Tree Fu Tom Launch from Blue Zoo on Vimeo.

This is the launch trailer we made for Tree-Fu Tom, the new CBeebies series created by the BBC & FreemantleMedia which is designed & animated by Blue-Zoo (Series Directed by Adam Shaw and Art Directed by Chris Rais).

Trail credits:

Blue Zoo

Producer/ Director: Damian Hook

Storyboards: Chris Drew

Animation: Dan Cripps and Matt Tea

Light, Render and Compositing: Charlie Batho

Red Bee Media

Creative Directors: Dawn Parsonage-Kent & Nicola Matthewman-Ward

Producer: Theresa Murphy

I’ve just been told about the VIEW Conference, which is an international event in Italy on Computer Graphics, Digital Cinema, 3D Animation, Gaming, VFX and Interactive Techniques. It will take place in Turin from 25th to 28th, preceded by the VIEWFest, the Computer Animation Festival (from 21st to 23rd October 2011). It looks really interesting and definitely worth a look, I wish I could go myself! In particular there will be a workshop on colour and light by Pixar’s Director of Photography Sharon Calahan.

www.viewconference.it
www.viewfest.it

Pixar’s Director of Photography/Lighting Sharon Calahan
Workshop on color and light at VIEW Conference

Sharon Calahan joined Pixar Animation Studios in 1994 as lighting supervisor on the studio’s first feature film, Toy Story. She then served as director of photography on Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille and Cars 2. 
Sharon knew at the age of three that she wanted to be an artist for Disney. She went on to study graphic design, illustration and photography. Following art school, she began her career as an art director for broadcast television and video production.
Prior to joining Pixar, she was a lighting director at Pacific Data Images completing commercial work, longer format television, and graphics packages.

Some of the international special guests of VIEW2011 will be: Randy Thom, multiple Academy-Award winning director of sound design for Skywalker Sound; Tom Wujec, the visual thinking guru and award-winning innovator @Autodesk; Glenn Entis, Academy Award Winner, Co-Founder and General Partner @ Vanedge Capital; Scott Farrar, Academy Award Winner and VFX Supervisor for Transformers 3, @ ILM; Roger Guyett, VFX Supervisor for Cowboys & Aliens, @ ILM; Lucia Modesto, Character Technical Director Supervisor for Kung Fu Panda 2, @ PDI/Dreamworks Animation; Peter Nofz, CG Supervisor for Green Lantern, @ Sony Imageworks; Erminio Pinque, Artistic Director at BIG NAZO LAB; Joshua Grow, 2011 Siggraph Computer Animation Festival Chair; Roger Gould, Creative Director @ Pixar’s Theme Park Group; David Revoy, Digital Painter and Art Director.

Blending animation with aliased footage:

Ok so most likely you’ll be compositing your animation into DV or or some other sort of lossy footage, such as the sort you get off a digital stills camera. You’ll notice that the footage has an almost jpeg-like quality to it (aliased) whereas your lovingly rendered animation will look pin sharp. The easiest way around this is to first not render at full resolution (I used about 3/4 the size of the footage) and drop the “mosaic” and “fast blur” effect onto your animation very slightly to add a little imperfection.

Colour Saturation:

Drop the colour saturation just a fraction, this will help your animation to blend in a little more.

Realistic lighting:

Ok so this is a very simple version of a really complex area that I don’t know much about but to easily get some nicer lighting to your shot, take a 360 photo of your location and use that as an HDR light source in your 3D package. If you weren’t on location for your shoot, just using a still frame from the footage will work to an extent too. Obviously this isn’t very precise but it will help! Also if it was shot on a bright sunny day don’t forget to add in a directional light to simulate the sun.

That blown out sky:

It’s very common that your location will look great apart from the sky which can end up over exposed or just white because of an overcast day. In After Effects use the “Luma Key” effect to key out the white sky and drop in a photo of a nicer one. Of course if you have a moving shot you’ll have to use a motion track to keep it locked down.

A few extras:

If you haven’t discovered it yet check out “Action Essentials 2″ from Video Co-Pilot. It’s great for adding a little atmosphere to a scene or little puffs of dirt for a dragon’s foot step, for example.

Also check out RealSmart Motion Blur, which is a 2D motion blur plugin for After Effects. I find this extremely useful as Maya’s motion blur adds so much time to a render.

Hope that helps, obviously you can go into huge amounts of depth with any of these ideas but animation is what you should be focusing on when you’re a student, but if you want to render out your shots these quick tips will really help your animation blend in a little better with minimal extra time.

Of course if you have any other tips yourself feel free to share and I’ll add them to the list!

All the best!

The BBC have recently announced the cast of Tree Fu Tom, the landmark show for CBeebies which I am currently animating on. You can read the press release here.

And you can also read the previous press release here.

Simon

Disney recently released the teaser trailer for “John Carter”, the film I worked on earlier this year.

No Smoothing

So why not just press the smooth button in Maya a few times? Well, you can do that but it will really slow down render times. This is where Mental Ray’s Approximation editor comes in handy!

1) Make sure Mental Ray is loaded (Window -> Settings/Preferences -> Plugin Manager -> Mayatomr.mll)
2) Select your mesh and go to Window -> Rendering Editors -> mental ray -> Approximation Editor
3) Under the section “Subdivisions (Polygon and Subd. Surfaces)” click the “Create” button.

That’s it! And with mimimal added rendering time (for this frame it added about a second) the frame now looks like this:

Smooth

Just to confirm, this will only work if you’re rendering in Mental Ray. Hope that’s useful, happy smoothing!

Simon

I thought I would take this opportunity to mention a new series that started airing this week, which I worked on last year and was in fact my first job as an animator!

The series is “Castle Farm”, a pre school show created by Corrina Askin and produced by Impossible TV for Five’s Milkshake show. It’s such a brilliant series and has been great fun to work on and I learned a lot. One of the most important bits of knowledge I came away with definitely has to be animating at speed to a TV schedule (roughly a minute a week) whilst still keeping up the quality. My biggest tip for any animators out there going into TV animation for the first time has to be even if you’ve got a daunting number of shots to get done, take time out to plan. Even if it’s just a couple of minutes in your head. It will save you a huge amount of time in the long run and will minimise trial and error.

I’m still working at Impossible TV and having a great time on a new series for Chorion (whose brands include Mr. Men & Little Miss, Noddy and Paddington Bear to name but a few) as well as finishing off my studies at Animation Mentor (only a few weeks left to go!). I’ll be posting some videos of my most recent work soon!

Best be off now and in the meantime, you can see Castle Farm weekdays on Five (in the UK) at 8.50am!

Simon