I find the audio is a little less horribly mangled by the Aniboom site… The YouTube one is in the post below this one…

Watch more cool animation and creative cartoons at aniBoom

If you like, you can download a higher-res version here (400 MB)…

Download a smaller (but still better than YouTube quality) copy here (100MB)

I managed to get a bit more work done on the video recently, so here is the latest version. Still needs a few tweaks here and there, but the overall jist of it is there, I think. The final part (under two minutes) is already underway. I should have another update very soon, and I hope to have this video pretty much completed by June 23rd.

Controversy

There was a lot of controversy surrounding the picks for the semi-finalists in this competition. 10 videos were chosen to receive $1,000 in funding (mine wasn’t one of them) and there are three so-called “Golden Tickets” still up for grabs; the judges are choosing these at the moment and hopefully they should be announced in the next couple of days. The golden ticket winners get to go through to the final round also, they just don’t get $1,000 for their efforts.

Anyway – back to the controversy. A lot of contestants were upset by the fact that half the semi-finalist videos chosen were either a) previously completed animation work re-edited to “fit” with the Radiohead track, or b) were produced by professional animation studios.

Now, there is nothing in the rules to disqualify these videos, but I think a lot of people felt that this was supposed to be a contest for the average amateur animator looking to get some exposure and a chance at creating a Radiohead video. I guess a lot of people felt duped – some were a lot more vocal about it than others. How can individual animators compete with a fully staffed animation studio? And what about those already-made animations that obviously had months of work put into them prior to this contest?

Regardless of what happens in the competition, I’m doing this project for my capstone, and hopefully it will find a place on my demo reel. I admit to feeling a little deflated with how the contest has been handled though…  Such is life.

Journal

In the weeks between April 28th and June 8th, I mostly created scenes with various sea creatures and animated them either from a 3D perspective, or a side-scrolling perspective. I also began to play with ideas for the strange lights that the submarine would encounter about a minute and a half into the video, and from there until the end.

Initially, I tried animating a small white, glowing circle but it didn’t look too great.  So, I decided to use point lights, which can be animated in 3D space.

The problem with point lights in After Effects is that normally you can’t actually see the light source, just the effect that it has when shining on another layer.

To solve this problem, I got a plugin called Lux, which enhances AE’s lights by adding a visible source and volumetric lighting effects, i.e. a light cone (or halo/corona, depending on the light type). Then, by also using the light sources as particle emitters (using Trapcode Particular) I was able to create lights that leave 3D light trails behind them.

One nice thing about using point lights is that you can set which layers in your scene are able to receive (be affected by) lights. I was able to create an effect whereby the glowing lights “fly” over the seabed and light it up as they pass – i.e., dynamic lighting. In AE it is possible to tweak the effect this has by adjusting the receiving material’s properties, such as specular level, diffuse level, shine and so on.

I have also spent a lot of time trying to create natural looking movement in the mysterious UFOs/lights. One thing I have been experimenting with is the use of expressions in After Effects.

An expression is essentially a snippet of code (very similar to Javascript) that can be added to more or less any parameter in order to automate it in various ways. For example, a common expression that can be added to a layer parameter is “wiggle”. The “wiggle” expression is fairly self-explanatory. If you apply it to the “position” parameter of a layer, it will randomly “wiggle” the position of the layer around as specified in your expression.

wiggle(0.5, 20)

The above expression will randomly move the layer 20 pixels at a rate of 0.5 times per second in the x and y axis (the z axis, too, if it’s a 3D enabled layer). Of course the values can be changed according to what you want to achieve, and it’s not limited to the “position” parameter.

I watched a very cool video (Lexus commercial) that contains two particles traveling together through 3D space.  I really like the way the particles moved naturally and rotated and intertwined together.  A generous soul at creativecow.net provided me with some ideas and examples of advanced expressions/scripts that might be used to achieve this effect.  I’m still experimenting with it – I’m the first to admit my programming/scripting skills are quite up to scratch yet.

One other thing I’ve been doing in the past couple of days is using ZBrush (a 3D sculpting program) to create strange looking sea-beds encountered halfway through the video. By using ZBrush’s unique “2.5D” painting tools, I was able to create 2D seabeds that “sort of” look 3D, which the After Effects camera can then pan along in side-scrolling shots.  They fit well, because none of the other elements in the video are “true” 3D objects, either.

So far, the biggest challenge to my productivity has been my slow computer and numerous crashes. Rendering a ten second, particle heavy clip can take up to 2 hours. Often, I will need to tweak it and render it again, so it’s not a fast process. I look forward to a time when computers can run programs like After Effects in realtime…

That’s it for now. I will update with some more videos and images later this week as soon as I get a moment to prepare them for the web.