May 2021 - Final Check-in

Final short film was published! Thank you and enjoy The "International Reaper School" short film:

https://vimeo.com/showcase/6517029/video/545263965

The proceeding posts on this blog is the reverse-chronological order of responsibilities that showcase my journey of helping create this film...

April 2nd 2021 - Check in 4-5

Animation

March was a lot of cleaning up animation for the group. I polished character animation for scene 2, and helped someone who took over a scene I animated last semester, which we kept but had to tweak placement for in the environment. On top of that I rigged blinds he peeks through and fixed the hand animation for that.

Rigging

- fixed the Old Man rig and rerigged his facial rig for better expressions

- Rigged blinds so the Old Man can peek through in the next scene:

I made a tutorial on how the rig can be positioned after being formed.

Chalkboard 2D Animation

This animation is finished but needs polishing and tweaking. I also found the way to convert from TVPaint to Photoshop, adjust the lines to white, then make the background transparent. This was it composited into the 3D scene playblast:

Concept Art

- Illustrations for picture frames in the Old Man's house, represented people in the group as grim reaper students failing at reaping him. These were made an hour each

[me]

[Owen Swallow]

Feb 26th 2021 - Check in 3

Animation

- Second pass of readjusted animation of scene 2. Currently rendering the 2nd and 3rd shots, but here's the first with a render pass.

Rigging I fixed some more things in the Grim rig. Previously I fixed a file that was Grim textured in purple, but we're supposed to be using a file of Grim textured in black. Simulations I tried a simulation in Houdini and in Maya to see how 3d smoke would look on Grim. However, we are making smoke in post-production.

Chalkboard 2d Animation I got stuck on one pose near the end of this progress for a couple days. I pulled lots of reference of baseball players and even made my own reference, which helped. Inevidebly I had to erase a lot of work and flip the posing position to fit the frame better. I hope to soon try vector based linework for a cleaner animation, and to potentially have an easier way to make the animation an overlay alpha for the chalkboard.

After this there should be one more 'step' in the tutorial where the skeleton character presents the human's soul, which should take another few days after finishing what I'm stuck on. Concept Art - In our class meeting with professors we discussed how maybe souls can be physically captured using items like Pokémon Pokéballs, but shaped like skulls. I made a quick concept art in a minute.