We have 2 weeks left until the UCBUGG showcase, and even though Dan says we have until our ILM trip to finish our short, I know that our team wants to have something amazing to show at that showcase. It feels like there are so many things to do and I definitely feel the intensity of that, but our team is so close to making one of the most beautiful CNM shorts ever. We are starting to render this week and I’m both excited and nervous for the next few weeks: it’s going to be chaotic, hectic, exciting, and emotional all at once. All I can say is the future is very exciting.

This week I continued working on animation for several scenes. In addition to touching up the spin sequence, I am also doing clean up and background animation for other scenes like background characters or wind animation. It’s kind of nice to switch between scenes when one thing is being really frustrating. We have one week left of animation and that means a lot of hustle on my part. I’m ready to make this spin as beautiful as possible.

 

This week in CNM I worked more on animation for background characters as well as adding touch up animation to the end scene with Jackie and Grandma holding hands. My scenes feel like they are getting close to finished so I want to continue help polishing the small details like adding corrective blendshapes, touching up animation and expressions, and making the background characters and sets come to life.

The animation stage is almost wrapping up for our short: a lot of our scenes feel very close to being done and now comes the attentive part of going through each scene and making all of those minor adjustments before we send them off to be rendered. I spent a lot of time this week just trying to keep track of everything that needs to be done in the next few weeks and it feels like a lot to be done, except then I remember how far we’ve come this semester and this year, how much we’ve accomplished, and I know that we don’t have very much left to go. Our team has a lot of things to touch up in the last few weeks but our short already feels so impactful and beautiful, now is the time for the finishing touches. Night Market is going to be a beautiful short, both visually and emotionally, and it makes me so proud to see the kind of legacy it will leave behind on the future of CNM students.

In the last month of CNM, I’m hoping to contribute as much as possible to animation in our short. As usual, I have been working character animation for the spin: I have been adding small details like finger animation, touchups, expressions, and especially focusing on the last part of the spin where Teen Ping shows up. I still feel like there’s a lot of work to do in that scene but I am really happy with the results that I have so far. On top of that, I have been updating the layout for the background of the spin as well: this week, I added in the ocean shader for when the characters go back in time, timed the movement of the matte better with the foreground objects, refined the courtyard setting to match other parts of the short and added the Night Market into the first half of the spin to help with the transition. These small changes have really helped the spin come to life!

 

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog, but so many things have happened since I was last here. Our team is continuing through animation, but more importantly, we’re making our way into the last official month of production on Night Market. That means all hands on deck right now for animation, shading, lighting, and compositing. There’s a lot of work to be done but there is SO much that this team has accomplished and I swell with joy, pride, and love for this team and everyone on it when I think about the hard work we’ve put into it. It is really hard to believe that this amazing journey is coming into its final chapter, and I don’t think I’ll be ready to leave it so soon. But for now, there are other things to worry about:

The animation for the spin has continued for the past month, and I can honestly say that it has come a long way from the beginning of this semester. The scene actually carries the emotional weight and severity of the story, and successfully tells the amazing story of Grandma Ping’s life. Our guest this week, Stefan, was able to understand the entire story and the spin so clearly: he understood what Grandma Ping went through and how Jackie was affected by it. Seeing his sincere reaction to our 3D animatic gave me a lot of hope and happiness; it was amazing to think that our piece is so close to being finished that we no longer need to rely on the 2D animatic to understand that story and its emotions. There’s still a lot I want to clean up with the animation and push in terms of the emotions, but I can definitely see the finish line in terms of this scene.

On top of animation, I have been helping with more blendshapes and rigs this past week so that all of our characters can be animated. The emotions of the short are particularly important and I want to make sure I give them as much attention as possible.

Our team is continuing to work through the weeks of animation and I’m very proud of the way things have been turning out so far. We’ve been able to add most of the major blocking animations and have started to get the smaller details in as well. I am still working on the spin scene and it is starting to feel more and more like the animatic and original story pitch intended. Last week I worked on detailing some of the movements and improving the timing of the actions to be less linear or “floaty” as Sir Wade said. I also had a chance to add in some facial expressions which added a lot of depth to the scene and Jackie’s reaction to it. Of course, there are still a lot of small touches and details to add in, but I am optimistic and looking forward to it!

Next week I also want to see if we can apply some of the topics on camera that our guest lecturer, Casey mentioned this week. I think it can add a lot of depth and visual nuance to the short.

It’s no secret that for the last few weeks our team was really struggling to find a way to make the spin scene work properly. It’s also no secret that this has been a major source of stress for me for the past month because more than anything, I didn’t want to be setting up my team for failure down the line. To make matters even more stressful, last weekend our entire project repo decided to stop working, with several files being corrupted or deemed as “unrecognizable”. It took a whole day of debugging and internal screaming to get things working again and at that point, it was already 7PM Sunday night and I felt horrible that my team didn’t have the whole weekend they should have had to work on their scenes.

However, once again, the incredible people on my team prove how special and determined they are and produced an amazing result on Monday. After many git errors, missing files, and other setbacks and I am very pleased to say that the spin scene and the rest of our animation are FINALLY coming together! Our team hustled and rallied together like crazy at the end of last week and showed such a great 3D Animatic that I swelled with pride and wanted to cry from pure joy. Knowing that we were finally able to make Dan happy with the animation we produced was a particular point of satisfaction and pride. As PM, it was one of the best moments of the semester to see how dedicated this team is to making something amazing. I am excited to keep iterating on the spin and adding more moments of characters acting with grandma and Jackie.

 

Last week we were struggling with a lot of spin dilemmas. This sequence that is so crucial to the emotions and the narrative of the story didn’t seem to be working and it was worrying for us. So our team tried any and all options that we could think of: we spun them counter-clockwise, horizontally panned them, created an elaborate long-take. In the end, however, our whole class has agreed that nothing works quite as well as the original spin. And after some logistic thinking, we were able to give this vital scene a bit more time, and that is very promising. Next week we are going to deliver the first real pass on our animation and I am very excited to see what everyone will do. Our team has been KILLING it in every stage, and I’m very proud of the work and effort they’ve been putting in. After some weeks of uncertainty, I feel confident and optimistic again. I am thrilled to animate grandma Ping’s life and journey and put greater emphasis on her emotions. Next week is going to be very exciting, and I can’t wait to see what we do.

 

First several weeks now I’ve been iterating on one of the crucial and technically challenging parts of the short: the spin scene in which Grandma Ping de-ages. There are MANY factors to keep track of in this scene and on top of that, it’s important to time them all properly. But one issue that we’ve been having with this scene is the amount of information the viewer has to process on screen. In the 2D animatic, there is already a lot going on in the matte painting, and now, there are added props in the foreground. It feels a bit overwhelming at times, and the pressure to get this scene right is unbelievably high. That’s mostly my fault, I have a tendency to bear the burden more than I should when they don’t go well, but this time, I’m mostly scared of letting my team down. They’ve all worked so hard on this short, and everything looks amazing. The thought of our short not doing well because of this one scene that I couldn’t fix is a lot. But, at the end of the day, I know this is a team effort, and the thing that I love about my team is that they always have my back. We are going to figure this out together, and as a team, we will make one of the best shorts of CNM190.

In other amazingly fun developments, this week we had to make live-action references for our short and it was possibly the most fun I’ve had as a cameraman. Everyone in our team was so happy, light-hearted, humorous, and dedicated all at the same time. It was one of those moments that I’ll remember fondly from CNM190. It made me realize how much I really love my team and this class, and it is quite honestly the greatest honor and pleasure of my college experience to work with these amazing people. There’s only one semester of CNM190 left, and no matter how difficult things may seem sometimes, I want to cherish every moment, every small detail like the ones we experienced this week.

The rigging phase of our short is almost done; Jacob, Natalie, and Akshata have all been working so hard on these characters to make sure that they move and feel right when they animate and I appreciate that so much. I feel a little guilty since I haven’t contributed as much the last two weeks as I usually do. It’s not much of an excuse but this is the first semester I’m taking a computer science class in over a year and it would be an understatement to say that I’m a little rusty. But I’m determined to find a way to better balance my schedule and priorities because, at the end of the day, CNM is the class I love the most and I never want to forget that.

In spite of that, I did get to iterate the spin scene further: something tells me this scene is going to take several weeks if not months of changes to get perfect. Dan said it perfect last week, “We’ve brought our short to an 11, now EVERYTHING in our short has to be the same.” The spin scene is so pivotal to the emotion and the understanding of the story so I really want to get it right. That’ why I’m going to keep iterating until we get it to work as beautifully as it does in the animatic.

 

Spin Scene_V3