Mother's Days - Winner of the New Designers Screening Prize People's Vote

Mother's Days : Post-production : Christmas Lights Test 01

Image 01.

Clip 01. Green screen

Clip 02. Composite

I had originally planned to use my skills from school to wire up a small set of LED christmas lights to my puppet powered by batteries, but I thought there could be a simple way of using the combination of stop-motion with CG for this. I had a feeling that if I were to cover a piece of wire with black shrink wrap, paint white dots on it in intervals to represent bulb placement then wrap it around her head, this would be enough of a base to add lights in post-production. Once I had some footage to test out my theory, I opened up Photoshop, painted one single dot with the airbrush in a medium vibrant blue then saved it out and imported the png into After effects. 

Image 02.

I placed a duplicate of the blue dot onto each white dot that was on Doris's head wire then alternated the lights to flash on and off for each 4 frames in three sets. When all of the key frames had been quadruple checked to make sure the rhythm was in time, I changed the layer types to colour dodge and this gave the perfect glow I had thought it would on her christmas hat (see image 01).

Mother's Days : Composite Demonstration

The submission deadline for my degree has now passed so I submitted my work.

There is however, much more to post up and do so I will be continuing my posts for 'Mother's Days' as a continuing personal project.

The clip below is a demonstration of the layers that have been composited using After Effects to make just one segment of Mother's Days.

Mother's Days : Major Project Submission : Animation

1) Animation

2) 'Art & Making Of' document

3) Demo Reel

4) Technical Document

Mother's Days : Art & Making Of

Mother's Days : Animation Demo Reel

As part of the project submission it is necessary to make a short demo reel to suit the area of my chosen career path from current and previous work.

Mother's Days : CG House Composite : Test 01

Image 01. Composite Render of the CG Buildings & Stop-motion foreground

(Bump Maps still to be applied)

Image 02. Concept art for comparison

Image 03. House render with dirt now included

Image 04. House render with dirt now included

Image 05. House render with dirt now included

Image 06. House texture map with dirt now included

Image 07. A screen-shot of the maya view - lining the houses up behind the characters with the amusements building and wall temporarily turned off.

Mother's Days : CG Composite : Amusement Building : Test 01

Image 01.

Image 02.

Image 03.

These images are a test to see how the 'Amusements building' works when composited into the scene, this is without all of the tweaking that will be done such as added bump maps, colour correction and lens blur. Image 01 is the composite with the CG Wall and CG Amusements building composited with the Stop-motion characters using After Effects. Image 02 shows the comparison between the production view and the concept view. And Image 03 is how the elements look in Maya through the camera resolution gate with the stop-motion segment as an image plane for line-up purposes. 

Mother's Days : CG : Amusements Building

Image 01. The orthographic diagram, Maya model and texture map

Image 02. A render to see how the texture looks

Image 03. A render to see how the texture looks

The letting will be attached soon, as will a bump map and lighting tests

Mother's Days : August Segment Test

Image 01. Me on set whilst animating Mother's Days

Clip 01. The segments of the August scene. A little rough still but more work is yet to be done for the 'post-clean-up & composite'. Also the background buildings and sound will be added.