Just another small update of our animation: 'Kinnaree' is being showcased on Skwigly magazine at the moment :)

Followed by our very rewarding 4 days in New Designers promoting Kinnaree we contacted Jean-Dennis Haas from Spungella, a blog dedicated to animation, to promote our work. We were very happy to receive the confirmation from Jean-Dennis Haas, agreeing on sharing our animation. Thank you JD :)

You can view the blog post here:

http://spungella.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/k innaree-animated-short.html

Kinnaree - Animated Short from Dayle Sanders on Vimeo.

Last week was a very exciting one for Mango Mercury studios and Kinnaree. As CGArts and Animation course got the chance to showcase our work in The Business Design Centre in London as part of the New Designers exhibition. It was a very rewarding week where everyone got in contact with people from the industry as well as graduates  from universities across the country.

'Kinnaree', as well as everyone else's work received a lot of positive comments. Apart from that, our course won best stand award which attracted even more people to try out our 20's style cinema stand. We are grateful for our tutors' input to this amazing stand which promoted our work even further.

Kinnaree by Dayle Sanders and Andriana Laskari | Make Your Own Book

This post sums up what we have been up to for the last few weeks after submission, in preparation for the New Designers exhibition in London this upcoming July. We knew that at the time of submission, the incompleteness of Kinnaree was not ideal for New Designers. There were major issues regarding the editing of Act two and three; the shots didn't work as a composition; there was hardly any communication between the two characters and the position of the characters in the scene was confusing. It should have been a thing of the past going about the editing of our animation the right way, re-evaluating things like the order of shots and the camera behaviour. 

This is our first attempt in re-story-boarding. In this version, we attempted to scrap the part where Kinnaree was falling and instead replaced it with facial communication between the two. 

This second version based on playblasts is our most resolved one. We are happy  the shots work a lot better now and hoping to keep on animating the rest of the scenes this weekend.

Also, some environment experimentation we've been up to to enhance the props.

Final (WIP) Animation

Art of Document

Kinnaree Major Project Art Of by andriana_laskari

Technical Paper

Major Project Technical Paper by andriana_laskari

CD Design

DVD case design

Demo Reel

Just a couple of promotional renders from our animation so far.

Shots in this video include: a revised walk; an over-the-shoulder shot; Kinnaree looking for a sunspot (figuratively speaking) to dance in. Shots needed to conclude act one are: Kinnaree entering the sunlight and her walk cycle coming to a halt, to roll on some dance. All versions can be pushed for one more output and also depending on the final film camera transitions.

Hello again,
I tried to stick to the advice you gave me and made sure Kinnaree was within the shot and this time with more establishing shots and a few close ups. Hope it's better now and more linear :)

*Updated version after the feedback*

Hey Phil! :)
So this is our edit on the dance so far. There are three main dances taking place in the whole dance sequence which we tried to combine with edits. We are pleased with it till  0:23, but there is something about the shots and the combination of music which doesn't work after that point. We'll try and get the editing done this weekend so we can set up the render at the beginning of next week.

One of the things that has been a major concern to me was render time of the environment when using fog and how that would add up to our To Do List. It would be too risky to rely on entirely one layer in Maya so I went into After Effects and experimented using separate layers for each object in the scene. It was a big relief for me to see the experiment working and especially the fog which caused me a lot of trouble in Maya. At the moment, the CC Particle World Effect which creates the fog is way too fast but there are plenty of controls in the effect to make it look more 'fog-like'. The layers will enable us to gain control over their color, the blurriness to 'fake' focal length and the ability to keep adding up to it.  A the moment the shadows are missing which were not rendered out.