High Noon : .

The Making Of

The aim of this project was to create and understand the importance of a pre-visualisation. These give the animators a good idea of whether the story is working before putting great amounts of time into models and textures which may not be

needed or seen. We were given basic polygon plane scenery, and the components of two block

‘Western’ characters, which we put together using parenting, and created simple rigs for.

We were then tasked with creating a short animation with these characters and the concept of ‘High Noon’.

I started with a spider diagram of associations of the genre, then had a few ideas and advanced into a basic storyboard.

Throws/drops gun

Tries to draw, but misses gun & comes up empty-handed

Giant bird swoops in & snatches him up before the shot can be fired. Drops gun in shock.

Showdown. Has perfect shot, other guy is unarmed. Slow pan. He can’t miss.

From here, I started building some houses for scenery.

Some close-ups of my wood textures:

Even colouring in a few houses improved my Photoshop skills. Top is first try, bottom is just over a week later.

I created four different houses, with varying levels of complexity, the duplicated two to save time.

The balcony from the storyboard.

Some window detail.

Modelling & rigging the bird:

Weightpainting bird :

Animating the first scene: it was difficult getting the camera

to show the same as the perspective. Also I had a strange

problem with animating the cameras. Sometimes they would do an over-exaggerated sway in a

transition.

Here I am altering the camera’s pivot to combat the problem.

It didn’t work. I’m still not sure what caused it, but you

could get around the problem by being careful how you

moved the camera.

Lining up scene three first shot. Getting the

right camera angle over his shoulder was

quite a struggle!Used two cameras to make moving about

for shots easier.

Templated the other houses, and reduced opacity of the one he was standing on so I could see to animate

him easier.

Positioning cameras.

Animating arm.

Creating dust spray for missed shot.

This was much easier than I thought it would be. I simply created some plain

coloured basic spherical polys, hid them under the scenery until required, then

animated them flying apart and settling back to earth. I’m very pleased with the

result.

Altering the velocities of the camera pans in the graph editor.

The bird picking him up and flying off with him proved tricky. I

duplicated both and connected them, then keyed the visibility so

the unconnected pair disappeared and the connected pair appeared

simultaneously. This gave the appearance of the bird’s continuous

flight.

Editing the bird’s flight to make it look more natural. Was hesitating too much

before touching the ground.

Render tests. Awful time doing these – couldn’t get them right. They were either too dark, completely bleached, or a funny colour.

The problem was a directional light which had come with the scene which I had been unaware of. Once that was gone, the renders came out nicer.

Creating shot and final test render.

Most of the final renders came out nicely, but a couple look like I forgot to change the settings.

Also, the bird’s shadow is visible in part of the end scene when it

is waiting off-screen. Also, playback doesn’t seem very

smooth.

I quite enjoyed this project, and learnt much from it. My modelling and texturing skills have both definitely improved, and I think my

animating has as well. My timing seems better, and I put more consideration into making the movements more natural, with anticipation and secondary action, and

watching how bodies actually work to move.My camera skills have improved, and I really like creating pieces with plenty of

cinematography, so this is something I would like to pursue further.I wanted my piece to be quite humorous, but with a little suspense to contrast and

enhance that, and I think I achieved my goal.Working with such blocky low-poly models really makes you consider movement

differently, and you have to work a bit harder to fully express the character. Rendering and lighting are very weak spots of mine, and I will need to really look into

these much further next year to create better quality finishes to my work. I think this is one of my best projects of the year, and I am very happy with it, despite

the inconsistencies and undesirable elements in the final render.