Nearly There!

Again, it's been a while, deadline is fast approaching, but I believe I am pretty much there.
Here's an update of of everything since March:

In terms of animation, everything has been fully animated, rendered out and comped up. All inserted into a fresh premier file with soundtrack added.

I managed to get a day arranged with Niall, the media manager of AFC Bournemouth, to come down to the stadium and get my footage and soundbites for the film. He introduced me to Tony Allen, the sports commentator for Radio Bedside, who happily recorded some commentary lines I had written up. Many thanks goes out to Niall and Tony for their help.

Soundtrack wise, I took a little visit into the library and had a browse of their sound effects/sound bites section after hearing of it some time ago. A long overdue trip that would've made life alot easier if it had been done earlier. I managed to accumulate a selection of cd's with sounds I could use. After listening through them for suitability, I whittled down the selection to three cds; "BBC Sound Effects Library", "BBC SFX Football and Rugby Crowds" and "Carlin 143 Solo Piano Popular Styles". A little time spent on cutting and sorting out the soundtrack, it is now complete and I'm pretty happy with it.

Now to the animation. Having animated the majority of the film by the time Easter came round, left me the task of going through and tidying up the general sloppiness that was present. I updated the set with a couple of AFC Bournemouth posters, added books on the shelves and photos of my favourite Bournemouth players; little touches to add a football fan feel.
I also added the football footage I had into the scenes where the tv could be seen. I scoured through the matches I had obtained, matches of Bournemouth against Barnet and Notts County respectively, for sections which matched what was happening in the actual film itself as best as possible. So all the Bournemouth related things have been added.

Rendering was very time consuming, as I finished a set of scenes, I set them in backburner and left them to render as I worked on the others. I rendered foregrounds, backgrounds and depth maps. It took me a little time to remember how to do depth passes, but worked it out in the end (set everything to black, add fog and adjust the camera environmental range, render and viola! A depth pass ).

Imported the relevant files into After Effects and then began comping. Setting out the compostions was relatively quick and easy, adding an adujustment layer with either lens blur if I had a depth pass and gassiuan blur if I had foreground and back ground seperate, thus giving the scenes areas of focus. A noticeable problem with the animation before is that everything in the scene was the same shade of colour due to the cell shaded nature. Adding the blur in seperates the background or points that aren't overly important into the distance, bring the main focus to the action happening on screen. It has also solved the problem of depth of field, how detail on things further off in the distance deteriorates the further you go back.

Credits was a simple task to tackle after this. So now it has been rendered, here is the latest version!



Only thing I want to change is the opening title screen, it's very messy and sloppy as it was the animatic version, so some work needs to go into that. I'm going to have one final check through for things that need changing, eg. Axl's hand passes through the can when he passes it to the egg. Also going to add a few more sound effects in to emphasise certain moments, for instance, when Axl lands on the floor and when the egg bounces off his head.
Not long to go now. Scary times.