PBC - The Film

Ok so this will be the last post on PCB!! Because I finished it and my check arrived in the mail and it's all over!! WOO!!

So animatic was approved, fairly easily actually. I forgot to include the flush noise in it, Which annoys me because I wanted it to be in there so I only had to assure them that I hadn't forgotten about it and I was given full approval. They had said they liked the adverts I had shown them in our initial meeting, just to jog your memory they were like the oreo advert and the american express, realise the potential adverts. So I tried to keep that in mind the whole way through.

The process of actually making the film was pretty stressful if I'm honest. In this post I'm going to link it and then screen shot some parts to talk about that were particularly trying or that I learnt new things from in order to make that scene work, along with some parts that I am just a fan of and want to talk about.







So there's the video link. It's on private just now until PBC release it themselves but you can watch it by inputting: PBC 1 into the password field.

So let me break down making the video process a little bit. I actually thought the parts of this that were hard were going to be the easier parts and the easier parts were going to be hard so I completely misinterpreted this video. I thought it would be fairly easy but take a long time but instead it was actually pretty technical and I finished it pretty fast. I'm going to pick out a few examples to talk about down here. Things that were challenging, things that succeeded and things that I would like to change next time. Let's get started!


I liked this whole scene, so from the transition before to the transition after I was really pleased with this scene. It was challenging because there was so much to remember here, the back and forwarding of the ticking of the clock was an entirely different process animating in after effects than it was when I was hand animating it and that took me some time to get used to. In addition to that kind of animating I needed to animate the transitions as well which involved transforming three different elements and making them look attached and seamless whilst doing so. By complete accident in fact I forgot to animate the scale of the clock hand during that transition. It's one of the only things that annoys me when I watch this animation back however I know that it's not that noticeable and that nobody else even knows it's a mistake. It's just something I would change if I was doing this again. If I had the time.


This scene. Urgh. I really an not keen on this scene. Once I'd made the stylistic decision I thought for continuity sake I should just stick to it. So I tried to make the dust clouds here out of just a few rotating shapes and things. It does it's job no problem. You know what's happening but I just don't like it very much. There was one point where it really didn't do it's job and it was unclear and it just annoyed me. I watched it for ages, on loop, just me watching clouds. Then I enlisted some help and it was many of us watching these clouds before eventually we were like cartoon characters throw some punches in these kinds of fights so lets add in one of those. And EVENTUALLY that worked, once I'd messed around with the size and the speed and things because for a long time it just made things look weird. Still though I'd love to have had the time to figure out a slightly more convincing dust cloud for this scene.


This scene!!! I was about ready to murder this scene! I could NOT figure this scene out at all. I just couldn't understand how to make it work and I was so frustrated. Originally I had the green on one layer, separate from the body and I just wanted it to fill the body up and go back down but my mask wasn't working. It was moving and it was only masking one way and if I wanted to invert it, it was removing the wrong things. I took it to Neil and he was stumped and I couldn't google it because nothing was coming up when I did. It was just solo stressful. It wasn't until after I had decided I would just have to hand animate it and risk it not looking quite as smooth as the rest of the animation that Mike told me this scene wasn't working because I actually wanted to put a track matte on it. I nearly had steam coming out of my ears. He knows how to do everything! but hey at least I know that now and I will never forget that piece of advice. It's so well ingrained in my mind. Cause of all this stuff I hate this scene. Especially because I couldn't get the new cut out version synced up quite right with the body and there's an annoying line around the outside where it doesn't quite fit into the body. 



So I'm going to move on to things that I really felt worked. My film to me was split into 3 sections with 2 major transition scenes. These are those two major transition scenes. So everything before the first transition scene was on section of the film, then the second and third another and after the third was the final. So I was pretty happy when I animated these transitions and they felt natural and worked. I was also pretty pleased with that first one because when I showed the film at the final meeting, Abby was very impressed and it was one of the things she commented on once everything was over. I just think they are worth mentioning because they really held the film together and I'm glad they worked out.
The first one there was one of these fantastic instances where I thought it was going to be really complicated and take ages to figure out how to attach every element to one another for just the period of time necessary to swing the new scene into place. But! Actually it was very simple and I got this instant gratification moment afterwards when I could see it working.



So the final scene I am going to talk about is the end one. I loved the whole ending. From about the smiling kidney point ( which I feel I should add that the clients loved!) all the way to the end. I was excited about doing this part because when I made the animatic it paced really well and it looked really good and I was very excited about seeing it finished. It turned out really well I think and I loved the look of the books. I mean by this point I was running seriously low on time an it was about 3am of the day I was to have it finished on and I was just getting to this part. Otherwise I would have made the books more animated, like have pages and have them fall at offset times to one another but I just didn't have the time for that. I don't really feel like that effects things too much anyway. I was really proud of this whole last section of the film.

So when I took it to the clients they were really happy with it. They liked the smiling kidney. They were only interested in changing a work they forgot to tell me to take out of the audio. They were really very pleased. They said that we did a better job than any of the professional companies they approached about it at the beginning. Then I tried to make the hand over process as simple as possible and then everything was done and dusted. Project over. Job finished. Hell yeys!


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