Week 10

(This last week includes the play blast videos of final shots I worked on down below.)

The final week before our hand in this very Thursday morning was undoubtedly challenging, to say the least. We aimed at having a play blast ready for all our shots because we were beginning to worry we would never finish this on time for the submission once we started rendering.

The first step I took on Monday was to put together play blasts of all the final versions of each of my shots. From the first scene I had to cover five, each of which were a bit lengthy, stretching over 150 frames because of the nature of the sequence and the fact I was going according to the timeline of my storyboard. I found that my first shot needed some editing so I went back to my file and worked on her hand movements and shoulder because in this shot she had push the door open and there was not enough force to her push and the lack of this thrust left the scene blank with her lightly tapping it and the door suddenly opening with no effort.

Scene 2- Shot 11- Object mode viewpoint ready for render. (Changes to camera made later)

It took me some time and eventually I changed the camera angle to be a bit higher and that worked better. I faced a few more issues with shot 16 that’s the sequence with the slow burn close up towards the camera, where she changes her facial expression from fearful to determined and found the last time I re edited it I added a few too many key frames because I felt she needed to go faster but they ended up with her changing expressions every two seconds and it looked worse. I then went back and deleted those movements because if it confused me it would definitely leave viewers with more questions than answers.

My final work on Scene 2- Shot 16- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

That very evening our final environment was ready, complete with textures and set dressing packed into one master file that needed to be appended into every shot, and the way it had to be done was by deleting everything in our old set. This process took me quite a while because I had to be careful not to delete her rig that was animated, but also the objects in the scene she interacted with, such as the door and the light switch. After carefully adding the new environment into each shot, I found that when I switched to material view there were many objects with missing textures that just stared back at me like a black void and that did not help with the already tense situation and tight deadline we were on.

the final lighting I placed in the basement by adjusting the levels of brightness in my Point light inside the furnace and Spot light within the gas lamp.

Thankfully it wasn’t anything major and I just had to focus on retrieving the missing textures for objects in the scene my camera looked through. These included the light switch and door knob that were fairly simple to find. The next morning back after being in class from 10 am-9 pm, we launched into what was the hardest part of the process and with very little time to get it done- rendering. Rendering in 3D was the process of producing an image from 3- Dimensional data into a 2D still image of each frame in a scene; this was done on our systems in class because the graphics card had a high processor that could take the load of these file sizes. This meant the computers were taking raw data that was packed into each scene- which included the polygons, materials and lighting calculating the final result.

The scene in material view as observed in, Shot 27 for the birds eye view of my shadow I edited in later as post.

To understand why this process was extremely lengthy because we chose to render in Cycles. Even though Eevee was a faster method our scenes were looking highly desaturated and after all our efforts combined, the end quality was not something we wanted to compromise. The way our renders worked was that each second of animation was 24 frames in blender and each of those 24 frames took nearly 15-30 seconds to render, which meant per shot the renders took over 8 hours if they were any longer than 100 frames. For nearly all my shots that covered the first scene, were a good 5/6 seconds, leaving me to render them all at once on different systems on campus.

First thing in the morning we changed our render settings because the lights in our scene were too bright and the renders came out bad as still images. Once we adjusted them, we switched to logging into nearly six different systems in one class to get our Shots to render. The issue we faced then was that the settings for the GPU were set to OptiX and that did indeed cause the renders to crash mid way and we had to restart them, which was testing everyone’s patience because this happened to nearly all our shots while they were nearly half way through their renders, after waiting a good 5 to 6 hours on them. Another jump scare I was given was when I noticed that the door was closed in my render of Shot 11 when it was meant to be wide open in this scene of her opening the door and realized that it was because the new door that was appended in with the rest of the environment was not hidden from the render and I was on the verge of tears because it had been rendering for 8 hours and close to ending. I looked away as my I canceled that render and restarted it deleting that door in my way and leaving it overnight to re render.

My final work on Scene 2- Shot 12+13 combined- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

My final work on Scene 2- Shot 14- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

Kelly and I went to login to systems in the rooms upstairs to leave another few shots to render overnight because the only way the lengthy sequences could be put to rest was if they were dealt with first. After returning again from a good 11 hours spent in class watching the systems, praying they don’t crash, we dealt with the shorter sequences the next day. I double checked the remaining shots overnight and enabled all the render settings because Anna wanted to come in early the next morning to set them up and thankfully the remainder of all our Shots were only 50/60 frames long and took no longer than 45 minutes to 2 hours, which may seem like a mammoth of time to those on Eevee but was a blessing for us.

On Wednesday, the day before submission was one I won’t forget for a long time. From morning to night every group was racing against time to get their films ready for the hand in the next day, and no amount of time was truly enough for us because even though our shots were done rendering, which did lift a huge weight of our shoulders, the task of editing was left.

My final work on Scene 2- Shot 15- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

My final work on Scene 3- Shot 24- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

We divided the remainder of our work, so we each tackled one aspect left at the same time. Anna took on the job of rendering an opening title sequence that showed the work she did on the kitchen that was very briefly seen in the opening. Kelly was trying to help me fix the final shot because her camera was not set up as it was meant to be In animatic for the purpose of showing the eyes blinking open in the end. Instead, her shot went a bit fast and the camera moved around and I needed to add in a quick 40-frame shot with just the eyes opening in the end as the door slowly shut, leaving the viewer in darkness.

Another add-in that had to modeled were the pair of eyes that blink open at the end. I tried my best to find free rigs online of animals or humans, but ended up quickly modelling them on my own and slapping textures on them because there was no time for detailing. After placing them in the scene, I found the two Point lights I put in them to get them to glow were casting light in the space around it that I didn’t want. I changed this by placing two Spot lights instead and shifting the eyes underneath the stairs instead, where it made more sense because that part of the scene was already dark and cramped.

shaping the cornea and iris.

process of modelling the eyes for the final scene that appear below the stairs.

It was fairly simple to do however for some reason the keyframes that I placed on the eyes to stay hidden on the first and reappear in the end weren’t working and the eyes kept not showing up in the renders which left me quite frustrated as I had to dive into editing the sound effects and music for the entire film which I knew from previous experience on my animatic, was not to be taken lightly. I ended up editing in the eyes opening through Premier Pro by sticking in the render of the scene as it was and adding in all our shots into one large timeline timed accurately. The opening sequence Kelly rendered for some reason sped up quickly and had to be slowed down to match the Animatic.

My final work on Scene 3- Shot 25- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

My final work on Scene 3- Shot 26- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

I immediately watched the film and paused each time I felt sound effects, were needed and noted them down. Since Anna was working on tracing the title of ‘Luzia’ on after effects Kelly helped me search for royalty-free sound online and we had to download what we felt sounded natural to the scene. I thankfully had a folder filled with the sound effects I used when I added them into the animatic back in March, and they still held up well. I used a handful of them, especially for her running on wooden floorboards and the sound of the ball being kicked, hitting surfaces, her sharp inhales and exhales when she is breathing hard against the wall. A few extras we looked for was the rush of wind that came up when the door to the basement opened and these extra sounds really strengthened my soundscape.

I left class that night and continued editing overnight for the sound effects, music and blurring the toy in the shots, the lighting was rendered strangely. I asked the others to give me a still rendered image of a shot in the scene to be added into the end credits, because for the amount of work that went into these three months, very little is actually captured in the film. I was able to choose two upbeat Portuguese soundtracks sent by a link Kelly had found and add them into the title sequence and end credits as the finishing touches to Luzia.

My final work on Scene 3- Shot 27- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

My final work on Scene 3- Shot 28- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

The making of this film taught me a lot. These past three months have been a massive learning arc for me in 3D because previously I never imagined I would have the ability to learn such a skill and it has really refined my confidence in using Blender in 3D modelling and animation. By working with Anna and Kelly, I believe we each learned from one another because this is no task that can be tackled alone. Its extremely important to support one another, especially when the stress levels were peaking this final week, we stood by each other and that’s team effort.

My final work on Scene 3- Shot 30- Object mode viewpoint ready for render.

I learnt a great deal about the responsibility needed in this industry and all we had was a taste of an actual production pipeline. Besides that, it included communicating with one another and not letting any personal differences interfere, which at moments was a struggle for me initially because I felt we lacked a connection and that’s not one to be forced but towards the end I think it was the problems we faced and overcame together that brought us closer and really helped us grow just as Luzia does, facing her fears of the unknown.