360 Animation Test

Today was the first big day of testing for mine and Tim's 3rd year film project!

 The project is going to be stop motion, which is something I'm really happy about because I love watching stop motion, and I do enjoy animating in stop motion when I get the chance.

The main centre point that sets this apart is us incorporating 360° video into the project. This is a pretty big thing, and definitely something that hasn't been done in previous years at Falmouth.

Being a post production student I am mainly concerning myself with pipeline, which at out first thought of the idea seemed very complicated to figure out. But as the weeks have gone on we solved more problems and now after this test we are confident that this project is really feasible! From the get go I said that compositing in Nuke was gonna be the best way to go about working the pipeline, so we aimed to test that today!


This is the image we got straight from the camera:


After animating the stop motion the first thing we did to the footage was unwrap it, to get this:


Much better to look at! and much easier to work with for post production. The main thing we were trying to test is the green screen, and how we can work with the footage in Nuke. Green screening out the set will be important when it comes to making the short film, so we had to make sure the pipeline works.


This is what we managed to create in Nuke. I set up a node tree in nuke to process the image. We managed to key out the green, although its not the best as we couldn't shoot in raw or very high quality, but it worked. Just to test adding elements in I dropped Tim's jumping animation on top of the green screen.

I also added a little bit of roto just to clean up the image.

Once we were finished testing the post production we exported the video from Nuke we were able to view it in 360 like this:


We know now that the whole pipeline works, and this is really important for us, it's has given us even more drive to carry on working on this project, we have still got lots to work out, but, we have shown that this is possible for us to do. 

Next it'll be on to testing closer to what we would have in 3rd year, and really getting a story that people are going to want to watch!

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