The finished film!

We would like to present our final animation - hooray!

Here is the stereo 3D version:

And here is the 2D version, for those without the correct glasses:

For a time we thought we wouldn't be able to have toon lines, ambient occlusion or even a depth pass, the rendering was acting so strangely, but we found solutions at the last minute and were able to composite something very close to the deadline!

It feels good to have this completed.

We also produced a festival kit containing technical details, a full list of credits and some info about the team. You can download that here.

Production update - nearing completion!

Over the past six weeks, All Is Fair In Love And Playtime has been in full production. We are now excitingly (and maybe scarily) near the end, and looking forward to having a finished film.

Once the rigs were at a ready-enough stage, we began to follow our detailed production shotlist to work through the animation. Though our plan had been pushed down to only two weeks in which to complete the animation, even working on it every day it took four weeks - still quite a good time considering we had two people animating a one-minute film with three characters and lots of body mechanics.

Here are a couple of examples of how far our animation came over a month:

Initial blocking for the fight scene:

The finished fight scene:

Inbetweens for Simon trying to impress Loretta:

The finished shot:

You can see that as we animated the rigs were updated; they had textures and details added, as well as small fixes.

We are currently sorting out render settings, so next should be the finished film!

Animation reference edit

A while back we filmed some reference footage, and since animation is now underway I thought I would edit some of the best pieces together to fit the timing of the animatic. As well as making some shots of reference easier to find, it also means we can get a better grasp for how movements will fit into the minute length of the film.

Animation checklist

As rigs are being completed the next - and very important! - stage of production is animation. I have already started a little bit of blocking for one shot, but not enough to show yet. But for when things are underway we have a checklist to ensure no shot or character gets missed out, and to allow everyone to see what stage the animation is at. This is also useful as two of us are animating, so we can see each other's progress as we go.

Andy hasn't yet been assigned to shots; the ones I have been assigned are largely down to the Al rig being the most complete, so I may as well start on as many shots with Al in as possible while Andy continues to finish the rigs.

-Caitlin :)

A month of working out story...!

It's been a while since an update on here because we've been busy rethinking our ideas. Once we were back at uni we learned our piece had to be exactly one minute long. After acting out our ideas so far to see what the timing would be like, we found the story was simply too rushed, so we then spent the next weeks coming up with entirely new ideas - but ideas that would still let us use the character Jack had started modelling.

Our original idea involved two boys playing in their garden, imagining themselves in amazing scenes like a western saloon and medieval castle. While we loved the idea of showing the difference between the real world and the imaginary world that children see, we simply couldn't cut it down to one minute without sacrificing too much of what made it charming in the first place.

Our new idea still involves two boys, but this time they are fighting over a toy plane in a playground when a pretty girl sat on the jungle gym playing with a toy truck grabs their attention. They boys continue fighting, but this time in an attempt to traverse the jungle gym and reach the girl first. But when the younger boy prevails and reaches her, it transpires that he was only interested in the toy truck.

You can read the full script by clicking the 'script' tab at the top of the page.

We are currently finishing off concepts and storyboards, gathering screenshots and videos in preparation for Thursday's progress presentation, and creating a 3D environment for an animatic.

I have also spent some time redesigning the blog to match our new logo colours. Everything looks a lot more bold and consistent now.

Before:

Now:

-Caitlin