Week 8

This week we booked out the motion capture studio so we could get to grips with the software and how to use the program, because we want to map the motion capture movements onto the 3D guy when he is finally finished. Unfortunately even with the guide there to help us we could not get the cameras to calibrate and we ran out of time in the studio before we even had chance to capture any data at all, however we have booked out the studio for next week so hopefully we can get everything we need then.

Our group had to deliver the pitch presentation this week and we did it in blog format, to which we each had access and each added our own work and concepts. This was presented to Steve, one of our tutors. He seemed pleased with our progress and gave us some good feedback. I was pleased with how it went and Steve seemed to be too. 

I also furthered the creation of the 3D character:

Week 7

This week we began filming some tests for the section of the sequence where the real life character goes through the portal into the 3d landscape. To do this I set up the shot I needed by referring to the storyboards I previously created. Once the shot was lined up I got one of my house mates to simply stand up and walk to the other side of the room, and then took another take without anything happening in the scene so after the filming is done, working in final cut the two sequences could be cropped together to make it look like my house mate is  dissapearing as he walks and eventually the portal will be added so it looks like he is dissapearing into the portal. Here is the footage without any editing:

 Another member of my group was to do the editing in final cut. 

I also started creating the 3d character in Sculptris, he is based on one of my character designs I did in the previous weeks. Unfortunately progress with the it is moving rather slow but I am happy with how it looks so far:

Weeks 1-6

This is an online journal to keep track of the work that I do towards my groups final special effects 

sequence. The first six weeks of the project was spent doing the weekly tasks set in lesson and adapting the

things we learnt into practical applications to help us along with our project. We all agreed the basic outline for our project, basically a real life guy is playing a game and he gets sucked into it and has to fight the game character in the virtual world, then we all went away and drafted up basic storyboards, character and set designs. I have decided to initially focus on the combat character, to start this I am going to do some research into the type of character we are looking for:

From my research I have decided that if nothing else the character I create has to be pretty ripped, I want him to be a big tough looking guy that you wouldn't dare even look at.

After creating a few basic character designs I decided to go onto researching into the types of backgrounds we are looking for:

I have drafted up a few rough ideas for what the background could look like: