Great drawing weeks, but also post problems

Last week I couldn’t find some time to write an update, so now an extra large blog post with some nice updates.

We drew a lot of frames this week. We did over 200 last week and this week about 170 frames. Up to now we finished around 450 drawings (we need 1500 frames in total). A great result, but I think we will be able to speed up the drawing of the frames because the school gives us a Cintiq 21 WZ for one week. We are on schedule, but we’re still not there.

Last week the school gave us some new feedback. They told us that the animation was confusing at some times, especially in the beginning. Some people said that we might need to skip the animation because it distract from the interview with Hajo. This is very important feedback; this means we have to be very careful using the animation. Our target is that the animation makes the interview stronger and not that we use the story to make a cool animation. We really have to work on this problem.

What also gives a lot of problems is the compositing of some shots. A lot of these shots have some camera movement, so we use the blender tracking system to integrate the background with the footage. In almost all shots this works great, but sometimes it’s very hard to integrate these two together. There are enough tracking markers but we used a tripod and this is not easy to match. I will have to look for a solution.

Another big thing is the render time. This week we started rendering the ‘Death Marches’, which takes place in a forest. Rendering these images takes around 20 hours, and sometimes we have to re-render the shot because it looks bad. What we do is let the computer render at night so we can use the images the next day.

Last week we finished some new shots, below you can see one of these (still in progress). What we want to show here is Hajo in a sugar tank. He is looking for some sugar to put in a can, then he gives this to his friend Jos, who is on top of the tank and grabs the can. We wanted to give the feeling that he is in a small room. Therefore, we built this room in Blender for a nice background image for in the animation, below we will explain how we did this.

In this image you can see how we built the 3D sugar tank. Important thing is that we made a room with realistic lighting. We made a round hole in the tank so the light gives some nice streaks on the floor. The other lamps are for some nice environment lighting.

This is the final background before we put a filter on it.

And this is the final (75 frames). Total working time around 25 hours.

And still this shot is not finished yet. We want to put a final compositing layer over it, this is for the flashback feeling and color grading. At the end we have to add the sound.

This is the animation process, so far.  I forgot to tell something about the soundtrack composer. Tim Ouw is making the soundtrack, he showed us some great sample (John Williams style). Here you can listen to some samples. In the next weeks more about this process.