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 ( ) 

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 - 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 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.