Click on the image above to see the Quicktime movie or right click to save it.
Animalia Showreel (Quicktime)
I’ve done some kind of breakdown to show a bit of each steps per shot.
Animalia Project - (2007/08) - Australia
Working on Photon VFX - Gold Coast
Animalia project was really great to be part of. Photon had an amazing crew and the work environment was always full of good vibration. A tidy pipeline was essential to organize the huge amount of shots delivered.
Comping wasn’t an easy task as we use to think about 3d animations renders. In the beginning we had plenty of layers to assemble what normally is a heaven for us compers that love to play with layers and channels.
With time, the production had to adapt the amount of layers per shot once the rendering time was taking too long in outputting from 3D and Compositing’s render.
We had an amount of 3 shots to comp a day in the beginning but optimizing the render layers wisely, we could increase the numbers of shot to 5-7. So far so good. With the production coming to end, the producers started to demand more shots a day… Wow. It was becoming heavier and stressful. :O
It was when I decided to create a software that could do repetitive tasks for shake. Imagine when you have to create a new script, save at the right folder in between thousands of folders, with the right name and version (ep001_sc072_sh017_v005), import all the rendered layers one by one, folder by folder, copy your tree from another file and plug everything in again and adjust the whole shake script for new settings… This repetitive tasks could waste us a day, some good minutes, maybe hours with totally different shots…
Once the software took place, at the end the “compers” were saying that they were addicted in using the software. haha. Because it was so painful to create everything from scratch again and again. The good thing about this program was that we could take an approved shake script and make it a template. So if I had a “night shot” similar from the last episode, it was just a matter of selecting the right Template and give the wished number of the shot, scene and episode. All done in 5 seconds.  Now we could concentrate on the fun part.
Beyond the challenge of creating this software, we had plenty of color corrections to do. Trying to solve smoke, fire all in post production. You might not believe, but sometimes we had to do plenty of roto to correct some render mistakes that couldn’t go back to the 3D department. Plenty of tracking, 3D projections using Maya and also lots of macros to make a neat shake tree and create a standard for the Compositing team.
About ANIMALIA
I found this article telling a bit more Animalia and his creator.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/tv–radio/animalia-animated/2007/07/18/1184559859851.html
Animalia’s Website
http://pbskids.org/animalia/index.html
http://www.animalia.tv |
