The attempted art of Sabotage

It's safe to say that we've had a more than semi- successful week of rendering! Amit, Bimpe and Natasha have been setting up the passes - we're using Indirect, Diffuse and reflection - as well as a couple of custom ones - ID, ZDepth and AO.

All pass have been completed and have now been thrust gracefully into the render farm.

A couple has gone through earlier in the week, but Amit had spotted some issues with the outputs - some of the passes weren't showing what they should have shown, and them some weren't showing anything in After Effects, but were working fine in the glorious Photoshop. He's gone back into the render settings and saw a couple of things that may have caused the issues, so fingers crossed they should be fine now.

we are organised and ready to render!

 A few of the shots have been successful (huzzah), so Ritchie and Cristina have started the compositing process in After Effects and it's all looking pretty good so far. Cristina had worked on a new Matte painting that was similar to the IBL we had in place for renders and its really exciting to see it all fitting together!

A very happy compositing Cristina

We wanted to give ourselves as much flexibility (and detail) as possible when it came to compositing (hence all the passes) and due to time / experience, we want to keep our comps simple, but more importantly we want to make sure that everything still retains the same look and feel - especially as nearly all of us will be comping so we need to make sure everything is still unified.

With all the technical stuff rolling along, we're turning some of our attention to our credits. We want these to have as much thought and care as we've had with the film, we also want t have fun with it! We've been throwing around some ideas, and settled on a really good one from Yannis which will involve some 2D animation (his speciality). With that said.. no more spoilers

Oh and we also attempted to spread the good word of Team Juan with Team 2... but they were having none of it.

We can't be held accountable for our characters actions...

Pre-Production Pro's

We are full steam ahead pre-production wise (pretty much!). We've started to make final decisions on our character designs and Kaitlin and Amit have pulled together our schedule.

It's looking pretty robust but we're confident we can hit our personal deadlines - which would give us a 2 week buffer by the end to make any emergency tweaks if needed.

The teams been doing a lot of research into Mayan patterns and textures to use as a common theme across all our designs. We think this will really link our animations world together AND help it stand out from other low poly stylised animations.

After a few tweaks Natatsha and Yannis have pulled together the final design for the troll. It was good to see it presented in different styles and it allowed us to see how different features worked in different ways. We've agreed on using Natatsha's style with Yannis's colours.

The piñata goats are pretty much there, Ritchie's just gonna tweak the colours so although they're meant to look like a set, they also need to look quite individual - so one will have more pink, the other more green etc.

Yannis has tweaked Bimpe's original design for the Mariachi's to make them more stylised and to give them a bit more character! Their instruments are also colour co-ordinated to the goats.

Cristina's also pulled together some amazing designs for the environment. We've gone through a few designs picking out features we want to stand out like the rocks - as we want them to resemble the ogre. We're also going to comp the characters onto the plane so we can check and test the colours and make any final tweaks. We'll also start thinking about the matte painting.

First drafts of the environment

Final design / colours (for now!)

Aiming to start modelling next week!

In terms of the storyboard, Bimpe and Natatsha will be reworking this in time for Monday, to incorporate comments from Phil and Barry about consistent camera angles etc. We've been looking at The Good, The Bad and The Ugly for inspiration into how we angle the camera's between our heroes (the goats) and the villain (the troll).

We also did some team bonding with food, salsa and beers - cause we're awesome like that.

Team Juan

We've been making some further developments on our current untitled project!

script, script, script!

We've kicked off our pre-production process and sort of split into sub teams - aka weeding out the artist to start work on character designs, concept art and a more detailed storyboard / colour script. 

There's been initial meetings to make sure that everyone's on the same page in terms of style and direction, so we can then go away and start designing.

Designs will be:
- Mexican theme colour palette, mainly golds, yellow, blue, orange, pink
- Working against a 2D background
- Characters and assets will be boxy and low poly (like the coolness below)

Low Poly Moodboard

Pinata Moodboard

Natasha and Kaitlin also pointed out possible complexities when modelling and rigging (especially considering the time constraints), so we've figured out that its probably best to keep the goat model simple so it can be duplicated (for the other 2) and then tweaked to match the persona (yes persona) of each goat! 

This will also make the rigging process easier - meaning that we'll only need to do one rig then copy this over for the other 2 (hopefully).

We've divvied out the characters between us to work on over the weekend:
Goats - Cristina and Ritchie
Troll - Natasha, Bimpe and Yannis
Mariachi band - Kaitlin and Bimpe
Background - Cristina and Kaitlin

Cristina and Ritchie have already started out on some cool initial designs for the goats!

We'll be re-grouping on Monday for a quick show and tell and make some final decisions on the design, then aiming to have final designs by Wednesday.

Amit also pulled together the roles in the group!

Our design reference style sheet