CAGD 495 Week 7 - Christopher Coombs

 Welcome back to the seventh iteration of our team's progress! This is Christopher Coombs, the team leader of the Ape Adhesive group. By the end of Sunday, my team managed to complete the blockout for all the remaining shots. Here was the end result:

    As you can tell, the video is eight seconds shorter than anticipated. In fact, there's quite a funny story behind that. During this blockout phase, I told the group to keep the time consistent with our storyboard shots if possible. The only thing I was worried about, which I had made clear to them at the time, was that our overall time would flow over the 30-second mark. Yet, by the end of the week, when I received their files, it was completely the opposite situation. I suppose they were just as worried about that as I was when they started creating their blockout. On this coming Wednesday of the eighth week of production, I will be getting together with my group and giving some feedback on which shots we could extend, and what in the animation, as well as the camera angles for some of them, can be tweaked around. At the very end of this shot compilation I put together, you might notice a really cool animatic at the end. That is all thanks to Tyler, our very talented After Effects artist. I really love the transitions she did in this final panel, and it actually gave me a fantastic idea. As the white stream of glue covers the entire frame, we could have a fourth wall break where the gorilla's fingers are seen grabbing the edges of the panel and pulling it down. The panel starts sliding back up, but the gorilla manages to stop it from moving by resting his arms over it. You can then see him try to awkwardly pull his arms away but they get stuck to the glue colored panel. This idea can be implemented by taking a plane in Maya, coloring it green, and ultra-keying it in Adobe Premiere. Through doing this, we can have the gorilla overlap the panel at the end. I brought up this idea to the group, and everyone seemed to love it except for our After Effects artist, as they favor animating a 2D gorilla with no fourth wall breaks. So for now, we're just mulling the idea over until we can pitch it on Wednesday. What's most important, though, is to focus on finishing the animation in our base story before anything else. Therefore, this cool panel idea needs to be only a cool afterthought.

That's all for now! Thanks for checking in, and see you next week.

                                                                                                                    - Christopher Coombs

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