Final Project: BRICKZ

For my final project I further explored my real-life brick breaker idea from my midterm.  I added an animated ball, scenes of me returning the ball in a racquetball court, and a brick-break animation with cloud particles.  I would have loved to make a longer video and really complete the concept, but I'm still very happy with my little film.

I approached my project less like an animation and more like a video production, which caused me to put a great amount of focus on cinematography and video editing.  To organize my concept, I wrote a screenplay.  It was a bit unorthodox, kinda like a screenplay combined with a storyboard.  Here are scans of it.

With my vision on paper, it was time to animate my scenes.  I wanted the ball to squish and move like a racquetball would in life.  I did not know how to use physics in Maya, so I keyframed every bounce and squish manually.  The graph editor was extremely useful for this because it allowed me to edit multiple keyframes at once.  I also used the graph editor to edit my camera movements, which gave me great control over my cinematography.  Here's the graph for my entire animation:

As you can see, it is quite complex.  I "spiked" the slopes of the ball when it hit other objects to give it more of a hard bounce.  I learned how to use the graph very well which definitely increased the quality of my animation.

I perfected the textures and colors of my racquetball environment for the final, as shown here:

Midterm

I used pictures I took from the actually racquetball court I filmed at as the wall and floor textures.  The lights were edited as well to make the colors not as blown-out.

TCNJ's one and only racquetball court would be the location of my cut-away scenes.  I brought a friend with me to help work the camera and throw the ball to me.  The racquetball court was a pretty good place to film.  The bright, full light lit me very well and there was a lot space to move the camera.
Final
The scenes of me in front of a green-screen had to be redone, mainly because I realized that I never actually swung the racket.  I also wanted another shot I could composite in front of my animation.  I made sure to light the green screen better than I had for my midterm.  To key out the screen I used After Effects and I also used AE to recreate a camera zoom effect to match the zoom out in my animation.  The final video was edited in Final Cut and exported in 720p HD.

I had a very big vision for this project, which was only partially fulfilled mostly due to time restraints.  The video doesn't feel finished to me, because it is very short and never really reaches a conclusion.  I did the best I could with the time I had and I am still very proud of it.  This project (the midterm and the final) was my first time ever doing a green screen video project.  Movie special effects is the industry I see my career in, and I challenged myself to try green-screen compositing because I really wanted to learn the technique.  I definitely learned a lot from this project.

Low-Man

I made my low-man do a goofy martial arts pose, and except for the slight pausing it does I'm happy with it.  I thought it was really cool how the simple addition of the eyebrow raise and head tilt added a lot of character to him, and it made me think about how it's the little details that really make the animation believable.




Midterm Proposal
For my midterm, I will begin my final project, which is as of now called BRICKZ.  I am planning to recreate the arcade game Brick-Breaker in a real-life setting.  I will accomplish this by compositing myself into my animation using a green-screen, and show me playing a racquetball style game to break the bricks.  The bricks will be horizontally opposite to me on the court, not above me as Brick-Breaker is usually thought of.  My midterm will be the first scene of the final project, which will be a large scale video project.  Here is my very rough storyboard:

Midterm Production
The first thing I made was one very detailed brick.  I spent a couple hours just focusing on creating the most perfectly shaped, colored, and textured brick I could.  I really wanted to capture the shiny colorfulness of the bricks in the Brick-Breaker games I've seen.  I started by making a blue brick and rounding the left and right sides in the style of many of the flash games I've played.  Here are some of the games I used as references:                                                                                                                   

My goal was to make the bricks look multidimensional and detailed.  So I made another brick almost identical to the first one, shrunk it, and put it inside the blue brick.   I made the outer brick transparent, almost like glass, and the inner brick very reflective with a phong shader.  Then I duplicated this brick and changed it's color to look like different bricks.  After I was done arranging the bricks I moved on to my environment, a racquetball court.  The court is a simple rectangular prism, but a few fine details were needed to make it believable.  For the floor, I tiled a hardwood planks, which is what most racquetball courts use for the ground.  I gave a phong to the left and right walls, making them reflective
like if they were mirrors or glass.  And for the far wall and the ceiling I used a picture of a highly textural white wall as a bump map.
I used the picture to the right as a reference.

I spent hours just on the camera movement, because cinematography is very important in any video project.  I needed the camera shots to be engaging and logically tell the story of BRICKZ without any audio.  I did this by having the camera start with a close, ambiguous shot of a few bricks, so the viewer becomes curious of what the bricks are.  The camera then pans to the left, showing its brickbreaker-like formation, then zooms out to show me with a ball getting ready to serve.  This camera movement also shows off the brick reflections nicely.  The hardest part about moving the camera was getting the timing right with Maya's interface.  As a relatively experienced video editor, Maya felt to me like I was editing video while I was filming and constantly directing my scene.  That being said, Maya is not a video editor, and getting the precise timing I wanted was difficult and took a lot of trial and error.

Using the blue screen was a very educational experience for me, mostly due to all the things I did wrong.  Here is my original footage:

As you can see, not a very good lighting job.  I had never tried to use a green/blue screen before, and I did not know very much about lighting.  I used four lights, probably incorrectly, and that is why I am so bright and blown out.  When I put my footage into After Effects, I had a lot of trouble getting a good key out because of the bad lighting.  The only way I could remove all the blue involved making myself a little transparent.  This frustrated me, but then I realized that if I duplicated the keyed out footage of me a couple of times and layered them on top of each other, I looked completely solid.  My errors in lighting also worked themselves out, because my animation was lit very brightly so I actually matched it relatively.



Self-Evaluation
I think I successfully created a good first step towards my final.  I established a good foundation to build my other more ambitious project ideas off of.  I think what I did the best was cinematography.  My shots were carefully thought out and timed and I think this is why my animation is successful.  I made sure to frame my project attractively, and the storytelling is clear and concise because of it.

Here is the final project: