into account no matter what movie file I used (regardless I turned on the transparency option).

compositing

All compositing was done in After Effects, importing 3D backgrounds in layers, enabling me to have bigger control over them. I discovered that I need to put on "premultiplied" option to keep the light effects the same as when rendered out,

2D animation was imported in editable layered PSD files, previously sorted out with animation option in Photoshop.

2D Frames of crane flight from the top, composited on the top of rendered layers from Maya:

Final look: