The brief for this project is to create an advertisement for a small company who are wanting to go into 3d work. For this it has to be a convincing match move. There is no brief specifically just a convincing piece of work to showcase what the company could achieve, so there is no theme.
In some cases i’ve found it harder to work with no specific brief or theme as the possibilities are endless. so in order to get myself thinking and create my own theme. I am looking at existing companies advertisements and reels, which is something i do in my spare time anyway. So i’m just looking for things that will stand out from what i’ve seen.
In this first showreel I really liked the VFX with with the spaceships and the city scape. I was inspired by many aspects of this showreel but thought a lot of it was out of my capabilities to replicate, so continued to look elsewhere.
I looked at another of their showreels , some of which was the same but I did see some different ones such as the robot falling from the ceiling that stuck out to me . I began to get a few ideas but nothing that was really exciting to me because in this project i felt very limited in my skills.
Videos from movies and the making of them:
In some of the showreels above I did struggle to see how things were done so began to look at behind the scenes videos to help understand certain effects.
After my short research i did begin to understand the techniques of match moving and what i would need to do. I had a meeting with my client on the 12th of February to discuss what I could do for this brief. At the time I really didn’t have much of an idea but I thought of having a scene with thoughts of tall sky scrapers and big buildings and maybe having a CG object such as a plane or something in the scene and making it look like it belonged there. The client seemed ok with this idea but I on the other hand was not so enthusiastic about it. So I began to go back through some of the videos id watched before, because it keeps me inspired and thinking of more interesting ideas. I came across the V-Ray advertising show reel and stopped an advertisement with the pink and white butterfly. It really stuck out as such a striking vibrant image and sparked an idea, as i thought a lot of my other competitors would offer something similar to the first idea above. With this in mind i wanted to stand out from the other options my client had at hand.
The concept which I pitched to the client on our next brief meeting the following week. This was to be set in possibly a shopping centre or just around a town centre with a unassuming box on the ground. The camera would start at a low angle to be just in front of the box and the audience will see only peoples feet walking past this box. Then one person feet will stop just in front of it step left and right looking to see if it belonged to anyone. The person would then bend down and pick up the ox and the camera would follow the box up. The person would look at it and eventually open it. To be amazed when a butterfly pops out of it and starts flying around the camera will be stationary at this point with the person upper body in shot as their head turns to watch the butterfly. Fly off.
The scene would end with a still image of the box with the strap line “thinking outside the box.” And the clients logo on screen.
Below are some rough sketches of the idea.
The time scale on this project is fairly short it ran from the 2nd week of February to the 27th of march. So it was 6 weeks but the actual production was around a month because of the concepting stage. I made a timetable of what jobs id need to do and when they would need to be done for the project to get finished in time below.
Timetabledocument
This is the progress with the butterfly:
I also have separate page for my butterfly character with how that idea developed and some rough sketches for that character. I decided it would be best to combine the two projects so i had a better quality model for the cg match move. I did think it would benefit me time wise as well. The character i made did go through much of its ascetics in z brush itself as i found it easier to develop the character and try things and change things. I also tried several colors for it. As i originally wanted to use a striking light blue i thought it would look a lot more futuristic and interesting to an audience. For some reason i tried the color and many variations and it didn’t suit the character at all so i changed this to more neutral colors. As the character had to be hard surface for the other project i went with quiet an old rustic look to suit the metals and coppers used for the surface. This didn’t affect my progress with the match move but i would of preferred other colors.
Here you can see my final match move in which the butterfly was changed colour wise because I had issues involving my other project which caused me to lose the textures I applied above. So I painted the sculpt again in more vibrant colours as it would of been very time consuming to replicate the same textures again. After this the model was brought in to Maya. I used Maya to build a skeletal structure for just the wings which took a few attempts in itself as I wasn’t to sure how many bones to add and Maya didn’t know what to do with the body of the butterfly. So when I skinned it the characters body would move with the wings. This I managed to rectify after changing the skeletal structure and painting weights on the character.
After this I tracked the footage out of nuke and into Maya where I went on to animate a cg box I had built and textured. I then added a HDR image to give a sense of the same lighting in the scene. I rendered this out in three parts the box stationary on the floor, the box being lifted up and the box being opened, with the butterfly animated also.
I had a lot of difficulty with this because of the fact the box was being moved as the actors hand had to appear over the box as apposed to behind it. This created problems as rotoing out the hand for every key frame would of been very jittery, so I used a key light node to get a mask. This did give me a mask but because the box was actually fairly similar in tone to the actors hand certain parts could not be keyed in that mask. Which meant at some points I actually had to roto the box back on in the right corner. It also caused there to be a white edge around the box which obviously would look fake so again I had to roto out this fro every key frame which was extremely time consuming. I did however finish this as best as I could although it is slightly messy at some parts. I managed to add a few effects when the box is opened that is more in line with what I wanted to create.
The final piece is shown below:
What my client asked for:
My clients brief was simple to create something interesting to advertise his company that was a match move.
The client seems happy with the piece although they did make me aware they would like to have seen colour correction in the piece, this I also feel I should of added but because of time constraints with other projects I was unable to do that for them. They do however think the concept is nice and the final piece did do what they initially asked for.
I think I achieved this although some bits I would like to improve on such the white outline and where the box gets slightly cut off. I still think the piece in comparison to work for the same brief achieved the clients goal. It demonstrates that they are thinking out the box. There are things I would change to improve on such as colour correction and the edges and the slight jitteriness of the box itself at points. I would of also added music to be more appealing to an audience. I would also next time try my best to come up with a more efficient idea if I were running other projects, as this one over ran time wise which I am sure the client wasn’t not happy with although they were made aware of it. Next time I would try and think of an idea less complex especially as match moving isn’t something I know well enabling me to stick to the timetable I had made. I think I was very ambitious in this piece which required me to use zbrush, Maya and nuke for various different things in order to achieve it. In doing so I feel I have learned a lot about moving through different programs and the way zbrush allows you to go through the different levels of subdivisions and how Maya can use tracking data to do a lot of the initial animation of your object. I also feel a lot more confident in nuke now so I feel being maybe over ambitious was a good thing.
rubyakhtar 