Dissonance Rochester Premiere

Dissonance officially premieres to the people of Rochester this April 30 at the SoFA Emerging Filmmakers Series, a segment of the 360|365 Film Festival.

Humble, but it's a start!

animation reel, finally!

[2012 UPDATE: If you wish to see this version of my animation reel, the password is "reel2010". Please note that this is NOT the current version of my animation demo reel. Please see the Videos page of this blog for my most recent reels. Thank you!]

I've finally put together an animation reel now that my student film, Dissonance, is done. This is my first edit, including shots from both Dissonance and Bhava Raga Tala, that my teachers liked the best.

Although, both my teachers have suggested that I should just send in my complete films for internships instead of chopping them off into a reel. Either way, comments are welcome!

Dissonance Trailer

Will be done in 4 weeks! Aa!

lighting tests, cntd.

[2012 UPDATE: The passwords for the following videos are "test"]

Shot001_LightTest_11.10.10 from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

Re-did some lighting tests, with the character textured correctly this time. It's not bad, but it still feels flat to me. Going to play around with the lights more before break starts and I don't have the privilege of rendering in the lab anymore.. Rim lights should help break out the flatness a little, and probably a little more contrast. Other than that, I don't want to get carried away with lighting and texturing. Animating the clocks from shot-to-shot is going to take some meticulous thought, and that's next on my list to tackle before I start animating next quarter.

I also plan on thumbnailing most of my shots over break.

Shot010_LightTest_11.10.10 from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

Also, working title has been changed to "Dissonance".

enter protagonist

Here's my bot for my upcoming student film, almost done!! These are two renders I did for my Advanced modeling class.

And here's proof that my rig actually works so far! The poses should be familiar from Richard William's book of awesomeness. I slapped in the extreme poses for the character for this quick test animation. At first, I was going to animate something for a shot in my film, but I decided to do something more "cartoony" with broader movements to really push the rig. In actuality, the acting in my film will be subtler, but I wanted to make sure my rig was capable.

I can't wait till I can start animating!! But for now, on to more lighting tests!!

sneaky peaky

These tests took about 11 hours to do. The character isn't done texturing yet. Now that he's in the set, I have a better idea of how to texture him so he doesn't blend in with the background so much. Till now, I've been using the Norman rig in my 3D animatic, so now I have a better sense of where I should be going.

Also, rigging is still as terrifying. But I have to thank my self from the past for making life easier for me in the present by practicing rigging all of summer =)

^ I goofed up on the timing of the light for this one.

Newton's Cradle

Been really sick this past week, and trying my best to motivate myself to accomplish things.

inspiration tests

Trying to figure out visual styles, etc. etc.

I was pretty much drifting in the air when I sat down to work and plan things out. So I started with doodles and sketches. I have a secret crush on animating credit sequences so I started sketching possible backgrounds for my credit sequence animation (I know, I'm more excited about the credits than the actual film- which kind of got me thinking... but now's not the time to explain that)

So I started with these:

And got inspired to do these...

This is just lambert with occlusion. Initially, when I didn't even have an idea, I thought of this style for simplicity's sake because I had seen one or two student films in this style that weren't super-immaculate with textures and all. But maybe I won't use it.. I just wanted to try it out.

As far as layout, I'm taking inspiration from German Expressionism...

Over summer I had something like this, but now I feel like it doesn't go well with the mood and the personality of my character.

So now I'm going for something more like this:

And now I'm super excited about the film!

a new beginning

The safety instruction monologues by airplane stewardesses are ringing in my head in all languages right now. I'm off for a ride, and I don't know what it's going to be like and it's shamelessly frightening!!

I like, at the end of of a period of time, or seasons in this case, to say that I've accomplished something. So by the end of the summer, I think I can safely say I've got a better grasp at the concept of rigging than I did before. On my second go, I think I made a decent rig for a really rough representation of my character for my next film.

There were a bunch of crazy problems that got me all frustrated and then I figured out solutions to them and felt elated, but then it lead to other problems, which I fixed again, messed up again, yadeyada.. But in the end, I think it turned out to work well. I mean, I was able to animate a really quick walk cycle with it without facing any problems (except for the shape and dimensions of the character which was very distracting and got in the way). And it also helped me learn how a rig that I build works, in comparison to the rigs I am used to working with.

And lookit that mustache test!!

Hopefully, now that I've gone through this, the process will be much smoother when I finally do it on the final character.

Wish me luck!! I have homework already!

headed somewhere

So I've finally decided to make a 3D film for my next school project, thanks to a little encouragement from my professor. I was pretty hesitant about making the decision because I've no experience in rigging or cinematography. I can figure out ways to simplify texture and lighting, and even cinematography for that matter. But the thought of rigging makes me nervous.

I'm planning on a robotic, mechanical character to save time on rigging, but I still have very little knowledge on how I'd go about it. So I'm redoing this rigging assignment we did in class from the Modeling and Animation Handbook, and hoping I'll be able to figure things out.

Here's a little something I quickly doodled as "early concept art" while waiting for Final Cut Pro to render an edit I did for a small intern project. The mustache was a new addition to the character design I had in mind, but I don't know how I'd animate it quite yet. I've never worked with clusters and stuff.

I'm hoping I'll be able to learn something from one of my supervisors here at Humble. I finally got to meddle with some 3D stuff yesterday. I modeled this 2D paper cut-out-ish character using poly planes and used tools like the Sculpt Geometry tool, nonlinear deformers and a few others. It might be how South Park characters are modeled, I'm not sure. I read an article about it once. But I'm pretty sure I took a long round-about method because the texturing and stuff wasn't working as easily as it should've. Anyway, so this character has a mustache and I asked my supervisor if I could shadow him while he animates it. It probably won't get animated while I'm still here though.

Anyway, and here's another random thing I did in Flash while waiting to be assigned a project. It goes by a little faster than I wanted it to but didn't get the time to fix it. I wish these players would let you frame-by-frame the videos.

Also, I found a grey hair on my head today :( And I finally watched Despicable Me! It was awesome of course, except I felt like I missed out on a lot of gags at times cause sometimes there'd be so many going on at once, right after another, and there's a soundtrack playing practically all through out the film. But so entertaining and fun characters!