Semester 2 Week 7.5 Floating City Submission

Fixing the Video

In the day since we got feedback on our videos in the presentations, I've tried to fix the problems Alec had with the animation. There were a few complaints, and they're listed here:

  • Gears clip into one another in a few shots
  • Lighting is too dark
  • Motion tracked title cards slide around the image. 
For the gears clipping, Alec suggested using the Expression Editor, and sent me a file that had a Mathematical expression which turned gears properly. I had a look at it, and I tried to figure out what Alec had done on his file, but I couldn't figure it out. I understood most of the code he'd done. The first line dictated the speed of rotation of the first gear, and then the second line dictated how much the second gear would rotate in relation to the first one. However, there was a series of numbers that dictated the speed of the second gear's rotation, and I couldn't figure out how those numbers worked. I tried looking at online tutorials too, and I couldn't get it to work. So, I just altered the gear's rotation in the graph editor, and went through the animation frame by frame to fix the clipping. I would have liked to figure out how the Expression Editor works, but I guess that'll wait for another time.

The lighting was an easy fix. I simply colour graded the video brighter in Premiere Pro.

The motion tracked titles were also pretty simple. I just had to adjust the anchor points of the title's movement, since the title's anchor wasn't locked to the motion tracking. I just adjusted it's placement, and then fixed the size of the titles, because they were covering each other. 

In conclusion, the fixes were straightforward, but I'm still surprised that I didn't notice them when finishing the video earlier this week. I guess I've just been looking too closely at the project to notice it. 

I'll be uploading the project today, and I hope the fixes made a difference.

ST: Discovery's Intro
Our Animation



Suggested Research

So I've thought a bit more about the Game of Thrones intro, and TV show intros in general, and I've made a few realisations. 

The purpose of television intros is to show the themes of the show and to get the mood of the series across. The way they usually accomplish this is by using symbols and imagery from the show, heavily stylising them, and putting them to music. This is the way Elastic Studios (The GoT intro studio) has been running their productions for years. 3D intros seem to be the chosen method to do this across all the biggest TV shows. 

In a way, our project tried to accomplish the same thing. We had to show iconography from the city, and use that to present the feeling of being in Prague. So, while Star Trek Discovery's intro imagines the blueprints for futuristic technology, we were doing the same, but for the medieval era of Prague. 

I hope that we've accurately matched that feeling. Looking at studios like Prologue and Elastic has shown me a lot of different ways to present information in this way, and it would have been good to look at these earlier, since it's the type of project we were aiming for.



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