Nefertiti
Eilin Dahiana Berrio Pena
Priya
Shah
Karlita
Rojas
Simone
Costa
Mikhail
Magnaye
Lanre
Onifade
Jack
Devereux
PRE-PRODUCTION
Original Logline
When Momi’s eternal sleep is disturbed by a beautiful explorer, he is captivated by her beauty and despite his unrequited love, he endeavours to save her from the tomb’s treacherous traps.
Final Logline
Driven by her passion for Egyptian history, a curious explorer enters a profound abandoned tomb in the search of a mythical treasure.
Little does she know that a horrendous looking creature will put her good heart to the test.
Theme Moodboard and Rig Choices
Eilin as the director presented her moodpboard during the pitch. She explained that she wanted to explorer going around the pyramid ruins. She loved the idea on focusing on an Egyptian style-like environment. Here is what she had in mind.
"The method I used to come up with this story was to do a research on the rigs we had access to. While looking for rigs I found the Thep, what stood out for me was that it is a cartoony rig and it is something I really like; cartoony animation. I also found the Dana rig which aesthetically looked very nice and worked well with the Thep rig. The next step for me was to try to develop a story around these two characters, the first thing I took into account was that I wanted this to have a cartoony and comical feel. My very first script proposed a rom-com story between the mummy and the explorer.
In this first script draft he saves her from falling into one of the tombs traps and the mummy saving her, this makes her realize that even though he looks like a horrendous monster he is a kind soul, this later on changed to her saving him putting her fear away and being driven by her kind heart. Something I found during the process of developing a story that worked was that it is not a simple task to come up with a story that makes sense at first. The story went through so many passes that made me consider the method I chose to come up with it.
Translating the story into visual images was also quite challenging but with the help of the feedback we received we managed to make the story work. All the Dailies were distilled into the following logline, "Driven by her passion for Egyptian history, a curious explorer enters a profound abandoned tomb in the search of a mythical treasure. Little does she know that a horrendous looking creature will put her good heart to the test."
There are two things that stood out to me during this project, one is that not every single thing has to be justified in a story and two that should never ever be done with a character in a T pose position."
From the feedback we were given, the dana rig was a good choice to work with. However, she did not look like an explorer. Therefore, we decided to retexture the Dana rig by changing the eye colour, adding an explorer hat and adding some dirt on to the clothes. Simone had taken the lead on retexturing Dana.
From the feedback we were given for Thep, Thep did not look scary to run away from but instead was too cute. Luckily, this rig had an evil mode plugin that would change the eye colour and teeth to make it look more scary. This was a plus point to change the characters mode from scary at the beginning to cute in the end as it meets narin.
Dana (Narin) and Thep (Momi) Before:
After:
Storyboarding
Mikhail, Simone and Eilin were doing the storyboarding for Nefertiti. This is how they went from the beginning to the final animatic as explained by Mikhail.
"As the director of the project, Eilin already had a vision in mind of what the story would be. With the storyboarding Eilin provided me and Simone with a script as shown from above. Eilin was very open to ideas and any changes to her story so with this script, we were told to draw thumbnail sketches for the other half of the script. After drawing the sketches me and Simone would go over to Eilin and discuss if it could be improved, what she had in mind or in even better.
Storyboarding wasn’t too much of a hassle as the communication during the process was clear. Changes that were suggested were decided with a group vote, with the majority deciding what would happen next. However, when changes were suggested everyone seemed to be happy with them and positively accepted any changes for improvement.
At first, Simone and I started doing sketches and storyboarding on big sheets of paper, while Eilin was using her tablet. Shortly after completing one of our dailies was finished, our tutor suggested we do more developed drawings in maya using the grease pencil. Not only did this help with storyboarding but it helped put our animatic together too. Going into maya was a good decision because it also meant that we didn't have to keep on redrawing the background and solely focus on the character key poses.
Before deciding to draw in maya using the grease pencil, Eilin had already assigned me and Simone shots within the maya scene. At this stage, the environment was still at a basic stage but it had verything we needed to a basic level to make things work. In the maya scene Eilin had also created cameras on where the shots had to be so me and Simone didn't have to worry about adjusting and putting cameras into the scene.
All this was enough to create a satisfactory animatic which seemed to work and tell the story well. This allowed us to move into 3d layout and pre-visualisation of our project.
At the stage of pre-visualisation our story had changed quite due to feedback from our tutor and special guests from the creative industry such as: Max Howard, David Prescott, and Ben Leyland. Getting feedback from people with great industry experience was great as it helped develop our story to flow more and also understand the characters we are animating."
Finalised Animatic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHtLIxNkes8&feature=youtu.be
Finalised Previs:
Life Reference:
Once the previs and animatic was finalised, we all decided to film our life references for the initial shots we were given.
All Life References
Once all was set up, Priya had set up the plan for this whole project. However, roles had be changed due to COVID-19. Therefore, she had taken the lead of finalising and fixing the plan based on limitations of COVID-19. Below you can see:
The Weekly Goals Of Everyone and Adjustments Based On Delays:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HXtorsCnsaf_53NMuOnJE0giN9Twz_eInzYEv2i6lmk/edit#gid=0
Everyday Individual Contribution Since The Project Has Started:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1iqwucFFWBi9TfWVWenIBwhYZw9gQWDhZiZiSw0jT4p4/edit#gid=0
Overall Month Plan For Short Film:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DR1HQUnPcIpdAPv5NwIJXxwZMx_R9v99JpGO_e38KjA/edit#gid=0
Animation Shot Roles:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cXBW44XTL9_B6i2RnDcs5K5Qr8AggvrSC-TrRI_eSyY/edit#gid=0
PRODUCTION
Animation
Lanre was one of the animators for Nefertiti. This is how he developed his animation. This technique was used amongst us.
"The process for animation on this project started with the storyboard, which roughly laid out where the characters were going to be in the scene and what they were going to be doing.
From there, an animatic was made in which everyone started to record their live-action references for their shots. With my shots recording the live-action reference wasn’t that hard had it helped me understand how the characters/camera should move. For example the running POV shot (shot 15), at first I thought was going to be straight forward to animate.
All I had to do was bop the camera up and down while it moved forward. However, when I filmed the live-action reference I saw that there were more subtle movements when you are running like that. Like in addition to the up and down motion you also have a slight side to side motion and an even less noticeable diagonal type motion.
This came in handy when blocking my animation because I knew what the actions that I was animation looked like in real life so I could block them in my animation. I also used my live-action reference when splining as well so I could get an idea of the timing of certain movements that the characters should make and how fast or slow they should be moving."
Jack was doing the everyday editing for the dailies to present at University and for google meets meeting everyday during COVID-19. Here is two of the final edits for blocking and splining of everyones animation combined.
Blocking Edit:
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/3b882915277e/#1520225/1713038
Splined Edit:
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/3b882915277e/#1520228/1713044
Lighting
Priya was doing the lighting for Nefertiti. This is how she went from the beginning to the final render lighting tests.
"Initially, my first attempt was just blocking out the lights in the environment provided by Karla. The aim from the director for lights was to get that lamp ready, and show the resembles from day light to evening sun set light. My first attempt was just to find out a way to get light source into such dark environment and somehow make the characters visible with limited light source. The idea that me and eilin discussed was to either use torches with fire or holes from the ceiling. However, having flames was a challenging and time consuming aspect as it had to be rigged and animated as well. So Eilin had suggested to try getting the light source from the ceilings and doorway instead.The first renders are down below".
"However, I was not pleased with the results. This film relied heavily on the lights for the storytelling aspect. Therefore, I did a lot of research on how I could improve the lights. Firstly, I had to get the lamp ready with the Dana rig so everyone could reference the rig with the lamp. I had decided to go for a mesh light using a cone as seen below." "However, I was not pleased with the results. This film relied heavily on the lights for the storytelling aspect. Therefore, I did a lot of research on how I could improve the lights. Firstly, I had to get the lamp ready with the Dana rig so everyone could reference the rig with the lamp. I had decided to go for a mesh light using a cone as seen below."
"However, due to COVID-19, I had to change this mesh light. The original render with the mesh light was 10 minutes and 25 seconds. Since we had only three computers to render at home, I had to somehow change the lights to make it faster to render. Spending a few days I had managed to make not only the renders below 3 minutes but also improve the look of the lamp with the light inside."
"Secondly, in terms of shot 1 and shot 21 establishing shots, Eilin was very clear on the sunrise and sunset lights and they should be reflected in those shots. I had decided to go for a physical sky, however, using spotlights as the sun instead of using the build-in sun in physical sky. This was to give that sun ray effect by increasing the volumetric light emitting from light and giving that glory sun effect. Two lights were used to give a yellow-white sun effect. With physical sky that was not possible to do so, unless we use a mesh light. As renders had to be below 5 minutes this was the only way. Additionally, since the sky seemed plain, I decided to add clouds and fog using mayas build in fluid clouds in dynamics."
"Thirdly, In terms of lighting falling from the ceiling I had decided to improve by playing around the lighting. When discussing this with Maciek, he mentioned something about Gobo. I went online to research about it and that is when the lighting had changed into more a realistic sun effect. When setting up gobo I had decided to use the texture below to add into the light filter gobo."
"From applying this, I changed the light settings to soften the volumetric light emitting this texture and added another either spot light or area light to give more reflection of light on the characters so it is more visible and it shows the sun light emitting on the characters. Also, in all the tunnel scenes one or more area lights were parented on Momi and Narin. This was because the spotlight with gobo filter was not enough to light the characters. I even had to add one long area light in the tunnel with orange tint to have some atmospheric mood. This was a similar case with Narin having the lamp as sometimes the lamp would not reflect light into some areas of Narin's body when wanted to have it reflect. "
First Render Test of Shot 11:
New Render Test of Shot 11 with new lights:
Technical Issues with Lighting and Rendering
"Lastly, the issues occurred during finalising the lights and setting up everyones render.
As we have moved everything to online, we had decided to use TeamViewer to work on the lights and set up renders for those rendering. However, this was a challenge for me as TeamViewer did have technical issues as seen below."
"As finalising the lights on Eilin's computer, I could not see the lights at all from my side. It was always this rainbow effect that always appeared. There was no solution to this so I just had to guess the lights based on Eilin's explanation of what she sees on the phone call and just have luck on how the final renders came out. Luckily, everything worked out fine."
"Sometimes Maya did not like to work when it was rendering, it just did not want to render the skin. I am not sure what happened but after a week later, it just resolved on it's own."
"The rig for Thep always had the issue with this message: // Error: [polymesh] Thep_RIG_V003:eyebrowsShape: incorrectly defined UV coordinates, missing either uvlist or uvidxs."
"Instead of fixing the eyebrows with automatic UVing, I just decided to change the render to untick abort on error for everyone so we do not have to do automatic UVing as we render all the shots. It worked properly and no issues were occurred."
Set Design:
This is how the set and layout was build by Karla
POST- PRODUCTION
Credits:
While everything was rendering Simone was designing a drawing for the credits. This is what Simone idea was.
"A sketch that portrays clumsy Momi busy trying not having his bandage chewed by a silly camel. I took inspiration looking for postcards, and I thought was funny having Momi sending a letter to his friend Narin."
Mikhail and Eilin also took the opportunity to create fun renders for the credits in the meantime.
Final Editing:
Priya had taken over the final edit due to some circumstances and Jack had been continuing to fixing up the sound effects in the meantime.
On the day of the submission, the main feedback was to fix the intro. The titles of Escape Studios and Nefertiti were not matching up and everyone had suggested to change the title of Nefertiti to match the latest Escape Studio render I did for experimentation. The rest included to match up the sound effects to the animation, check colour correction of all the videos, shorten the timings to have constant speed and add some extra cross dissolve between different cuts. The dust and heat haze effects were added and finalised as well.
Before:
After:
Colour Correction
Before And After
First Render editing:
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/3b882915277e/#1503436/1679459
