All finally coming together

Everything is finally coming together. I have finalised the poses and textures and niggled and niggled with the render settings in Maya until I felt I was happy. I started putting the 2D elements together in After effects so that I had a better idea of how much time I would have for each part, and the timing of those parts to the related music track. This in turn will allow me to animate the the right time in Maya. After Effects is largely unknown to me, but after just a little while in the program I feel I have fallen in love. I was able to apply much of my Photoshop knowledge (thanks Adobe) and it has been too much fun. It is a pity I only have such a short amount of time during this project to fiddle around with After Effects, as it was always my intention to use it purely for compiling work I had done in other programs. This project has reminded me why I moved away from 3D in the first place, as it is very very technical and you only really start seeing 'cool looking' results well toward the end of a project. I am too visually driven to be starved of beautiful visuals until the end of such a long project. After Effects has in turn opened my mind to very new and interesting possibilities and I might look into some motion graphics during the summer holiday. It is definately something I would consider developing in my third year. Animating in this program is a lot of fun and has renewed my interest in the subject.

Here are some screen grabs of frames from my current progress in After Effects. I am working at 1080p at 25f/ps (PAL):

My little intro sequence containing my name, profession and top contact details (including a link to a professional website where more of my work can be viewed). Minimal but efficient I would say. Making use of this logo/design throughout my reel has helped pull it all together and has introduced a nice element of design I am very happy with.

Fading this frame to the colour concept art helps add some more information to the viewer about the design, as well as giving me an opportunity to highlight the strength of the character's silhouette (a key element in character design and something I feel is important to establish in a showreel).

My first little 3D render. I tried bringing in an infinity curve into the render, but eventually abandoned the idea as it was giving me unfavourable results and it didn't really seem necessary in the end. This way I can keep the background consistent throughout most of the reel and it also allows me more freedom in regard to colour correction as I can now colour correct the 3D render without worrying about affecting the background layer.

The music track I am using is a remix of a song called Exile by Enya, and can by found HERE

I had no intention of mixing my own music for the project as I knew I would have very little time and I would rather explore other skills more related to my field of study. It is something I would like to dabble with in the future when time permits. The music choice was very important to me though, because there are so many pitfalls when choosing music for a showreel. The top tips I got from researching the topic of music choice was that it should preferably be lyric-less (or non-destinctive lyrics), the song should have a strong beat (not necessarily a fast one) and that the song shouldn't be distinctive (i.e a well known song associated with a movie) as this can make the reel look amateurish. I really like the song I chose. Even though Enya isn't exactly unknown it is still a remix I hadn't heard before and it 'spices' up the tempo of the song to make it more upbeat than the original. Sudden tempo changes in the song have also given me some nice cues to cut my reel to.

Overall things are coming together better than I had planned due to some new knowledge and happy accidents. The final hurdle in this project is to make sure I get the renders out of Maya before the deadline arrives. Sadly there is nothing I can do to speed up the process and hopefully my planning regarding keeping the render time as low as possible pays off. I am rendering to HD after all. It has been a crazy three weeks with an average of 12hours a day in front of a computer and the last couple of days WELL above that, but seeing the final results are always somehow worth it.