Space Monkey Mafia

This's a video worked on by myself and my partner Greg Ripley; it was supposed to be based off the intro to the original Planet of the Apes. Neither of us have actually SEEN planet of the apes, however... and in my opinion, this's actually a good thing. While the other groups were tied down to tradition and what had been done before them, we were pretty much the only ones given the true purpose of the project... to take a basic script, design models, and build a short movie out of it, from the storyboards, design, animatics, and eventually to production, all on our own. Since we had no character designs, environmental information, and so on, other than really, really basic stuff like "camera goes past Jupiter", this gave us a ton of freedom to do as we pleased, while still sticking to the script given.

Specific details:

The models of the voyager space probe, and of the monkey's hand were done entirely by Greg with only minor consultation from me. He did an excellent job on them for such short notice =3 I handled most of the modeling and the compositing and rendering, while Greg handled the conversion of targa image sequences into videos that could be used in premier.

The music was chosen from a group of selections I had pre-chosen, and presented to Greg, who made final choice. The final choice was a bit surprising, but after seeing how perfectly it lines up on the timing on the video, I think it was an excellent choice ^^

The management for the project was handled by myself, director duties and human resource management and so on. Essentially, storyboarding and ideas were co-written without any issues, with Greg adding alot of great ideas to the project, but handling in between stuff such as deciding who does what and so on, I ended up with the 'leader' tag whether I wanted it or not XD

Out of anyone in the class though, I'm glad I got partnered with Greg. He worked hard, and we got along well. He's had a few difficulties with maya, but getting to work next to him, and nudge in the right direction, I think helped him out alot. The voyager probe is a great example of having gotten something from scratch to work well. Think he's come a long way and is doing much better now ^^

Overall I'm happy with how the video came out, though we had alot of rendering problems... many, many, many sequences either had files corrupted, randomly delete themselves, or fail to work into video sequences due to errors. Some sequences were rerendered at least 3 times, and in the end, we were able to force most to work, though a sequence from frames 522-588 always failed, despite being rendered off something like 6 times or so.

In this gap, seen roughly around 22ish seconds in, we had to sneak in a playblast to cover the hole. Removed all the things like camera gate and light arrows to hide that it was a playblast, but the lighting was totally different due to the vast difference between preview lighting and actual lighting. Sooo... did a quickish dip to white at the front and end of the problem area which masks the light transition well, though the dip does seem a little out of place, and we were forced to use several of those due to various errors, such as the third camera was upside down for no apparent reason and refused to fix itself and I had been unable to correct the problem, so just rendered the scene out as normal and did the dip to white to hide the fact that the camera movement doesn't quite 100% line up.

The final scene with the monkey's face closeup also had issues with rendering, and was eventually forced to be done with playblasts. Even the final render image which is held on screen refused to render properly despite several attempts, so a photoshopped image of it is used instead. If you look closely, the last frame jumps ever so slightly.

Mike, the instructor, pointed out that the last half of the video does tend to slow down significantly, it was nice and fast paced until about halfway, then some camera moves just drag out really long. I hadn't realized this at the time, until mentioned, but he does have a point. Think we'll be keeping that in mind for any later projects, to maintain the same atmosphere throughout, rather than a drastic change midway through.

Overall, it still looks epic win anyway ^^



*Note that Brendan had to come in and yell at the rest of the class for being behind the other class and behind schedule significantly at one point; our group was actually ahead at the time, so got out of that. While the other groups in the class passed in playblasts totally, mostly without changes to the settings so they looked clearly like such, we managed to get ours done early enough to render it off almost totally, and would've had it done sooner if not for severe issues with renders failing and getting corrupted.

Overall, quite a good dealie to get done early and with better quality ^^