Submission

I have rendered out the entire scene two times and cant manage to have the background animating. There must be some setting that is set incorrectly so overall i am not happy with the finished piece. One way we could of sorted this problem was having everything pieced together earlier. i was ready and waiting for moses animation for me to put onto the environment two weeks before the deadline but moses didn't complete the animation until very late in the day close to submission which didn't leave me enough time to fix the problems i have encountered in rendering.

E4 Ident

After finishing of the animation of the logo and I was happy with the look of the environment and logo I did a few test render to see how they looked when rendered it appeared to work well. One big problem I later encountered was the render animation of the environment texture. it took a very long time to render out the background a and it didn't animate as well as I hoped and sometimes when playing with different players not at all. I am not sure why this has happened it severely detracts from the overall appearance of the piece.  I don't understand why the background moves when rendering out a few test frames but doesn't move when rendering out the whole piece with no settings changed.

Showreel creation

For my showreel i decided to use IDVD for the creation of the menus and overall design of the dvd. I ran in to a few problems when i was texting the software for creating dvd's, they were that every time I tried to burn the dvd or render out the piece as a disc image or video TS folder it encountered an error with scripting. To solve this problem i checked for updated to the software. After I updated it and tested it it worked fine, Lesson learned to always keep my software up to date.

I searched through my hard drive and external hard drives to find my old work and go through them to find suitable pieces for inclusion in my showreel. I decided to cover a wide range of diciplins from 2d and 3d animation to Photography. once i had collected enough material i added it into idvd and played around with different looks untill i was happy and rendered it out.

Room creation

Here is a render of the room i have modeled and textured in maya for our animation piece. i have kept the textures and models looking as realistic as possible but haven't spent too much time worrying about little details because of the style we are going to use in post production. I played around with a few different layouts but found this to be the most suitable.

For the creating of the Pastel style i have been looking at different Pluggins and techniques i could use in After effects to create the desired effect.
After research I found video gogh produced a nice effect that i was happy with.

Concept

After undertaking numerous research and brainstorming sessions moses and i decided to focus on the particular style of 2d animation we had seen in the end creditis for the robin hood movie (seen Below) The style used was coulourfull abstract and looked to have been drawn using pastels. We decided to aim for a simular style but using CGI instead of hand drawn animation.

We both came up with a few ideas of how we could relate this style to the breif for the E4 Ident. My main concern with the brief is that the piece has to be exactly 10 seconds long whitch isnt very long at all so we are quite constrained within what we could creativly produce and successfully convey to the audience.

After we had experiemented with a few different ideas we decided to use moses concept for having a cat chase the E4 Logo around a room. He was confident he could capture relevent videos for us to work from using a neighbours cat and a lazer pen.
The videos moses captured were great showing lots of different movment and angles we picked one especially that showed good movment and was exactly 10 seconds long.

Now we know what we were undertaking we split the production between us, I have the challenge of creating the enviroment, animating the E4 logo and experimenting with diffenent ways of stylinging them to our desired style.