Category: Collaborative

This week we finally finished the final short film of the project, next I will introduce the editing, compositing, sound and summary. We edit the film in the last week and then add effects and sound effects in Pr.

In addition we added 2d painting as 2d effects.

About the team

About final film

About working process

About editing and sound

The background music was collected and integrated by Jiazhuo Tang and I from the Ai composition website. The rest of the sound effects were downloaded by Tang from material sites. The composing and editing of the video was done by Qiaoqing Yu.

This is the website of Ai Composition：

https://soundraw.io/

About 2D effects

I wanted to show a combination of 2D and 3D animation to present this short film, so I chose to use 3D animation to tell the story and 2D animation to show the visual effects. After a meeting and discussion, the story plot of the burning carousel was added and this 2D effect was drawn by Gou.

Based on the image of the main character, we suggest drawing an end caption illustration that is cute.

Summary & Reflection

This project cooperation is a very good and precious opportunity, and I have learned and gained a lot from this cooperation process. As team leader, I still have a lot of improvement to make. This project collaboration was only ten weeks long, and we completed a game promo. The meaning of this film is to oppose bullying, and the main character of the story is a young boy who was once bullied and isolated because of his appearance, and his heart has always longed for an amusement park of his own, and the rabbit doll was the only playmate he ever had. He originally thought he could find a real friend, but became twisted in the depths of his desire and he eventually lost himself. At the end of the film, the hand that appears is the one who comes to save him from returning to reality, but can it really save him?

The first thing I need to reflect on is that my lack of experience in time planning for collaborative projects led to a slow progress in our first month, so the time left for the later stages was not all sufficient, which also directly compressed the time for later revisions and adjustments. The second point is that my mind is not spread out enough. Sometimes I feel like a good idea comes to me, but I can not move it forward or make it more developed, and I often feel a lack of new inspiration. This has been a problem for me for a long time. In the early stages of our collaborative project, I had a long plot and the story didn’t become complete until the fifth week. I should take the time to watch more books and films, and the one that has interested me recently is the David Hockney exhibition, which I will visit afterwards. In the end, I accumulated more lessons about project production from this experience, such as how to record the meeting process, how to communicate with members about the process and details of the project, and how to search for various materials, all of which were very valuable to me.

This week’s task is to do the lighting first and adjust the lighting effect. After finishing the lighting and animation of all the files, render them by shot number and duration.

About rendering

I mainly do the lighting adjustment for the animation part that I am responsible for. Here are the details and process of the lighting adjustment for the third shot. In addition, I did the lighting and rendering for the ending section.

Another light was added, so the reflection of the eyes is very strong, and the original eye highlights are not obvious.

Therefore, I disconnected the added light and the light link to the eye. So that the eyes are not affected by the intensity of the light

About Rendering

The final animation rendering took us about 5 days. We worked on the rendering from Monday to Friday, and while we were rendering we also needed to check that the rendering settings of the files were accurate and that the textures and lighting were working properly.

This week’s task is to rig the main character and the doll, and then import them into different scenes for animation.

Due to time limitation, we will divide the work more clearly：

• 3D: this week to do animation, four days
• From tomorrow to Sunday (3.1-3.5) finish the animation, Monday (3.6) start rendering plus post 7-14 rendering and post.
• 2D: do the first frame and footage 1. carousel 2. characters pose a movement for reference

About rigging

The work of rigging is done by Qiaoqing Yu, who needs to fix the position of the bones on the character model first, and then use ADV to complete the basic rigging, after which the weight of the skin needs to be adjusted, and this step is the most complicated, after many attempts to try again and again to complete.

About Animation

We divided a total of 16 shots in the animation section, and we were respectively responsible for the animation of three different scenes.

1. First frame: comic book (2d)
2. Second frame: shoot the gate camera from top to bottom (2-3s) to shoot the little boy walking into the gate (walk two steps, walk into the gate 2-3s)
3. The third frame: the boy walks towards the carousel and then stops (walk 3s + 2s after stopping)
4. The fourth frame: holding the rabbit in his hands very happy (4s, holding the rabbit in his arms)
5. Fifth frame: holding the rabbit in front of the merry-go-round and dancing around (small range) (5s)
6. Sixth frame: turn around and cover the camera from far to near and then turn the scene (3s)
7. The seventh frame: the camera close-up to the feet, from the feet to the house, (3-5s)
8. Eighth frame: give an empty shot of the crane room, from left to right (5s)
9. Ninth frame: still shot, close-up of the doll lying in the crane machine (3s)
10. Tenth frame: side shot of the little boy, close up (above the shoulders, head shot) (tilting the head and bringing it forward) (4s)
11. The eleventh and twelfth frames: two other shots according to the split screen (add subtitles, add voiceover) (5+5s+2s freeze frame) (the twelfth frame, the little boy’s hand lifts up and sticks to the glass, the doll follows suit.)
12. Frame 13: Far shot, amusement park gate, the camera pulls down and captures the rabbit in the beam of light. (5s)
13. Frame 14: close-up, the tattered rabbit (2s)
14. Frame fifteen: close-up, a hand holding the rabbit (two steps forward with the camera in first-person view, approaching the rabbit, pulling the picked-up rabbit closer to the camera) (5-6s)
15. The sixteenth frame: on the basis of the fifteenth frame, the subtitle (I will take you to home.) (3s freeze frame, end) about 1m10s, the end of the film 20s
16. The total length of the film is about 1min30s.

I was responsible for the 3th shot of the carousel and the 5 shots at the end.

In addition, we are not individuals. As a group, we watch the preview after we make the animation, then we give each other comments, and then we make modification of actions and shots.

The aim of this week is to finish building all the 3D scene models, as time is very limited in the next three weeks.

About the building of the room of the crane catcher

The room of the crane catcher is a separate indoor scene, in which the main character saw the doll in the glass and became curious and asked if it would like to be friends with him. In the design of the scene, the most external is curtain, giving the room a sense of mysterious atmosphere. At the same time, we propose to add children’s interest to this room in addition to the crane machine, you can see a lot of gift boxes and children’s favorite toys on the left side of the room. The chandelier is the most distinctive part of the design and is meant to express a sense of fantasy.

3D model building about the gate

The gate was originally designed by a 2D member, and the 3D modeling was done by Yu and I. I did the top part of the gate, and Yu did the bottom part and mapping. To achieve a better visual effect, we do a lot of deformation in the parts of the gate model, so that it looks random, not board, it will look more lovely. The model of the cream below was more difficult to make, so it took a day to modify it and finally achieved the desired effect.

After adjusting the basic model, add more details to the door, and do the texture, lighting. But this is not the final lighting effect, we are currently just testing the visual effect of its basic model.

The model of the house inside the amusement park was downloaded a long time ago, and I modified it here and made new materials and textures so that it could be more in line with the style of the amusement park.

The purpose of making these houses is to enrich the scene and to serve as a background when the camera is in motion.

The main task of this week is to continue to finish the 3D model. Also, since I modified the storyboard last week, We added new props according to the storyline, one is the gate of the amusement park, a bunny doll (complete/broken), a doll, the room with the doll catcher, and the carousel. Members of 2D draw new designs based on storyboard.

About the new 2D design drawings

About 3D Character and Scene Modeling 2.0

3D modeling is mainly to continue to complete the model of the main character, as well as the three new scenes, the carousel and the room of the crane machine.

The first version of the carousel is not using rabbits as props. It looks more ordinary, there are no features. Later, according to the new 2D design, I made the carousel with rabbits.

The Ferris wheel and carousel were made by me, and the left game prop （Rotating Flying Chair） and basic horse model without texture were downloaded from the website.

Here is the download site：https://www.wmiao.com/

The 5th week’s assignment was a collaborative project presentation and a revision of the storyboard. I was the team leader and created the slides about our project presentation and presented it. In order to make our story concept and intention more critical, I made new drawings and story adjustments to the storyboard after discussing with my team members.

About the presentation

Here are the details of our project introduction

About the second revision of the storyboard

The new storyboard was drawn by me, because I wanted to make the story more reversed and critical. At the same time, I hope to draw the audience’s attention to those who are being bullied.

Story Concept ：Our project is a game promo with an anti-bullying theme. Therefore, our main character is a young boy who has suffered from bullying. Childhood experiences have a dramatic impact on the formation of one’s personality, and the main character of our story is a person with childhood trauma, whose personality has been distorted after experiencing bullying. We reflect his inner world through the two-dimensional illustrations, and the whole amusement park is actually a reflection of his inner world. At the end, the player picks up the broken rabbit doll that the young boy dropped at the entrance of the amusement park, and something is about to happen.

Our main task this week was to complete the three models of the characters and part of the scene modeling.

About character modeling

The character modelling was done by Qiaoqing Yu of 3D animation, whose main reference came from Gou’s 2D character design and other costume and material references. As we like the character design of 【Identity V】 very much, we also referred to the style of it when we made the initial character model.

This screenshot is the initial stage of trying to model the character in Maya

This is the second version of the 3D character model that was completed with modifications based on the 2D character design.

About scene prop modeling

I was responsible for modeling the amusement park scene. Since the amusement park prop we are sure to use at the moment is the Ferris wheel, I made the model of the Ferris wheel. I started by finding some references of amusement park scenes so that we could further refine our 3D scenes.

These are some of the amusement park scenes I found from Artstation that were created by 3D artists.

The upper part of the Ferris wheel I modeled through the polymash of Maya

The bottom part of the Ferris wheel I made a high platform and steps, because the Ferris wheel is a distant view, need to be placed at the back of the amusement park.

The main task this week was to complete the storyboard and character design. Since our story content is about a little boy lost in an amusement park, we will design the main character and the style of the scene in a fantasy style.

About the Storyboard

The initial storyboard was done by Xu from 2D Animation, who designed the first version of the storyboard.

The first version storyboard

After seeing the draft storyboard drawn by Xu, we met again to discuss the structure of the storyline. Since we were making a preview, the storyline needed to be compressed, but this version of the story was a bit tedious and very fragmented without a lot of useful content, so we decided to make changes to the storyboard after the discussion. The initial storyboard is very important for the mid-term modeling and animation, and is the foundation of the whole project. Therefore we pay a lot of attention to the quality of the storyboard and the storytelling.

About the 2D character design

The character’s design was drawn by Gou from 2D Animation, who designed several versions of the color scheme.

Gou designed a total of 5 versions of the image of the main character

Red and blue version

Green and grey version

Red and white version

There is also the design of the supporting characters, although the final part of the supporting characters deleted

Xu also designed the characters, but we did not take this version.

We finally decided on the image of the main character, using the red and blue version, which can reflect the naivety of children. The second reason is that our story takes place in an amusement park at night, and the main character will be more noticeable when wearing red and blue-based colors.

The second week we met to discuss the story content of the project. At first we were stuck on what theme of story we wanted to do. Our agreement was to do a dark style story.

The second week we officially set up the project team, I was the team leader, the members were Qiaoqing Yu, Jiazhuo Tang from 3D Computer Animation, Yinyun Xu and Guowei Gou from Animation.

To speed up our pace, we started brainstorming. We asked each other about scary scenes, especially as young kids, where was the first place that came to mind? I said the first thing that comes to mind is an empty amusement park. Group members propose the empty shopping malls, after-school classrooms, etc. Then we decided that the main character was a young boy of about 10 years old.

Record the setting keywords during the discussion

After we determined that the story was set in an amusement park, we further discussed the plot development of the story. At first we conceived of a storyline about lost children, and later mentioned about raising awareness about disadvantaged people.

Considering the volume of the project, we still consider doing the content of the little boy getting lost, so that the story sense of the game promo can be reflected.

After that we confirmed the project and group members’ information.

This is the first week of the project and I’m leaning towards the idea of doing a game promo. I’ve always loved fantasy game titles, so I looked for games in my favorite genre for reference. Considering the workload, we won’t attempt to make overly complicated game promos, but rather focus on making short and delicate content.

After we decided the direction of our work, we started looking for the right partner. We needed partners for 2D animation and storyboarding. Within a week’s time, we found a partner. I worked with two students from 2D animation and two students from 3D animation.

After this, I searched for a large number of stylistic reference images about characters and scenes. Through these reference charts we were able to more quickly determine our design style and direction.

About the style of the game characters

These are the character designs we are interested in

About the style of game promos

I’ve always loved the art style of the game 【Identity V】, so I wanted to create a similar dark style promo. Also, I appreciate the art design of【 Brawl Star】. It uses many delicate, childish and cute elements to enrich the picture, and I learned a lot.