Nov 11th

Cleaned up, shortened and refined a lot of shots to get the scenes down to as less of a time-frame as possible. For instance, Scene 1 was reduced from being 834 frames to 454 frames. Over with scenes 1 and 2, around 600+ frames were removed from the final cut and this greatly helped with render times and speeding up the process of events taking place in the film (to help maintain the viewers' interest).

Uncleaned (frame number):

Cleaned up (frame number):

A lot of animation and camera angle clean up also took place (like shot angles being awkward, and arm movement timings not syncing with the legs). Here, many of the camera angles weren't in the most optimal position and were changed through some tutor feedback to better frame each shot.

Uncleaned (chair in the way, ruining framing):

Cleaned up (better, more clearer view):

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Uncleaned (face getting chopped):

Cleaned up (no face getting chopped):

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Uncleaned (too close up, head chopped off a bit):

Cleaned up (no head getting chopped, better framing):

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Uncleaned (framing is a bit off, cutting off the side of the cross):

Cleaned up (slightly better angled shot now):

Nov 10th

Smoothed out the rest of Scene 3.

As well as this, I gathered all reference files which were textured and sorted out their referencing in the main scene (this one).

The lighting, as well as Maya Fur (which is being used as grass) were also sorted out and optimized for rendering. The renderer and the lighting model were decided to be Mental Ray with Physical Sun and Sky due to most of the film being shot in an outdoor environment. This greatly reduced render times when compared to Maya Software's Directional Light dome, as well as significantly improving the overall look and achieving our team's vision. And the number of grass spindles were greatly reduced from 1,500,000 to 350,000 in order to decrease as much render time as possible while still keeping the look of the grassy fields [from the point-of-view of the render cam] existent.

Nov 9th

Blocked out the rest of Scene 3 with shots 4, 5 and 6.

Nov 8th

Smoothed out the 2 blocked shots from yesterday.

Nov 7th

Blocked out shot 2 and 3 Scene 3.

Nov 6th

Smoothed out first shot of Scene 3. Though this time, I had some trouble getting the movements to look fluid so I had to re-animate some of the parts; like when Timmy pulls the cross out of the ground.

Nov 5th

Blocked out first shot of Scene 3.