Enlighten Festival - Blooming Jungle

ENLIGHTEN 2014 from Eye Candy Animation on Vimeo.

Here is a short clip created by Eye Candy Animation just to give you a little bit of an idea as to what the Enlighten Festival is all about. 

For those of you who don't know anything about the Enlighten Festival; it's this really amazing festival held in Canberra every year where huge projectors light up the buildings with amazing artworks, and this year they decided to try some animation as well.

This footage was taken by Mark Jekabsons

I was involved with a community project where I created Blooming Jungle with the help of Sarah Robertson, Tom Magill and Jack Hampton.

This footage was taken by the AIE

The video above is footage taken of the other animations also created by people from the AIE; together with the Blooming Jungle animation which I was a part of creating. 

Blooming jungle is a short little animation that transforms the National Portrait Gallery into an artwork, as the ancient ruins becomes consumed by wild plants, deep in the heart of the jungle. 

White Wednesday - Short Film (Matte Painting)

This post is about the matte painting that I have created for the opening shot of the short film White Wednesday. The hills, trees and mountain has each been created on a separate layer using Adobe Photoshop whereas the buildings in the foreground is a rendered sequence from the 3D scene that has been created in Autodesk Maya. The sky in the background is a HDRI image created by Tom Magill.

White Wednesday - opening shot matte painting from Anzel Rossouw on Vimeo.

Creating the matte painting for the opening shot was quite a challenge as this was the first time that I have had the opportunity to create a matte painting. It was interesting to go through the process of creating the different layers of the background.

Opening shot, Final render

The opening shot for the short film White Wednesday, was created using Nuke's 3D scene through projecting each layer on a separate sphere with a camera which I have created within the scene. Each layer for the background was created using Adobe Photoshop by a series of images and painting.

Matte painting breakdown

On the left of I have included an image showing the breakdown of the opening shot. On the top left corner of the image I have included a screen shot of the 3D scene work space within Nuke to illustrate the composite of the five different layers, to create the final render that is used within the short film. The spheres that have the separate layers projected on, has been hidden so that I am able to show how each layer fits behind each other as the spheres are also hidden for render purposes. On the right side of the image is the four layers that make up the finished render excluding the sky. The very bottom layer is the 3D buildings; a sequence that has been rendered out of Maya from our 3D scene. This sequence was then projected onto a sphere in Nuke using an imported camera that is used within the Maya opening scene to achieve the downwards motion of the 3D camera. This was then projected onto the smallest sphere located at the centre of the other spheres so that was placed in front of the other layers.

Even though I restarted this matte painting quite a few times I think it turned out pretty good for my first attempt. Each time that I restarted, it just became better and better. Sometimes all it takes is a new perspective and to learn from your mistakes. I know I have definitely learned a thing or two.

White Wednesday - Short Film (Environment and Lighting)

This post is about the concept sketches of the environment as well as the CG lighting for the sunset setting for the courtyard scene that I have created for the short film White Wednesday.

Assets Concept Sheet, Anzel Rossouw, 2013

The Assets Concept Sheet on the left are a few silhouettes that I created to get an idea of how some of the environmental assets would potentially look like. I kind of focused on the street lamps as they would help to bring across the look and feel of an European town.

Environment Concept Sheet 01, Anzel Rossouw, 2013

The image on the left, illustrates the determining visual setting for the environment as a guide for the look of the film. The environment setting of White Wednesday, takes place within a European city on a hill; so the buildings would be very compact and would not be on the same level.

Environment Concept Sheet 02, Anzel Rossouw, 2013

I looked at cities all across Europe but particularly Salzburg, Tallinn and Venice. I mostly focused on the shape of the buildings so that it would have a good silhouette especially when it is placed within the background. I then focused on the windows, roof tops, as well as other assets that would be found on these types of buildings.

The style of the buildings were meant to be very simple such as blocks with sharp edges. These buildings were deigned to be created at a very low poly count to maximize the processing power of the Maya scene. By minimising the poly count, there would be less chugging in the scene and animation becomes easier and faster to create. Imagine having a hi poly object such as a house but then duplicating and placing it all around the scene to create the town; now that would make your scene slow to move around in. So these concept sketches are simple to create very low detailed houses.

Courtyard Sunset Camera 01, White Wednesday, 2013

Courtyard Sunset Camera 02, White Wednesday, 2013

The two images above illustrates the CG lighting that I have created for the Courtyard scene within the short film White Wednesday. The images above are renders taken within the Courtyard scene of the film with same lighting but taken different cameras to show different perspectives. The lighting in this shot is created for a late afternoon setting; at sunset. This lighting was created by using Autodesk Maya through using directional, area and spot lights.

In the end we decided to go with someone else's sunset lighting that they had created for this same shot for the film. Even though the lighting that I created in the shots above are not used within the film, is still think the lighting turned out really great.

White Wednesday - Short Film

White Wednesday from AIE on Vimeo.

In my second year at the AIE of the Advanced Diploma of the Screen and  Media, our last project was a short film assignment where we had to create a short film through using the skills that we have learned through our time at the AIE where we were specialising in 3D Animation and VFX and much more.

I worked with the 6 other students in my class to create White Wednesday. In the beginning of the project we all had to come up with ideas for the short film. The script used for White Wednesday was created by one of our group members, Rebecca Lyons Wright. Seeing as this was her script, she became our director for the film.

White Wednesday is about a pigeon pooping on several statues until he reaches a statue of a woman holding a dove. The pigeon falls in love with the dove not knowing that this is a statue and not a real bird. He flies down to her where he tries everything to impress her, to win her love and affection. When everything else fails, he figures out that she is in fact a statue. He's whole world comes crashing down and he falls asleep on the statues hand next to the dove statue. In the late afternoon a real female pigeon flies in and captures his attention where he immediately falls in love with her.

The style of the short film was set out to be cartoon like and unrealistic; something that would appear within a children's television program. The style for the environment, was initially meant to be very simple, such as blocks with sharp edges for the buildings and the textures were meant to look slightly grungy. Where the pigeon was initially going to look as if has been made out of clay.

The film turned out to look a little different to what we thought it would be at the start of the production, but it has turned out to be quite a production piece. We've all had a great deal of fun creating this film; I know I have. I worked with an amazing team as we created something extraordinary, especially when you consider the time frame that we were working within. I've learned a lot through this short film and had great fun working with the team.  I just want to thank the team and everyone involved in creating this film for all their efforts. This film just wouldn't have been the same without all of you.

Holographic Fashion - VFX Short Film (VFX & compositing)

I just wanted to talk a little bit about the VFX/ Visual Effects as well as the composition that went into creating the Holographic Fashion short film. The process that we went through to achieve the final film.

Shot 01_Green screen footage

The three images that I have included on the left, is to illustrated the process that we went through to create shot 01 of the short film Holographic Fashion.

To the left is the first image, Shot 01_Green screen footage; this illustrates the footage that was taken with the green screen as the background and lighting set up. All the footage for Holographic Fashion was taken by Tom Magill at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE); at the Canberra campus. The green screen were used so that we could later composite the footage on top of the 3D background and then add effects to create the results we wanted to achieve.

Shot 01_Background

The image on the left, Shot 01_Background, is the clean render of the 3D scene for shot 01 that has been taken straight out of Maya. This render was used within the Nuke script as the Background layer where everything gets composited on top of. The image appears to be quite dark as it have not been gamma corrected yet and it does not contain any effects. This render has been done through a linear workflow in order to create realistic lighting within the scene, which also explains it's dark appearance. You can barely see the furniture in the background but as you can see the image below on the left, Shot 01_Composited, that it is more visible but still needs to be quite dark for the effect that I was going for.

Shot 01_Composited

To the left is the image, Shot 01_Composited; this image illustrates a final composited render that is used within the completed film. In this render you can see the result of the footage once it has been composited over the background together with the visual effects that are all added  together.

The Background layer which is the image shown above, Shot 01_Background; has been saved as an .exr file extension and was then automatically been gamma corrected once it was opened within Nuke. A ZDefocus node was then added in order to create the blurriness within the background to create the effect that the camera is focussed on the foreground.

The desk in the foreground has been rendered on a separate layer to the background so that the background can have different effects to what the desk in the foreground would be receiving; so using nodes like the ZDefocus node was easier and would not effect the desk in the foreground.

The slider on the table that I used to switch the holograms on; was created through the use of a two separate flare nodes together with an animated grade node to control the visibility as well as changing the colours and creating that slight flickering.

I then added the footage of myself to the tree of nodes by using a merge node. Using Primatte node; I was able to remove the green screen that  was in the background and instead I now had the render of the 3D scene as the background. Further more I used nodes such as Sharpen, Grade and LightWrap node to help the footage blend into the environment and to create the effect that the light of the holograms in front of me was illuminating me. This meant animating these effects at the start as the film does not start with the holograms on.

The holograms seen in this shot was created using all the Photoshop concept sketches that was created by myself and Natasha Downs. These include the dress designs as well as the hologram controls such as the intensity slider used to brighten the holograms; the wheel that is used to select the dress designs as well as the other holograms such as the folder or the keyboard. I used a Glow node in Nuke in order to create the hologram effects on all the 2D images used. I then mostly used Grade nodes for the most of the colour corrections that I wanted to do as well as animating the visibility of the holograms.

Nuke workspace, shot 01 

The scree shot above illustrates the Nuke workspace for the animation of the wheel in Shot 01 that switches between different dress designs, to be rotated. The animation curves is shown through the Curve Editor workspace when editing the transform node that is used for animation. The Curve Editor was very usefull in getting the animation timing right according to the movements of my hand. Transform nodes were also used in order to place the footage as well as all the images in the right spot that I wanted them to be in. Transform nodes was also used in the animation of the folder being minimised; the rotations, scaling and translation; as well as the scaling of the dress design files; so pretty much all the animation.

Shot 02_Green screen footage

To the right, Shot 02_Green screen footage; is used to illustrates the footage that was taken with the green screen as the background and lighting set up for Shot 02 of Holographic Fashion. As you can see in the image; my hand is slightly leaving the green screen on the bottom of the screen. It's not the worst thing ever, and can easily be fixed with a Roto Node within the compositing stage. Instead we decided to use a transform node to place the footage in a way that that small part of my hand is cut off; as seen in the image below, Shot 02_Composited.

Shot 02_Background

The image on the right, Shot 02_Background, is the clean render of the 3D scene for shot 01 that has been taken straight out of Maya. This render was used within the Nuke script as the Background layer where everything gets composited on top of. The image appears to be quite dark as it have not been gamma corrected yet and it does not contain any effects. This render has been done through a linear workflow in order to create realistic lighting within the scene, which also explains it's dark appearance. You can barely see the furniture in the background but as you can see the image below on the left, Shot 02_Composited, that it is more visible but still needs to be quite dark for the effect that I was going for.

Shot 02_Composited

To the right is the image, Shot 02_Composited; this image illustrates a final composited render that is used within the completed film.The 3D model appearing in the 3D hologram in the image on the right, Shot 02_Composited, was sculpted by Natasha Downs using Pixologic's 3D sculpting program ZBrush. The background was however created by myself. The compositing was also done by Natasha Downs and with the help of Tom Magill. They merged the footage of the different render passes of her 3D model and was then able to create the hologram effect through using a godrays node as well as the gizmo's that was used in shot 01 on the other holograms.

Shot 03_Green screen footage

To the left is the image; Shot 03_Green screen footage, which illustrates the footage that was taken with the green screen as the background and lighting set up for Shot 03 of Holographic Fashion. This was done the same as the above two images Shot 01_Green screen footage, and Shot 02_Green screen footage. Where the camera as well as the lighting was set up relatively the same for each shot. For each shot we had about 3-4 takes so that later on we were able to decide which one turned out the best. Each shot also had to be acted out the whole sequence over again so when it came to the compositing stage, we were able to cut the shot where we wanted it to.

Shot 03_Background

The image on the left, Shot 03_Background, is the clean render of the 3D scene for shot 01 that has been taken straight out of Maya. This render was used within the Nuke script as the Background layer where everything gets composited on top of. The image appears to be quite dark as it have not been gamma corrected yet and it does not contain any effects. This render has been done through a linear workflow in order to create realistic lighting within the scene, which also explains it's dark appearance. You can barely see the furniture in the background but as you can see the image below on the left, Shot 03_Composited, that it is more visible but still needs to be quite dark for the effect that I was going for.

Shot 03_Composited

To the left is the image, Shot 03_Composited; this image illustrates a final composited render that is used within the completed film for shot 03. The background used for this shot is a render from a third camera within the same 3D scene that is used in Shot 01_Composited and Shot 02_Composited. I composited this shot using the footage shown in the image above in, Shot 03_Green screen footage, together with the same set-up that was created for the 3D hologram in Shot 02_Composited; by Natasha Downs and with the help of Tom Magill.

Credits_Composited

The image above, Credits_Composited, is illustrating the effects that has been created for the credits using Nuke. I ended up using the same gizmo that we used on all the holograms within all the shots, to create the same hologram effect where it almost gives the idea of a glitch in the hologram, on the text and the extra images on the sides. I then used a transform node to animate the text as well as the hologram dress design images sliding upwards.

I absolutely loved creating the effects for this short film and I learned so much while doing them. Working with the Foundry's compositing program, Nuke was an amazing experience and I cannot wait to start another VFX project. 

Holographic Fashion - VFX Short Film

Holographic Fashion from AIE on Vimeo.

Holographic Fashion is the combination of holograms and fashion design. The idea was to create a futuristic film in which I was a fashion designer in the future where the screen I am working on is a hologram.

Holographic Fashion was part of a visual effects assignment within my second year at the AIE where I worked with another student, to create a featured film. For this assignment we incorporated a 3D scene with filmed footage of myself and gave I then added some visual effects to create the holograms using Nuke from the Foundry.

The 3D scene was created in Maya in which I modelled, textured and lit the environment before rendering it. Using Nuke I composited the 3D scene together with the footage and gave the film effects using our dress designs as well as our screen designs, which was created in Photoshop.

I learnt so many thing s​and had lots of fun creating this film.This was an amazing experience. I hope you enjoy watching it.

Fireflies - Short Film

Fireflies - short film from Anzel Rossouw on Vimeo.

When I was studying at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment (AIE), at the Canberra Campus here in Australia in 2012; I had the opportunity to work with a group of students, where we had to create a short film as part of our first year final assignment. We ended up being eight students; where we only had about two months to create this short film.

This short film is about two fireflies that falls in love within the sun set of the swamp. The Fireflies Short Film created by 8 students in the Advanced Diploma of Screen and Media over 8 weeks.

The process of creating a film always starts with getting a story board together with a good solid storyline. So we came together as a group and brainstormed a few ideas for the short film. The inspiration for our short film originally came from the song Fireflies by Owl City. 

Owl City from Endeavor Media Group on Vimeo.

We wanted to create a short film about fireflies as being sung in the song; instead we ended up with a comedy/ romance story about two fireflies in a swamp.

The style of this short film was aimed at being a very cartoon like/ fantasy style, almost the same type of style that could be found in a Disney film, so a non-realistic film. So the next step was to start concept sketches and creating an storyboard which also meant blocking out the basic poses of the animation with block models. I was initially the environment concept artist for the short film.

Tree Concepts by Anzel Rossouw 2012

I have included some of the concept sketches as well as color swatches that I have created in Adobe Photoshop, just to get an idea of what the environment could potentially look like. I ended up looking at the Disney movie, The princess and the frog, for some ideas of how the swamp could look like, as well as looking at many images of swamps in America and what kind of vegetation are found in those locations. Looking at the style of my trees, I had quite a bit of influence from the styles that Tim Burton uses in his movies.

Leaf Concepts by Anzel Rossouw 2012

After getting the style of the trees right, I started creating some leaf designs. Looking at different color schemes of greens as well as the types of leaves and what they would look like on one of my tree designs. Before these sketches I've never really attempted creating environment concept sketches/ art, so it was pretty new to me to get the leaves to actually look like leaves; to get the ideas in my head into a visual representation. So this was a bit of a challenge for me.

Environment Layout Concepts by Anzel Rossouw 2012

I then tried incorporated these trees together in a landscape form; where I would be able to gather a good idea as to how these trees would look together when added into the environment with water and some other environmental assets. I wanted to see whether these trees would fit into a swamp environment as it isn't really your typical swamp tree.

Environment Concepts by Anzel Rossouw 2012

On the right I've included some of the very basic designs of the environment assets that could be found within swamps. I looked at many swamp images as references and looked at the vegetation that are found in these very moist areas. I found that plants such as ferns and lily pads as well as vines on the trees are very common in these areas. I also included a bit of a color scheme of a range of green colors that could be used.

Lighting Concepts by Anzel Rossouw 2012

This short film takes place within a sun set lighting, where at the start of the film it is in a late afternoon time of day, where it then progresses through to the end of the short film where the film ends at a night setting. The lighting concepts that I created has been included on the left where I have illustrated the progression of the stages from late afternoon to night, through the film together with color swatches of what the lighting might look like.

Below are two rendered images from scenes 8 and 9 from the short film where I did layout, created concepts as well as created the CG lighting and then composited the different render passes together with some paint overs. These were done using software programs such as Autodesk Maya for the layout of the scene and the lighting as well as Adobe Photoshop for the basic composition. Even though I created the trees concepts, the modelling of the trees were split between me and another student and many of the environment assets were created by some of the other students. These assents were created using the program ZBrush by Pixologic and Autodesk Maya. Unfortunately the shot shown below in the second image from scene 9, does not appear in the film due to complications when we were rendering, but I still think is turned out really great.

"Scenes 8" Lighting, Layout, Concepts and Composition by Anzel Rossouw 2012

"Scenes 9" Lighting, Layout, Concepts and Composition by Anzel Rossouw 2012

I'm really proud of this short film and think that for first year students, we did a pretty great job for the knowledge that we had back then. Although when I look back at it now and compare it to work that we have recently created, I find that we are capable of so much more now. We have learnt quite a bit since then. I know I have definitely improved, and all it needs is practice and more experience. I still think for a first year assignment, considering how many students we were and how much time we had; we really did do a great job and it turned out to be a great short film.