Martin provided us a very specific note on the animation flaws of our puppet. He stated that the flying animation was good, but the animation for the puppet drowsing in the train and blown away were not well done, as there were unsteady shifts and movements of the puppet and the set. Martin suggested that if we practiced more with the puppet, like the flying scene animation, which he thought as later production, we would feel more comfortable animating it. After I read through the notes and studied the animation scenes for both the drowsing scene David, Emilie, and Nick did, and the flying scene that Nick and I did, I noticed that for this kind of puppet animation, unless you are the absolute animation professional, otherwise it got to be a team work to make it work. The difference between the qualities of the two scenes is that for the flying scene I was directing Nick to move the actual puppet while I was using computer program to check carefully for any possible visual flaws, either it was an exposing masking tape under the cloth, or if the head did not have enough movements. When I went to work for cleaning up the images while the rest group members were working on shooting, later on they told me, each person got a chance to animate the puppet, but no one kept a constant look at the animation shots. Also, Martin suggested that we should get better lighting plus a tighter close up shot for the first scene. The puppet also needed to be fixed up with more details. Martin also informed Judy to build a more muscular body for the puppet.
For last week, Judy built a new body with much softer wire embedded inside for animating. Nick carved out the skin of the puppet head and worked on the puppet head basis. Emilie and David worked on setting up and adjusting the lighting for a green screen shot. Due to certain events that happened later during the production process, I took over the task to build up the puppet's face, hair, and texture. Judy helped me with building the jaw and eyes of the puppet after she finished building the puppet's body. After all her hard work, Judy had an event to participate for Saturday night, so Emilie, David and I start to work on the animation session of the puppet. I explained my observation to both Emilie and David about how we need to have one person constantly standing right in front the computer to check and direct the animator's move for the puppet, both Emilie and David have been very kind and understanding to volunteer to animate the puppet and let me direct them.
Emilie went to animate the puppet drowsing scene first. David was working on setting up the puppet. The actual new puppet's body scale was much larger than the set. David put a lot efforts in adjusting the camera and bending the puppet's knees to create the illusion that the puppet fitted the train. When I told Emilie what to do with the puppet and began the shot, I found Emilie's way of animating the puppet was very gentle and delicate. Once I told her some directions to move the puppet, she could get the puppet moving to the exact position I wanted very quickly. Later when Emilie took a break, I asked David to animate the puppet, and soon found that David had a different animating characteristics from Emily. When David moved the puppet, there were more force and power, so the puppet movements were broad. Then I shifted the strategies based on my two animators' different animating style. Emilie did the interior scene for the guying falling into sleep, because this scene required gentle animation. David did the puppet blown away scene to make the movements bold and vivid.
As a result, the animation quality for this time was quite high. After the shot, I went to edit the timing for the scenes so that I could deliver the file to David, who was an expert for compositing and AfterEffects and he handled the background compositing and masking out the wire on the puppet body during flying and green screen. I finished putting things together on Saturday evening after the animating session. After I came home and re-looked at my editing, I felt unsatisfied with the timing. I arranged to meet with David on Monday afternoon with a polished version of editing for him to composite the background into the scene. Yet since masking session in AfterEffects on station 241 did not work well on Monday afternoon, David had to bring the file back home to work on the compositing process.
Meanwhile I collected the files from the painting department, delivered by Cody. Since there was no specific direction about what images should be on which spot at what length of time from the painting department, I have to guess to figure it out myself as an editor. I collected well polished files that seemed to be the final versions, imported some of them in photoshop to fix up the lighting and cut out the backgrounds.
The process for editing still images and set up the correct timing was a long process, sort of like playing a puzzle game by placing all pieces in the right position. For this ten seconds piece, I have viewed thousands of times for every week to make sure I was doing a correct job. Every Monday or Tuesday of the week I would stay working on station 241 till the security needed to shut the school door. Late night at Emily Carr was my favorite time. My dear security, Bal, was always supportive and offered me his homemade cookies and desert to back me up. If I could do an adequate enough job for editing the piece as a whole, Bal would be for sure one of my biggest supporting source. On Wednesday morning David would bring the finished composting version and transport the file to our premiere project. Before that, here is a link for our current progress updating.
http://vimeo.com/33065324
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