Final Video
Responsible for everything except the car model and the real-life footage.
The production of the final video was very rushed, about 80% of the video was done in the last week. As I only did the easy shots of the front early on, most of the difficult and complex camera animations were done very last minute. Thankfully, a lot of the planning work was done early on and it helped make the journey a little bit more grounded as I just had to follow the storyboard and direction of the mood reel.
If I have more time, I hope to improve my composition shot and experiment more with the lighting and rendering aspects. Also, I would like to go back to my comfort zone and hopefully add more VFX simulations to my video.
Furthermore, after reviewing the video I realise there is some mistakes with some of the shots which I will be fixing and updating in the future.
Also thanks to Gonzalo’s reminder, I think the exr workflow is becoming more and more familiar to me. I usually render PNG as I try to make my renders as good as possible to avoid doing much compositing. But rendering exr really gives me the flexibility to make changes in post-production (even though I think I am still bad at it). However those exr files are really huge and since I had a lot of shots, my SSD exploded. Sadly, I discovered the DWAA compression too late as it really saved a lot of space.
BTS Video
Please turn off the sound for this.
So for the BTS video, I want to show my journey of making this but due to the short amount of time, I only can put the important parts. I want to share that actually there is a lot more planned for this video at first. But due to the limited time I have to work on this (because there are two papers to write and one more group project that is very VFX heavy), I cut the whole plan in half. Originally, there was supposed to be an abstract making of the video which is part 1 of this video. The final video shown is the second part.
So for the BTS video, I want to show the different stages of the production. Firstly, it is the pre-production stage where I look for a lot of references on cars. Also, I look at a lot of reference video of how other people do their production on cars. I studied a lot of real live shooting of cars where I broke down which camera angles and motion work make sense and which are not realistic. I also looked at abstract car videos where the producers used a lot of abstract CGI elements as symbols related to their cars.
Also, I showed some of the animation VFX and compositing process screen recording. Nothing new here, just normal and the usual workflow.
VFX
Some of the VFX playblasts showing the very little VFX elements in my video.
Animatics
Although it is only a car, animation is really hard for me to get so this stage is really a new challenge for me. Had to spend a lot of time animating the car and camera. I think I might just not be finished if it’s a character in my video and not a car.
The car rigging process is made easier with a plugin called launch control, it is really easy to use and delivers great results. I hope to try more of it in the future.
Mood Reel
Dig through the whole internet and finally filter the useful footage that is fitting for my storyboard.
Reference
Originally planned my video to have a Mustang or a vintage car, but I realise it is quite unrealistic for those cars to perform such “racy” animations. Perhaps next time my beautiful Mustang will be used in some more classy video I guess.
Storyboard
Can’t draw at all so I shall just take screenshots as storyboard directions.
Music
Found a piece of suitable music on epidemic sound. But it is too long so I had to remix it to fit it to my animatic. The screenshot shows the old animatic which is why the final music is longer than the video. It is a back-and-forth process where I match the clips to the music and vice versa.