Visual Effects Evaluation

Visual Effects Evaluation

In this evaluation I will be looking at the strengths and weaknesses of my work, first the strengths and weaknesses that I saw, and then the ones pointed out to me in the survey feedback.

Firstly I will describe the weaknesses of the video that I noticed.

- The first thing that I noticed about the video is that the introduction scene of the actor walking to the ‘site’ takes up to much time and would most likely make viewers lose interest quickly. Also the set-up scenes as a whole take up a bit too much of the total video.

- The second thing I noticed is that the 3D elements are to small and a bit to far away from the camera to be seen as 3D which defeats the point of creating 3D objects and animating them.

- The final thing that I noticed is that one or two of the sound effects used in the setting up scenes are unrealistic and spoil the realism of the scene.

Next I will describe any extra weaknesses that were brought up in the survey results.

- Firstly all of the survey results share my opinion that the introduction lasts to long for the amount of animated footage there actually was.

- Secondly people thought that the camera movement was a bit too shaky and made the animated and live-action footage run out of sync.

- Thirdly viewers think that the camera does not get close enough to the 3D elements.

- Finally one survey result mentioned that the aura/glow is too strong. So this could be distracting to viewers.

I will now describe the strengths of my work as I saw them.

- The first strength I see, after the overly long introduction, are the mini camera cuts of the equipment being set up which are visually interesting as they do not drag on so the viewer does not get bored looking at the same thing.

- The second thing I notice is that the animated footage and live-action footage appear to move together very smoothly and that the Mario animation animates smoothly so the scene appears quite realistic in spite of the shaky camera movement which I think adds to the realist of the scene.

- The third strength I notice is that the Mario animation is slightly transparent and has no special lighting or shadows on it, which makes it seem more holographic rather than a real object, which is the effect I was going for.

Next I will describe the strengths pointed out in the survey results.

- The first thing pointed out in the survey results is the interesting idea of doing a retro Mario game being project into the air.

- The second strength mentioned is the quality of the animation in the Mario characters, which is smooth and matches the style of the old game very well.

- The third thing mentioned is that the setting up scenes, which build up the interest in the video making the viewer want to know what is being set up and for what.

- The fourth strength mentioned is the use of sound. I assume this result is referring to the use of interesting sound effects used during the setting up scenes and the use of original game music and sounds during the animated part of the video.

- The final strength mentioned in one result was the authenticity of the 3D characters and scenery and their movement.

There appear to be similarities as well as differences in opinions of myself, and the viewers who filled in the surveys.

We seem to share opinions on the weaknesses such as the introduction scenes taking up to much time and the camera not getting close enough to the 3D elements to see them in full detail. We also appear to share the opinion on the strengths that the animated characters move smoothly and authentically and that (for the most part) the animated footage and the live-action footage move together very smoothly and realistically.

However, some of the viewers seem to have pointed out some strengths and weaknesses of the video hat I have missed or would not classify as a strength or a weakness such as the animated footage moving out of sync at one point on the video which I did not notice and so didn’t see it as a weakness, and the authenticity of the characters appearance and movement which I was attempting to recreate but did not initially class as a strength on its own.

These results came from a small variety of viewers with different experiences and knowledge of animation and it appears that those with more experience will give more constructively critical survey answers where as those with less or no personal animation experience will give both positive and negative feedback based completely on the appearance of the video because they have no idea of the processes that go into it and can also be slightly more critical than those with better animation experience.

In conclusion I have learnt that it is good to get a variety of opinions and feedback on the work as it provides multiple targets that can be improved upon so that future projects can run smoothly and realistically enough to please the animators who have the curse of knowledge and true sight, being able to see flaws in videos and ruining the experience for themselves. While also looking pretty enough to please the general viewers with little or no animation experience and so need to be visually engaged as much as possible and are not amazed simply with a computer generated moving image on a screen.

Visual Effects Final Video Survey Results

The results of my survey were constructive and helpful.

Visual Effects Survey Summarisation

In this essay I will go through each question on the survey I created and distributed and summarise the results of the individual questions. I will then summarise the results of the survey in general at the end to outline the strengths and weaknesses of my work and give myself targets for improvement in future visual effects projects.

Question 1: What did you like most about the animation?

This starting question prompted all positive feedback as it asked people for their favourite aspect of the video, with people focusing mostly on the animated elements of the Mario game being projected into real life and the general idea of this video.

Question 2: What do you think of the quality of the animated elements?

This question also prompted mostly positive feedback with viewers liking the quality of the characters and how much they resembled the original game.

Question 3: How smoothly does the Mario animation animate?

Viewers all agreed that the Mario animation animated smoothly, some also said that it runs very similarly to the actual game. Only one result said that it appeared to glitch in the middle.

Question 4: How well do the live-action footage and animated footage move together?

All viewers thought that the two pieces of footage moved together smoothly but was jumpy at certain points and at one point the Mario footage seemed to jump out of sync with the live-action footage. This was something I did not notice and I do not think was obvious to everyone.

Question 5: If you think the videos do animate together smoothly; how realistic is the scene? If you do not think the videos animate together smoothly; why does the scene not seem realistic? (Don't say, "Because holograms haven't been invented yet")

The general opinion in this question is that the video seems quite realistic except for the moments mentioned in the question above. Some viewer’s even mention that it is because of the introduction footage of the actor setting up the scene that makes the Animated footage seems more realistic.

Question 6: What could be improved?

All of the viewers had a shared opinion when answering this question, saying that the introduction scenes took up to much time in the video and should be shortened. Some viewers suggested improving the motion tracking in future projects so that the animated footage and the live-action footage move together better. Some also mentioned the aura/glow of the characters was a bit strong.

Question 7: What is your overall opinion of the video?

The over all opinion of the video is positive. All the viewers enjoyed watching the video and enjoyed it’s creativity and realism.

Question 8: How much experience do you have with animation?

This question was a multiple-choice question to gain an idea of how much understanding the viewers of the video had of the animation process.

Most viewers selected the option of: Lots, I am an animation student, teacher or professional.

One viewer answered: Some, I have started an animation related course or use online tutorials for fun.

And the rest answered with: Not much, only what I see in films.

From the answers of this question I can assume that the feedback I have received is constructive that most of it can be used as targets for future projects so that I might improve on the mistakes I made in this first visual effects project.

To summarize, the survey results show that some of the weaknesses of my work are obvious to people of any animation experience such as the length of the introduction. However the strengths of the video also seem to be commonly noticed with any viewer, such as the smoothness of the animated characters and the animated and live-action footage moving together also the interesting idea of the video. So even though this was my first visual effects project and despite the flaws in the video, viewers thought that my work was well made, ran smoothly and was enjoyable and interesting to watch.

In conclusion, like with any first attempt at a new thing there are issues, but I believe the issues mentioned above, especially in answer to the survey question “what could be improved” are things that can be improved upon in future projects and with more practice and so I will use them as targets to increase my skill and the quality of future work.

Based on the feedback of these survey results and my own opinions, some preliminary future targets will be to:

-Think more about the camera movement and position in relation to the CGI elements so that they can be shown better.

-Spend more time thinking about the sounds that will be used in the video.

-Think more about the content of the video and focus more on the animated scenes and not long empty scenes with nothing happening.

In the future I think I will create better surveys that have a larger variety of questions so that I may collect more constructive and informative feedback on my work so that I can create more and better targets for myself on which to improve upon, as I believe this survey was not as informative or thorough as it could have been or needed to be to provide me with a good level of constructive feedback.

Visual Effects Final Video Survey

To gain constructive feedback on my work I created a survey to distribute to a variety of viewers.

Visual Effects Animation Questionnaire

1. What did you like most about the animation?

2. What do you think of the quality of the animated elements?

  

3. How smoothly does the Mario animation animate?

4. How well do the live-action footage and animated footage move together smoothly?

5. If the two videos do animate together smoothly, how realistic is the scene?

If the videos do not animate together smoothly, why does the scene not seem realistic?

(Don’t just say because holograms haven’t been invented yet)

      6. What could be improved?

7. What is your overall opinion of the animation?

       8. How much experience do you have with animating?

-Lots, I am an animation student or use lots of online tutorials ( ) 

-Some, I have just started an animation related course or follow online tutorials for fun ( )

-A bit, I sometimes do small animations for fun ( )

-Not much, only what I see in films ( )

-None, I don’t watch videos of any kind or am Amish ( ) 

Final Video

This is the first complete final output of my Visual Effects project. I think it works quite well. I might play with the sounds a bit more during the 'setting up' scenes.

Sound Research

The inspiration for the video footage that comes before the scene that involves visual effects was inspired by this TV advert for PG Tips.

The sound(s) that I will use in my footage will also be inspired by this video and be made up of simple sound effects to accompany the actions of the actor. Unlike this advert however, I may also include ambient sounds such as bird song or cars to add realism to the scene since it is outside the lack of ambient/background noises would be unrealistic.

Visual Effects Filming

For the non-animated part of this unit I needed to film live-action footage for the 3d animation to be placed into. Following my storyboard I took multiple shots of footage and put them together. Here is the footage that will come before the animated part and so will set the scene.

 

Visual Effects - Research

Visual Effects and Compositing

The process of 'visual effects' is through use motion-tracking software to apply points to a piece of video footage that track the movement of the objects in the video and attempts to guess the movement of the camera in a 3D environment. This creates a theoretical path for the camera and this path can be applied to a camera in a 3D animation program. This is used when a company wishes to create CG characters and put them into a live-action scene that has a moving camera, because the movement of the live-action camera and the 3D camera are the same the CG character or object will be filmed in exactly the same way the live-action scene was and so will appear as though it is a part of the scene instead of a 3D object with a live-action video as a background.

There are various programs with which this can be accomplished such as: Blender, Voodoo, Icarus, Autodesk Matchmover, REAL VIZ Matchmover and many others. One of the programs most used in industry I assume would be Autodesk Matchmover as it comes as part of the Autodesk suite which includes Autodesk Maya, a 3D modeling and animating software.

After the footage and animation have been combined inside the chosen 3D animation software it is very helpful to be moved into a compositing program such as Autodesk Composite, which is also available as part of the Autodesk suite, in these programs the user can alter the elements of the 3D animation such as the strength of the lighting, strength of colours, size and strength of shadows, even the transparency of the 3D characters and objects. This is useful as these elements can be altered and previewed in this program instead of rendering out the animation multiple times to see how it looks if the elements are altered and makes creating the final output a lot less time consuming and a little easier.

When filming for a movie that requires CG objects or characters added a lot of things need to be concidered. The main two that come to mind are the types of shots intended to be filmed with the camera, and the lighting of the scene. These are possibly the most crucial as the camera movement and lighting need to be re-created in the 3D animation later. The lighting is not as much of a worry as long as it is re-creatable as it can be mimicked in the 3D modelling/animation software, but the camera movement could cause large problems for the motion tracking software if the camera moves to quickly or have unusual movements or angles, if the camera shot is to fast and the motion tracking software does not correctly calculate the cameras movement or position then the motion path will be wrong and the 3D animated character or object will not fit into the scene. Still/static shots are not an issue because if the camera does not move in the scene then the 3D camera does not need to move, however if the camera shot is an over-head angle looking down and moves to a low angle shot looking at the same scene but from the side, that could confuse the motion tracking software especially if the footage from the camera movement has too much blur in it.

Super Mario Animating

Learning how to animate the character sprites was tricky. I needed to find a way of having only one sprite visible at a time. So my tutor introduced me to a way of animating called 'set driven keys' which is where you create an object that 'drives' something else in the scene, in this case the transparency of the character sprites.

By creating a different set texture of textures for each character sprite I could set their transparency to be 100% or 0% based on the position on the driver, in this case the cone above the characters head. Using the 'set driven keys' window I can tell the transparency of the textures to be on or off based on the rotated position of the cone.

Visual Effects - Scenary

Using the same process I created the basic scenary of the Super Mario game; The bricks of the floor and the floating the bricks.

Super Mario Characters Progress2

Just like with the Mario sprites I have been able to create two of the common enemies from the game.

Super Mario Characters Progress

Using the sprite sheets that I found I have so far been able to create the sprites used to animate Mario. I created these sprites by creating simple 1x1 cubes, bevel the faces slighty, place them in the correct position and colour them the appropriate colour with normal lamberts. Then I combined the individual cubes into one mesh.

Super Mario Game Research

In order to create authentic mario characters I have found refference images online and will attempt to re-create them. The size of these sprite sheets is in the correct ration of single pixels. With this I can re-create the character sprites properly in the correct scale.

Visual Effects Planning

I have created a storyboard and animatic to help me plan out and explain to others what will happen in my video, I have also created a list of the types of camera shots that will be used while filming.

Visual Effects Final Choice

I have decided to do the 3D pixel Super Mario game projected into life/the air as it seems reasonably simple to do which will be helpful since I have multiple overlapping projects, given different circumstances I would have liked to create the meteorite or even a space-ship crash, but with the new software and skills I will need to learn it is best to keep the idea and the elements I'll need to create and animate simple.

Visual Effects Idea Choices

After looking at my mind-map and concidering all of the ideas on it, I have narrowed the final choice down to two.
1) Super Mario Bros game projcted into real life as a 3D pixel game.
2) A realistic meterite crash (possibly happening during filming for an alternative idea for comedic effect)

I am torn between these ideas because the Super Mario Game seems like it would be fun and the things I would need to create and animate are relatively simple. But the meteorite crash could be very interesting and teach me new skills in animation, texturing and adding effects such as fire and explosions in 3D.

Visual Effects Idea

For this unit I have made a large mind-map of ideas for what I could create which I have put into my physical work folder. At this early stage I have no idea of what I want to create yet so I wanted to get as many ideas down as I could so I would have plenty of things to choose from.