New-and-Improved Master Animatic

As you know, we've been gradually improving our CG models to provide photorealistic backgrounds for our live actors. However, for the most part, I have NOT updated our master animatic with the new material.

Believe it or not, our master animatic was last rendered on 7-8-10! That means we've had almost 2 years of improvements that weren't reflected in the master animatic.

Although I obviously can't post the updated animatic here (it's too big), here are a few before-and-after comparisons so you can get an idea of the improvements.

Scene C115b (Ryke Thale leaving the Jedi Temple after planting bombs in the databank):


Scene C115c (Close-up of Ryke Thale as he suspects something may be wrong):


Scene C115d (Moments before Ryke Thale's reaction to seeing droidekas behind the blast door):


Now imagine about half of the animatic looking as new-and-improved as the sample screenshots, above, and you'll get an idea of how much better the new master animatic looks. The entire movie has a different feel now -- much more like a realistic and immersive. It's pretty sweet!

Later,
Bob

Improved Animatics

Sorry for the late blog post -- I was out of town last week.

I'm still improving our animatics. Here are before-and-after pictures of Scene F402a (when Darth Vader suffocates Stormtrooper Captain):

You may recall that I can't kneel or fall in the Stormtrooper armor because of the limited range of motion. As a result, when we shot the live footage of Stormtrooper Captain falling to the ground, the best I could do was bend over and pretend to fall. I had to digitally move Stormtrooper Captain in post-production so that it looked like he actually fell to the ground.

Unfortunately, the fall looked fake and I finally realized it's because there should be motion blur. So I added motion blur to the fake fall (see 2nd picture, above) and now it looks much more realistic. Sweet.

Here are before-and-after pictures of another improved animatic:


In the 1st version of this animatic, the 2 TIE Fighters had almost identical flight paths, which looked totally artificial. In the new-and-improved version, I varied the flight paths of the 2 TIE Fighters so that they look much more realistic.

Here are before-and-after pictures from the last animatic I improved. In this scene, Brad's Jedi Starfighter exits hyperspace, then flies past the camera:

In the original animatic, the Jedi Starfighter flew perfectly straight, which looked fake. In the improved animatic, the Jedi Starfighter wobbles a bit after exiting hyperspace. If you look at the wingtips on the "after" picture (2nd picture, above), you can see that the Jedi Starfighter is tilted slightly to the right.


And in this 2nd pair of before-and-after pictures, you can see the wobble to the left in the "after" picture (2nd picture, above).

Happy Easter!
Bob

Improved Animatics

I've been refining our animatics, moving them another step closer closer to final footage.

I added animated streams of traffic to a bunch of the Coruscant scenes. Here's an example:

You can barely see them through the atmospheric haze, but there are now streams of traffic flying through the background. I tried to point a few of them out with the red arrows, but they're still really hard to see in this compressed image. Trust me, they look much cooler as video.

I added a hyperspace background outside Yane's shuttle. Here are before-and-after screenshots:


And here are a few reference photos of the hyperspace effect from "Return of the Jedi" and the Wookieepedia website:

As you can see, our hyperspace effect is close, but not quite final.

Also, you can't tell in the still photos, but our hyperspace tunnel rotates clockwise and moves towards the spaceship. Here's a pair of pictures taken about a half-second apart so that you can see what I'm talking about:


Finally, I fixed one of our Star Destroyer animatics. In the old version, the 3 Star Destroyers moved at exactly the same speed, which looked totally fake. Here are screenshots of the old animatic, one screenshot from the beginning of the scene and one screenshot from the end of the scene:

Here are screenshots from the new animatic:

See how much closer the nearest Star Destroyer is in the 2nd picture, above? You can also see that the leftmost Star Destroyer has moved faster than the furthest Star Destroyer.

Unfortunately, that's all I had time for last week. That hyperspace effect took much longer than you'd think. :(

Later,
Bob

The Dogfight Animatic is FINALLY Done!!!

Sorry for the belated blog post. My DSL modem failed a week ago and I didn't get the replacement until today. In the meantime, I only had dial-up access, which is WAY too slow to update this blog!

On the bright side, the dogfight animatic is FINALLY done! Here are the last 2 scenes that I completed last week:

Scene D245:

This 1st screenshot shows the Jedi Starfighter as it speeds away from the pursuing TIE Defenders.
The 2nd picture is the corresponding reference shot from "Star Wars."


In this 2nd screenshot, the Jedi Starfighter gets hit by a laser bolt. We'll add the laser bolt and explosion later.


In this 3rd screenshot, the Jedi Starfighter flies past the camera while the pursuing TIE Defenders (not pictured) continue shooting.

Here's Scene D247:

Right before this scene, we'll have a shot of Brad in the Jedi Starfighter cockpit preparing for hyperspace. This 1st screenshot shows the Jedi Starfighter right before it enters hyperspace.


This 2nd screenshot shows the Jedi Starfighter as it enters hyperspace.
And this, my friends, was the final animatic in our dogfight! (I promised myself I wasn't going to cry... :D )

On a separate note, I think I mentioned previously that Brad was concerned about Mr. Stevens' performance in one of the Imperial Officer scenes. While tweaking the master animatic recently, I digitally accelerated Mr. Stevens' scene by 10%. In layman's terms, that means he speaks 10% faster. I think it improved the performance, so hopefully it will satisfy Brad. If not, we'll blame him when Mr. Stevens comes back for re-shoots. ;D

Now that the master animatic is done (after completing the dogfight animatic), it's really just a matter of refining everything. I think I'm going to improve the texture maps on the interior of Yane's shuttle, and I may also try to figure out how to create the hyperspace effect which will be visible outside the cockpit windows.

Later,
Bob

Dogfight Animatic

We made some progress on the movie this week, but not much was picture-worthy so we don't have much to show for our efforts.

Brad's schedule finally opened up, so he brought his PC over and we got him setup to help me with all of the CG. It will be SOOOO nice to have some help with all of this. Hopefully we'll make a lot more progress now that I'm not the only one working on the overwhelming amount of CG we have in this movie.

As mentioned last week, I also re-edited some of the Darth Vader live footage to match Garry's ADR. It looks a LOT better! It's amazing how small improvements can make such a big difference.

I only had time to create 1 new dogfight animatic last week. Here are screenshots, along with their "Star Wars" reference pictures:

In this 1st shot, Brad's Jedi Starfighter zooms towards the camera with a TIE Defender in pursuit.
Sorry about the overlapping images in the "Star Wars" reference picture. Adobe Premiere Elements has a bug where it sometimes take a screenshot 1-frame BEFORE where it's supposed to, so that's why this screenshot still shows the dissolve from the previous scene.


In this 2nd screenshot, a 2nd TIE Defender has dropped into frame, joining the pursuit. In the final shot, both TIE Defenders will be shooting at the Jedi Starfighter.


In this last screenshot, the 2nd TIE Defender zooms past the camera as it pursues the Jedi Starfighter.

That's it. Like I said, not much picture-worthy stuff last week. :( However, now that Brad's helping me out, we should have a lot more pictures since I can post pictures of both Brad's work and my work.

Later,
Bob

Dogfight Animatics and Darth Vader

I created 2 more dogfight animatics this week.

Here's a 2-shot sequence from Scene D237, along with its corresponding "Star Wars" reference footage:

In this 1st screenshot, the TIE Defender flies towards the camera while shooting at Brad's Jedi Starfighter (off-camera). Laser bolts will be added later.


Here's another screenshot after the TIE Defender has gotten closer to the camera. This will look a lot cooler after Brad rotoscopes laser bolts.

Here's a 4-shot sequence from Scene D239, along with its corresponding "Revenge of the Sith" reference footage:

In this 1st screenshot, Brad's Jedi Starfighter is starting a counter-clockwise loop.
In the "Revenge of the Sith" reference shot (2nd picture, above), I drew a red arrow to show the Jedi Starfighter that I used as a reference, since there are so many ships in that shot.


In the 2nd screenshot, Brad's Jedi Starfighter is a little past the halfway point in the counter-clockwise loop.


In the 3rd screenshot, Brad's Jedi Starfighter is coming out of the loop.


And in this last screenshot, Brad's Jedi Starfighter zooms past the camera.

In addition to CG, we shot some live footage -- well, audio anyway. I definitely saved the best for last, because you guys are going to LOVE these video clips!

Garry, Sarah's old boss, looped our Darth Vader dialog. Here's a behind-the-scenes picture showing our state-of-the-art voice effects (aka "cardboard tube"):

It's kind of hard to tell, but the boom arm is on the bottom-right of the picture and the mic is being pointed at the end of the cardboard tube. Garry's son, David, did a great job keeping the mic in the correct position -- not an easy task because Garry would move the cardboard tube around while he was recording his lines. It's pretty funny to watch. :D

Anyway, laugh at our cardboard tube technique, but you can't argue with the results! Check this out -- the 1st video is my old (temporary) ADR, and the 2nd video is the new ADR with Garry's voice:


That last word that got cut off is "destination." Our actual animatic is fine, but for some reason when I render to Quicktime format, the audio gets screwed up. :(

Here's another before-and-after sample:

Absolutely amazing! Is it just me, or did Darth Vader suddenly become ALIVE in our movie?

Finding a good Darth Vader voice was extremely difficult. I gave it a shot, Jay gave it a shot, and Brad even recruited some people on Star Wars Fan Film Forums. Nothing was usable until last night. When we were recording Garry's dialog, Sarah and I would look at each other after a good take and smile at each other -- we knew we finally had our Darth Vader voice! It was a great feeling.

Since we shot the Darth Vader live footage about a year before recording Garry's ADR, the action and the dialog don't match-up 100%. So... I need to go back to the original Darth Vader raw footage, re-edit it to match Garry's ADR, then re-render. I'll probably do that next week.

Also, there are only 3 more dogfight animatics that need to be completed, so I'll try to work on those next week too.

Later,
Bob