2. Week 1 (Poster Production)
• I created my poster within Photoshop. My first step in creating the poster was to create my background. To draw my poster I used a
variety of tools, mainly the Brush tool, Smudge tool, and Eraser Tool. I found that an effective and easy way to add shading was to
simply select a colour darker than the colour which I desired to add the shading to. I would then decrease the opacity of the
brush which acted as a toggle for the depth of shadow. This process is more reliable than trying to create shading by blending lots of
colours. However, I needed to shade using multiple colours when the area had brighter colours and when I wanted to create a greater
sense of texture to a surface. For this type of shading I utilized the smudge tool which I used to create the character's hair, the desert,
and clouds. Colours could be blended when I used the smudge tool at the edge of a certain colour then dragged this edge outwards
which expanded it and also enlarged the colour in between the edge and the colour next to it. This in between colour cannot usually
be seen. Another use of the smudge tool was to create depth and perspective by warping multiple colours at the same time which I
did to make the desert. Gaussian blur was added to the desert to try and replicate the blur created from heat that is seen in the
desert.
• When creating the character on my poster I decided that first I would need to plan a rough idea of the pose and structure he would
have. This worked well because I think that I did a good job at making his dimensions look realistic even though they are quite simple.
The first step in making his structure was to find an image of a man in a hunched over position. I was unable to find an image with
the exact position I wanted but I ended up choosing an image of a man riding a bike as the torso was in the right position. On a new
layer I then drew around the torso and added a head, arms, and legs to it. I then a drew a hoop inside of the head to represent
the angle the face was turned, a hoop inside of the arms to represent the angle and position of the elbows, and a hoop inside of the
legs to represent the position and angle of the knees. These markers helped me plan which way the character should face and what
areas required detail or shading. I didn't really know if this method would work but I had seen these lines in sketches and assumed
this was their purpose so I got lucky that this was not a waste of time. I put each body part on a separate layer which meant that
when I wanted to smudge the body part it wouldn't mix with the other body parts.
• When I drew the mountain in the background I didn't want it to be overly crowded with small details so I used larger brushes. I used a
large variety of different colours and brush style to help convey the bigness of the mountain and that it had many different terrains. If,
instead, I had tried to do this with a smaller brush then I think it would have been too messy and the shape of the mountain wouldn't
have been clear enough.
• Once I had written my title I wanted to liquefy it So I had to turn it into a smart object which meant the text was converted from a
text layer into an object layer. This meant that I could edit in all the ways you can edit an image in photoshop but I could not retype it.
I used the pucker tool on it which made the centre of the pucker circle smaller and kept the outer edges the same size. I used this to
give the text a crooked zoom look. I used the paint bucket tool to colour the insides of the text. To create the red mist around the text
I added a red drop shadow, kept the drop shadow close to the title, and lowered its opacity.
3. Week 1 Screen shots
Character pose sketch
The title's drop shadow settings
Layers for different parts of
the character
4. Week 2 (Opening sequence)
• I will first talk about my work in Blender for my opening sequence. In Blender I created the footage of the sands in blender. My first step
was to create the sand dunes themselves. I added a plane mesh to my Blender project and I edited the shape of the mesh by going into
sculpting mode and used the draw and inflate tool to create the dunes.
• I then went to work on the texturing in the shading section. I added a ColorRamp node and I set the lightest colour in the mesh texture to
tan and the darkest to a greyish colour. I then connected this to a Multiply node which allowed me to connect the ColorRamp of tan and
grey to a color of black and white which controls the contrast and brightness of the texture. I controlled the placement of tan and grey
by using Noise Texture nodes connected to the values of the color ramps. This will mean that the two colours were a grainy quality. I
added a bump node to make the surface bumpy and rough. To actually place the texture of the dune mesh I added a mapping node to
the noise textures, which were connected by the pathway named object. A lot of this process required guess work, although I had already
learnt about the colour ramp shading technique. When I completed my first dune I duplicated it 79 times and spread it across the scene
to create a large landscape. I would have liked to have created 79 individual meshes but this would have taken too long.
• The next step was to animate the movement of the virtual camera. I wanted to create a set path for the camera to follow, I created
the path the camera would follow by drawing a line with the draw tool then transforming it into a bezier curve. I then shift clicked on my
camera, shift clicked on the line, then pressed right click which gave the option for the camera to "follow path". There is also a slider to
increase the number of keyframes the camera has between the start and end of the path. The more keyframes I added the more smooth
the animation is however it increases render time. I had some difficultly because the camera did not move to the position of the line, it
only followed the direction which resulted in the camera clipping through the ground/meshes. When this happened I changed the angle
of the path and when the path wasn't long enough I used the extrude tool to duplicate another line in front of the previous one. It
was quite hard to know what the camera movement would look like using this method so when I viewed the camera movement the line
had created I saw that the camera movement was very sharp and would jerk up and down unnaturally. I had to resize and redirect many
of the extruded lines which was quite pain staking. However I knew that I was going to have videos and text in front of this animation so
I didn't need to worry too much about what this part of the animation looked like as it would
be barely visible.
5. Opening Sequence continued
• A less successful part of the blender process was the HDRI which I was only able to make look suitable when I
turned it upside down and even when I turned it upside down a car could be seen in the distance which means if
this is spotted it breaks the immersion completely. HDRI's are 360 images which are used as backgrounds or
skyboxes which also add natural base lighting to the entire scene. I downloaded my HDRI from the
website HDRI HAVEN.com in which a number of free HDRI's can be found. I applied the HDRI by going to the
shading section and then clicking on "open image" and selecting the HDRI file from my computer documents.
• I then exported the blender animation as a mp4 and I put it into a premiere pro project. Within premiere
pro I added archive footage I had downloaded. My original plan was to use footage from the
archive footage website but these clips were paid for and I was unable to get permission to use them. I used clips I
downloaded from YouTube instead which unfortunately could lead to some resolution irregularities as
the different clips had different resolution on their original YouTube video and were likely recorded using
varying quality of cameras. I turned this footage to black and white using the monochrome faded effect so
that it was easier to control which parts of the footage would be visible using the brightness of the layers
underneath. For example when my animation was dark the light areas on the layers above would be shown but if
the animation was lighter the darker areas of the layers above will stand out. I also decided to make all of
the archive footage monochrome so it is not inconsistent as originally some of the clips were
monochrome but others had colour. Some of the clips stood out from the rest as their image was too sharp so I
added the gaussian blur effect to them.
•
6. Week 2 screenshots
Texture for sand dune mesh texture
Camera following beizer curve
Sand dune model
Settings for the video clips
Archive video clips
7. Week 3 (narration and 2D animation)
• I began to work on the narration for my opening sequence and I recorded the audio within Adobe Audition. I didn't use
microphone I used for previous projects because it picked up a lot of background noise and the vocals had a slight echo. I
wanted to use a hand held microphone so I plugged an audio interface into the computer which I then plugged into the
audio interface. The audio interface allowed me to toggle how much I could hear the input from my microphone or output
from the computer which meant I could listen to my voice as I was speaking which helped me to recognize how to adjust my
tone of voice. The microphone could only be plugged in one audio jack so when I played it back the audio file sound could
only be heard from the left ear. To fix this I copied the data from the left audio layer and pasted it into the right audio layer. I
realised the voice over did not sound ominous enough so I added a distortion effect to it. Once I imported the audio files in
my premiere pro project I then added a scrolling text to accompany them. I made this text by copying my script into a text
box and adding a position keyframe. I lowered the opacity of my text so that it did not distracted too much from the other
visuals but I also gave the text a stroke so it could be read very easily. I used the Germania font which I downloaded from
the website Dafont.com.
•
8. 2D Animation
• Before I started animating my 2d animation I knew I needed a video reference so I recorded videos of myself performing the
action that I wanted the character to perform. I added this video into a photoshop document by opening the timeline
window then imported the video to my timeline by selecting layer then selected new video layer from file and selected the
file from my computer documents. I then needed to create a new blank video layer which would allow me to draw on top of
the video. I would draw over each frame of the video on a blank layer by placing my protagonist in the same position as
myself in the video. This process was simple but very painstaking and it was hard to know in what ways I should deviate from
the reference video in terms of physics such as stretch and follow through. It was also hard to judge how the motion looked
as a whole because the video layer didn't allow me to enable onion skin so I could not see the frames before. This lack of
onion skin is one of the disadvantages of animating 2d in photoshop to animating 2d in adobe animate. However, adobe
animate does not feature a variety of brushes like photoshop and blur cannot be added to the animation in Adobe Animate.
All in all though I preferred animating in adobe animate as it is generally easier to use. Adobe Animate had a different
method of importing video which is to select import video and then I was given three options – Import video with external
playback component, Embed FLV in SWF and play in timeline, Embed H.264 in video timeline. I found that the last option was
the best as the other two had a playback interface around them which cropped the corners of the video. Also, the last option
did not distort when I enlarged it to fit the animation's resolution. This was a major problem when working in photoshop
because I had recorded the videos on a smartphone so the resolution was quite small and the image vertical so when I
enlarged it the image was stretched greatly.
• If I was to work with 2d animation again I would try and use an AI software such as Big Sleep which would allow me to
combine the video with a drawing and have the drawing move automatically with the video in a 3d environment instead of
animating it manually. For me to do this I would require a better graphics card.
10. Week 4 (t-shirt design)
• This week I created a T-shirt design in Photoshop to promote my film which I uploaded to my Redbubble.com
store and then ordered one to be delivered to myself. I needed to create a Redbubble account.
• When creating my T-shirt design I mainly used images from the internet and most of these images come from
amazon as it had a lot of pictures of metal parts and machinery which were being sold. When I used my own images I
made sure the image had bright enough lighting and the subject did not go beyond any of the edges. This was to
ensure that the outline was visible when I added the threshold filter which I did to all the images. I enabled this filter
by selecting the desired layer clicking on the selection titled "Image" then "Adjustments" then "Threshold". The
threshold effect turns the darker areas of image into pure black and the lighter areas into pure white. I toggle the
threshold number until the dark was in a area that I felt was accurate to where the shade would be in the scene.
Often, before applying the threshold effect, I would alter the brightness setting to try and influence where the black
would be placed afterwards. In photos I took myself I had to plan where the subject would be positioned in the
design which would affect from what perspective and from what distance I would take the photo from. The Image of
the man with the bag over his head was hard and took time a long time for me to make because I was unable to take
the photo myself as I acted as the man with the sack over his head. I couldn't tell what perspective the photo was
being taken from so there was a lot of trial and error.
• After I added the metal to the man's head I would then merge all of the layers related to his head so I could change
the position of and resize these groups of images without having to select each layer individually. For the title I used
the font called Angkatan Bersenjata which I downloaded from the website Dafont. I duplicated the text layer, changed
the new layer's font colour to black from red then placed it behind the original font and slightly down and to the left.
This created a kind of drop shadow but instead of a blurry shadow it was a clear copy of the image so in this regard it
was more similar to a stroke. I also added a noise effect to the top layer of text. Some of the people in the images
from the internet I used had their limbs in the wrong position so I used the lasso tool to select the limb and then I
right clicked on the selection and clicked new layer via cut. This takes that part of the layer and moves it to a new
layer so I can then move this new layer around without affecting the rest of the body. When I wanted to add
curvature to the edge of an image I would click control then right click on the image and select warp. I mainly used
the warp feature to position arms and bend pieces of metal.
•
11. Week 4 Screenshots
Puppet warp tool I used to
bend objects
Threshold graph
Early stage head design
Finished head design
Picture I took which I then imported in the Photoshop
12. Week 5 (3D Driving Scenes)
• The entirety of the driving sequence was created and animated within Blender. My first step was to create an environment that
would help me to gauge the scale and position of the objects within my scene. For the shape of my environment I used a simple
plane mesh. I wanted to create a desert texture on this plane which was achieved by going to the mesh's shading editor then
creating a new material. I edited the material by Adding a Bump node to the Principled BSDF node then connecting a Noise Texture
node to the Bump node. Within the noise texture I increased scale which increases the number of waves in the texture. I increased
its roughness in order increase the contrast/depth of the waves. I then changed the base colour to tan and that was the sand
texture finished. I duplicated the plane 1956 times however during the duplication process I found a way to speed it up by merging
groups of planes together into a larger plane then merging these larger planes together, and so on and so forth.
• For the character, Bellathon, that would fight the protagonist, I imported a human male model which I had downloaded from the
website Turbosquid.com. Firstly I made a new material for the human model and gave it a light skin colour base colour, increased
its subsurface to 1 which made the models surface glow from the inside which makes the character's skin seem more human. I
also set the subsurface colour to red which meant that the glow within the character had a red tint to it. When creating costumes
for the characters I wanted the costume to line up automatically with the character's skin. I achieved this by activating snap and
then in the snap settings selecting snap to face, this means every time a object is placed it snaps to the nearest surface. I made sure
to spawn the objects nearest to the character. Later on I discovered a better method which was to add a shrinkwrap modifier to the
new object and select the character as the target. This allows the object to bend round a target's face which is useful when
extruding around the character's body from an object. There were multiple points from which I could extrude/edit an object. These
points were either from the face, or from the edges, or from the vertices. Editing an object by its vertices was the most accurate
option because it allowed you to operate on a smaller scale and was therefore more detailed. When I was creating Bellathon's
helmet I coloured in its faces using a UV map. The process behind this was to create a new material on the object then to go up to
the objects UV settings select smart uv map. This generated a UV Map in the UV editor which was a 2d depiction of all the
different faces of an object. Please see screenshot of UV map below. However, for other armour and clothing I ditched this method
because it was too slow and also slowed my computer down so instead I used the select box to select certain faces and then create
a new material for the colour I wished these faces to be. Then, whilst these face are selected, I would click assign in the material
options which would make these face become the same material. I used this process when I made the protagonist's trousers and to
colour the motorbikes. When I made costumes from separate objects other than the human model itself I would shift click the
object then on the character model right click and I was given the option set to parent (keep transform). This meant that when I
moved the character model the object would stick to its position on the character model.
13. Week 5 (3D Driving Scenes)
• Bellathon's Coat
• I created Bellathon's coat by placing a cube through his body lining up with the top of his arms. I then
press control r and made a cut down the middle of the cube. I deleted one half of the cube and to the
remainder of the cube I added the mirror modifier and set its axis to X. This would mean that whenever I made
some sort of change to the cube it would be automatically mirrored by a duplicate cube. This saved a lot of
time and meant that the coat would be perfectly symmetrical. To make the shade of the coat I would extrude
three more cubes from the first one. Then I would use ctrl r to subdivide these cubes giving them more edges
and vertices which essentially meant that they were split into two cubes each time. I repeated this process
many times until the cube had the general shape that could approximate towards the shape of a coat. I have
copied a screenshot of this process below from a tutorial. I rearranged the position of the vertices and bring
them closer to the character's body I then re-aligned the vertices so that they were in the shape of a coat. I
added a subdivide modifier to the object and then I enabled shade smooth on the object which made it less
pointy. I selected the face round the neck, legs, and arms and then deleted them. Then in the physics section I
added cloth physics to the coat which made it droopy and give it the look and movement of cloth. I also
enabled self collisions so that the coat wouldn't pass through itself. However, this slowed down my computer
too much and slowed down the blender project. It was impossible to make any changes to the blender project
because any changes would take about five minutes. I ended up getting rid of the cloth physics. This meant that
the coat would look stiff and wouldn't move in a way that was in parity with the momentum of the character.
My next step was to create a material for the coat.
14. Week 5 (3D Driving Scenes)
• Motorbike Rigging
• In order to animate the mototbike I parented it to an empty. And empty is an invisible block. Instead of just
moving the vehicle itself I moved the empty so all the separate parts would move at the time when their parent
was moved. If I had not done this I would have had to move them all individually. It was also my intention to
make the empty a driver which means that when the empty moves in a certain direction it would cause the
wheels to rotate. I activated this by right clicking on the wheels X axis in its transformation settings which gave
me the option – add driver. I selected the driver to be the empty and I inputted the expression var*3 which
meant that whatever distance the empty moved on the X axis the wheel would rotate three times that
distance. However this process was a waste of time because the point of rotation on the wheel was not at its
centre so when they rotated they would float off into the air. There was no way to fix this as the wheels
assumed their centre was the centre of the bike model as a whole so they would rotate around this point. I got
rid of the driver and kept the wheel rotation stationary which didn't look very realistic but was the only option.
15. Week 5 (3D Driving Scenes)
• Character Rigging
• Before animating my characters I would need to give them a bone structure which would allow me to move
and rotate parts of the body separately. I gave the character's bones by adding an armature to the scene. I
changed the view port display to wire frame mode which meant that only the vertices of models could be seen.
It also made the character's see through so I knew where I was placing the armatures inside the body. I first
made a bone for the abdomen then extruded another bone to the bottom of the sternum and then extruded
again to the upper part of the sternum. I then extruded upwards again and on this new bone I used alt p to
disconnect this bone from the others and I placed it in the neck. I repeated a similar process when adding
bones in to the left arm, left fingers and left leg, and left foott. I selected the arm, fingers, leg, and feet bones
and the right clicked them and selected name left and right which orientates the rig into left and right
directions. This meant that when I right clicked these bones again and selected symmetrize they would be
copied on to the right side of the model. I then selected all of the bones and character model, pressed alt P and
selected armature deform with automatic weights. The body could now be moved by selecting the armature
model and going into pose mode which allowed me to rotate the armatures without permanently changing
how they affected the body. To make it easier to select the armatures I went into the armatures view port
settings and selected infront which meant the armatures could be seen through the character model even
when out of Wire Frame mode. Adding these armatures was pretty pointless because for the most part the
characters stayed in the same position and there was only one shot where I needed to move the hands.
16. Week 5 (3D Driving Scenes)
Animation
• Down in the playback graph I clicked the automatic keying button which meant that on any frame in which an
object transformed or changed position a keyframe would be added automatically. I mainly moved the
motorbikes only in forwards and backwards directions as I was not able to turn the wheels properly with the
handlebars so it wouldn't have looked realistic if the vehicle made a turn and would it would look like the
vehicle was hovering. I also animated camera movement and lighting. For the setting on the light I made it a
spotlight and I kept the spotlight focused on the characters by going through the frames and every frame that it
moved off them I rotated it to point back on to the characters. I also in some shots changed the colour settings
of the light and the strength of the light and the distance of the light.
• I changed the render setting so that instead of every frame becoming a PNG image the animation would
instead be exported as an MP4 video. The main reason why I did this was to save memory on my computer as
there are less files and also to save time as if every frame was image I would have to place them all next to each
other and shorten them all to one frame when adding them to Premier Pro.
• My final step in Blender was to add a green screen. It took a while to find out how to do this because Blender
does not have a green screen option unless you want to add a green screen to real life footage. At first I went
about this by going to the world settings and making the background green. This though didn't work because it
added a green light to the whole scene which would mean that when I wished to cut the green out most of the
scene would be cut also. The method that did work though was to create a flat plane and colour it green and to
position it behind the scene in the direction the camera was facing.
17. Week 5 screenshots
Human object and
motorbike object in their
original form
Material/Brush creation
For UV Painting
Bike model parented to
empty cube
Subsurface setting for
human model texture
Armature rig in render mode
Armature rig in wireframe mode
18. Week 5 screenshots
Smart UV map
Texture editing for coat's texture
Early stage coat model
Finished coat model
Green Screen model
19. Week 6 (audio and composite work)
After finishing my animation I edited it together within Premiere Pro. The first thing I did was to put all the footage I needed into the media
browser which acted asa place I could view all my clips before placing them into the timeline of Premiere Pro. Most of the decision making
about these clips was about where to place them in the timeline and then deciding on the length of the clip. In some of the driving shots I cut
down the length at the beginning and the end of the clip so that the vehicle wasn't seen as stationary. At one point I tried to time stretch a
clip to make it longer and have it play in slow motion but this didn't work because it made the the frame rate too low. In the clips where I'd
used the green screen I added a colour key effect and selected the target colour to be the same green using the eye dropper tool. I also
turned the effects tolerance up to about 30 which would get rid of any different shades of green around the border of where the green
screen was in the clip. Below these layers where I added the green screen I added a video of a time lapse of some clouds in the sky. Where
the green screen had been positioned there was now a hole in the top layer which revealed beneath it the time lapse video. I added the
threshold effect to the time lapse video to make it black and white. I used a variety of transitions between my clips, one of these transitions
being when the vehicles collide. To highlight the impact I adopted a dip to white which quickly increases the white value of the ending of a
clip and the beginning of the next clip. Another video transition I made was when I gradually lowered the opacity of a clip whilst the next
clip was placed above it. This made the first clip fade into the second. The rest of the editing I did was audio work.
I added the sound of winds howling throughout the animation to act as ambience and background noise to make sure that there was no point
in which the animation was completely silent as this would seem unnatural. A lot of the audio editing phase was spent altering volume levels.
I would often have sounds fade in and out by adding keyframes to the volume. For instance, when I had had the Song Horses Give birth To
Flies which I downloaded from youtube fade in simultaneously to the fade in transition on the clip of the protagonist looking out and the clip
of Bellathon on his Motorbike (2.13). I also added a reverb effect to a lot of sounds to make them seem like they are part of an
environment as all sounds of a level of reverb in reality. I would change the reverb settings according to how close and far way the object
was. In the shot where the two bikes set off (2.50) I reused a sound effect of a horse neighing from the song. I used the rate stretch tool to
make it deeper and last longer and I also used a distortion effect on it. I had used these effects to make the horses neigh seem more
mechanical and to match the lower pitch of the engine growling so that the two sounds seem like one or a weird symbiosis that are hard to
separate from each other.
At the point where the shot flicks rapidly between the two characters at 2.46 I used a gong sound effect which I increase the speed of as the
speed of the cuts between shots increase using the rate stretch tool. I also reversed the sound by right clicking on it and selecting its duration
window then ticking reverse speed.
20. Week 6 (audio and composite work)
I made a second version of the animation in a duplicate Premiere Pro file which I made by going to file and then
pressing save a copy. In this version I got rid of the narration and the scrolling text in the intro and I shortened
the introduction to be just the parts with archive footage deleting the bits that were just shots of the desert. I
then added the song Mantras of The Lotus God by Shibalah. I then added reverb to the song.
I exported both of these videos in H.256 format with the use maxium render quality setting active and then
uploaded them both to YouTube which they took a few hours to do due to slow internet. I also created unlisted
versions incase the public versions get taken off YouTube. I added all the links to the animations to my wix
website.
21. Week 6 Screenshots
Effects to remove the green
screen.
The timeline for the entirety of
my animation.
Reverb settings for when I want a sound to
seem as though It was moving away.
Export settings
