Slyboots Surai

Remembrance from Julia Giordano on Vimeo.

These are the two last shots of Surai's short film. I must revise and improve the previous scenes, make the montage and add the sounds and music.

Now, the visions of the old fortune-teller come back to the present and we can see Surai's shocked reaction at what she did.

Again, I've drawn and painted her in Flash, then used After Effects lights and cameras. She's supposed to be inside a tent that's just lit with some oil lamps. I've tried my best to suggest so by using a global red light and a brighter spotlight by her left. I've used the pretty handy 3D simulation tool I like so much to place the elements in a background so that Surai and the chair cast some shadows over the tent's cloth.

So now... two more shots to go, pretty much to redo and improve, the montage... There seems to be no end!

By the way, tomorrow I'm recording the voice-overs for the old woman and the shaman, thanks to my landlady's wonderful collaboration :-)

The shaman falls, deadly hurt, and Surai runs away. I'm not very happy with the result, but it'll remain this way for now. I must move on to the next shot...

On the second video I've tried to add some dynamism to the image by closing the shot a bit and trying to simulate the camera's vibration when Surai runs past it.

I think this is the shot I like most for now... :-) I've just uploaded a new version because I'd noticed that the shaman should be straigthening up after trying to catch the sword. So the following shots will form the sequence when Surai picks up the blade and sinks it into the shaman's chest.

I've used reference footage to draw Surai's movements in the second shot. I've opened in Photoshop the live-action video I'd previously recorded, then imported the main keyframes into Flash and traced over them. I've deleted some frames to disguise the realistic flow and created the inbetweens. I've drawn the shaman and exported him and Surai in independent files, then combined them in After Effects. Finally, I've added some bluring effects to the shaman.

I still have to add the colouring and background, but I'll do that when I finish the remaining shots. From now on I'll focus on trying to get them done as soon as possible and without the final colouring.

These are the shots where her eyes form and then open. They will be interspersed with the ones showing the shaman's reaction.

Here's another shot of the shaman's reaction, rushing to catch the laying sword. A brief shot of Surai's eyes opening will go between this shot and the latter. I'm thinking about replacing the first two seconds with a closer shot of the shaman's face, but I'm afraid I'd have to sacrifice the sway of the camera, which I like...

Again, the shaman's colours are yet to be improved.

Beause of the low quality of the video, it may be difficult to observe the effects added to the woods. As in the previous shot, I've used two blurring effects: the Radial Fast Blur and the Vector Blur.

This is the shot where the shaman worries about the consequences of the enchantment and instinctively steps back. His colouring is not final, I've just painted his clothes someway so I could combine him with the background using the alpha channel.

I've added some blurring effects to the environment to emphasize the movement of the camera and the space between the trees and the shaman.

By the way, some of the shots will be cut in the final editing, so it doesn't matter if some character suddenly disappears at the last moment...

This shot has taken quite time. The hair and the dress' movements are drawn and painted frame by frame in Flash, as the body. I've added the background elements, particles systems and some individually treated flowers in After Effects.

So... let's go for the next shot! (Gosh, this is so painfully slow... I wish the satisfaction at the results was more proportional to the effort made.)

Here's the next shot, the tree's flowers starting to fall over Surai. I was planning to do this with Maya, but I've found a way to do it in After Effects and this is how it looks like. I'm quite happy with it, so I guess I'll keep it this way and put Maya aside, at least for now.

I've used the Particle World effect, adding a sassafras flower texture to the particles. And the trees are the same as in the previous shot.

Here's the second test I've done with After Effects for this shot's background. The trees, grass and sky have been created in Painter and Photoshop, then imported into After Fx and treated as 3D objects to compose the scenery. Then I've added a camera linked to a null object, an ambient light and several focused ones.

Of course, the hair isn't finished, I still have to make all lines black, paint it frame by frame, paint her head... so, it'll take time.

The first test was done by painting a landscape in Photoshop and then adding a vanishing point to it to simulate a perspective. I imported the vanishing point file to After Fx and animated a camera. Here's the result:

I've been trying different methods to colour the frames. I first tried exporting a quick time movie from Flash, then opening it with Premiere to export it as a filmstrip file to open in Photohop. The problem was that this way I ended up with the double amount of frames to colour in Photoshop, since Flash had exported them at a 12 fps rate.

So I've finally turned again to Flash to colour the frames there by importing this bitmap I'd previously created in Photohop and by applying it to each frame.

Then I've exported the file to a quick time movie with an alpha layer and I've worked on it with After Effects. I've add it some effects to make the texture look a bit more realistic and I've tried to create the transition from the rough wooden texture to the human skin, but I'm still not happy with it. I don't know why the video with the tree texture and the one with skin don't match when superimposing them in After Effects...

Anyway, you can see the result in the video above.

Here's part of the rough animation I've done until now. It's the transformation scene: the shaman kneeling in front of the tree, summoning the tree's spirit and the beginning of its transformation into a human being. I'll soon start doing some colour tests with Painter and Photoshop by importing a stack of frames from Flash.

I've tried to simulate a camera movement in a couple of occasions, when the shaman kneels and when the first root turns into the left leg, and I like the result because I feel that the action looks more dynamic.