Putting everything together

I'm putting everything together in premier pro, its the only program I have to do it.

It's a little bit of a nightmare, its such a slow program, I have to keep waiting everytime I wanted to do something.

I also rearranged the photos before I put it into premier pro so they would be in order, (I did this on my laptop), when I put the folder on my computer for some reason it messed them all up again and wouldn't let me rearrange them.

It seems like everything is going wrong just to make the whole process of putting it all together more frustrating.

I've decided that I'm going to go into uni tommorow morning and put all of my images together using final cut pro. Premier has made as my images of my stopmotion a lot larger than the stage, I don't want to re-size them because it means all my images will be slightly different sizes and will make the animation jump about. I remember when I used final cut it didn't do this. I don't really want to leave it till the morning to finish everything but I think thats my only option.

Searching through the photos

Looking through the photos I noticed a lot of inconsistances. The clock is the most annoying thing throughout the whole animation, if you watch it you notice sometimes its fallen down, and then its propped up again, and then in the next scene its completely dissappeared and then it reappears again.

After I had done the alarm clock scene I should have clued it to the table so it would go anywhere. I remembered to blue tac all the furniture down but I didn't think about the clock.

Final things that need doing

While my computers rendering out the CGI section, I'm going to use my laptop to just edit some of the stopmotion photos. In some of the photos the monkeys sleeve has rolled up and you can see the foam underneath, so I'm just going to edit that out.










It's only a slight change but I have some spare time on my hands while I'm waiting for my CGI section to finish rendering.

Rendering CGI Animation

I've just set my animation to render so lets just hope my computer can cope with it. I've had to lower all the render stuff so the the file size would be smaller and so it wouldn't take as long.

Even though I've lowered all my settings on my animation, the render is still taking a long time because I have to do it in several separate sections,

It took 13 1/2 hours altogether. Luckily its not the first time I rendered something out on 3Ds Max so I made sure I left a whole day free to render everything out.

CGI problems

I haven't had many problems with my CGI stuff apart from someting I've only just noticed and thats 3Ds Max perspective is wrong and I don't know how to fix it.

Ahh I feel so stupid now I've just realised why the perspective weren't working, I hadn't put it in perspective view.

3Ds Max unexpectedly crashed on me, it also wouldn't allow me to open that file any more. That was the only file I had of it as well so if I couldn't get it to open I would have lost all the animating, and texturing I have already done.

I couldn't get the Max file to open but luckily it had made 3 backups of different intervals of my work and I was able to open one of them. I deleted all the mistakes which made it crash in the first place and saved it twice under two different names so I would always have a backup.

That was lucky.

Monkey Test

I've done quite a bit of my stopmotion and put it all together to see how it looks and to see if I need to change some things. I looked through it all and realised that the monkey was missing his tail on the walk section, pan up to the mirror and when he sits on his drums, so I'd have to re-do those sections. I had to re-do the walk section anyway because it looked a bit jumpy and needed more frames adding to it.



I was holding the monkey when doing the walk cycle so it made it quite difficult to tkae the photo and move the monkey. I made something to sit on the sets walls which would allow me to hang string off them, to hold my monkey up. This would keep him steady as well, (well steadier than my hand).














Another reason for doing this test was to see whether it would look better if my monkeys plastercine arm came out and actually hit the mirror images to make it look more like a mirror.

On the test it look a lot better with the arm in but was really difficult to create, I had to take off the monkeys head and try to angle the arm so you couldn't see the rest of the body. When I re-do this section I'm going to create just an arm, so its easier to angle and get the shot.

Stopmotion failed attempts

While animating the stopmotion section of my animation I realised how easily things could go wrong meaning you would have to start the shot again. To start off I couldn't get my computer to pick up the camera while using either stopmotion pro or helium frog, so I decided to take the photos anyway and just be extra careful of how much I move the character, as I wouldn't be able to use onion skinning.

Second thing was I had my computer on stand by while animating (my sets opposite my computer). Throughout animating my computer kept turning itself on and then off again, which gave my animation a blue haze every now and then. I also kept moving the jacket of my character and I kicked the set half way through animating. When I played everything back there was a blue flashing light in the background, my characters clothes kept ripplying and half way through the set just jumped. I think it was easy to say that I need to re-shoot that section of the animation. When I do I'm going to make the morphing into a monkey slower, so just adding very tiny parts of plastercine every 2 frames or so.

The wire I'm using for my character is really bad, I'm able to move it about 10 times and then it just snaps. I don't really have time to buy some more wire so I'm just going to have quite a few sparre parts.


Luckily greg gave me some of his wire which means the drum scene won't be as frustrating and I should be able to get a better walk cycle.

When I re-shoot I'm going to make sure I blue tac everything down because I keep knocking the bed and bedside table.