Some follow up to the Rhapsody with James screenings after the Budapest premiere. The film will be shown in three more European places in the next two months. Be sure to check it out if you happen to be somewhere around:
Milano film festival: Milano, Italy (12.-21.September. The film will be screened as part of “Maratona Animazione”)
Fantastisk Filmfestival: Lund, Sweden (18.-27. September)
Animatu: Beja, Portugal (15.-19. October)
A little portfolio update. A commercial on which I worked as a creature TD. I created the character setup for the dolphin and the horse.
I was just notified that Rhapsody with James has been selected into Budapest short film festival! The festival will be held from 3.-7. September which also sets the premiere date. Yay!
You can find the complete ‘Budapest short film festival’ competition selection here:
http://www.busho.hu/?menuID=program&pageID=08program&lang=en
This is an extract from a commercial I worked on quite some time ago (end of last year) but just didn’t find the time to post it here since I was overwhelmed with Rhapsody with James. I created character setup for the moose and character animation in two shots (those with ‘CA’ in the right top corner).
I’ve created a small site for ‘Rhapsody with James’ with some images and full credits. Nothing biggie yet but I’ll update the site with more info in the future.
Well, as the title says…. It’s final!!!
I’m looking at the festival lists and where to submit it but more on that on the coming posts. Right now I’m just happy it’s finished!
Two more images from Rhapsody with James. Things are getting pretty near the end as far as visuals go. There are only a few shots that need rerendering of 3d elements but otherwise I’m mostly fine tuning things in compositing.
This is an image from the first shot of the movie. This is the only shot in the movie with quite a lot of overpainting done in Photoshop. Since only the first two buildings on the right are actually shown from different angle later in the movie I decided that only those two buildings will get full texture work done in 3d. For the most parts of other buildings I just did a light pass with simple shaders (no textures) and then painted those details in Photoshop.
Sometimes there are shots that require models not used in any other shot. And they just happen to be very short, sometimes less than 2 seconds. You have to do all the models, textures and lighting that are not reusable for any other part of the film. In the end the time you spend per frame on the shot is well…. quite high.
Below is one of those shots from ‘Rhapsody with James’, visible for 46 frames…
I’m in the process of lighting, rendering and compositing all the shots in ‘Rhapsody with James’. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done any serious lighting so it took me a while to get used to the whole thing. I’ve been thinking how much will I render in 3d and how much will I solve in compositing. At first I thought I’ll do most of it in compositing and break it into as many layers as possible. Sounds good but at the end of the first shot I rendered I realized that to have this functionality things had to be much more automated so that layers/passes would be created on the fly and that’s an option I don’t have at the moment. So I took the middle road: I ended up with around 10-20 layers per shot which allows me to tweak things quite fine in compositing but if something is really off I still have to rerender things.
I approach lighting the same way as animation. I take a first pass at the whole film and then go through all the shots and make another pass instead of sticking with one shot and tweak that one to the end. The only difference is there will be much less passes/corrections than I did in animation since I’m focusing much more on animation than on lighting in this film. It’s also a good excuse because my lighting skills kinda suck these days.
Though things aren’t yet final for any shot that’s rendered I’m showing sort of work in progress of one of the bathroom shots.
