Ferris Wheel source images

For the final window scene I had planned to have an amusement park with a spinning ferris wheel and a roller coaster shooting past the window. Unfortunately there aren't many fairgrounds around in the middle of November so I wasn't able to get any footage or images myself, so I turned to my good friend Mr. Google for help!

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/erichoward/

There are plenty of great images of ferris wheels on the Internet, many of which are reasonably high quality, but unfortunately many of them are from the wrong angle! A lot of the more suitable ones were of horrendous quality or in motion, with lots of tiny lines and flashing lights that proved a complete nightmare to try and cut out neatly. As much as I'd love to have a full-colour ferris wheel spinning in the background, I don't really think it's too practical.

A couple of results were of silhouetted wheels which gave me the bright idea of creating a vector illustration to use, which would be much more simple to achieve. There are a few really really nice ones on Google but they're terribly low quality so I may end up just resizing them and then re-tracing the image to clean it up.

Windmills: Photos and footage

Similarly to the previous post, I went hunting for windmills at the weekend! I was really hoping I could find one that was active and working so I could film it, but I wasn't able to locate one during my (admittedly brief) search.

Luckily there's a restored windmill about 15 minutes from my home in Kent which is actually open to the public during the summer months. Wind permitting, it's also active — sadly not the case in this instance. Regardless I think I can still make it work. I'm going to see if I can cut the sails out and put them onto a separate layer. I should then be able to animate them turning quite easily. The position of the sails is actually ideal for this as it reduces the amount of clone brushing I'll need to do to fill the gaps!

Cows: footage for animated background

Originally, for the cow in my animation, I was just going to chop up some photos of a toy cow and make puppets similar to the ones I've already done. After seeing how much they cost I soon changed my mind!

I then thought that, seeing as we need to have at least one animated backdrop in our animation, it would make more sense to go out and film a cow that I would then be able to use in the background. As a result I spent most of this weekend out shooting some footage.

I ended up shooting a lot more footage than this (almost 1GB in total) but decided against uploading all of it! I've sifted through all my clips and picked out the sections that I think I can use:

My camera's not terribly hi-res, but seeing as the cows will be fairly small I'm hoping it won't be too much of a problem.

I'm hoping to cut the cow out of the background and composite it over the field beyond the window in the background of my animation. I'm planning on experimenting with After Effects' "Roto Brush" tool that I've heard very good things about. From what I understand so far it's a slightly more automated rotoscoping process that allows you to quickly cut parts of footage out from the background. It sounds like a very versatile tool and I'm hoping that there's enough distinction between the cows and the background for me to cut them out effectively.

(No practical use whatsoever, but I thought it was funny!)

Character design materials

Met up with Craig on Thursday to have a quick catch-up. We have frequently conflicting timetables and he doesn't live on-campus so it's been quite difficult to find a time that we're both in and available! 

I was initially apprehensive about how he'd respond to the complete 180 I'd pulled regarding my ideas, but to my great relief he seemed quite enthusiastic about everything and was very keen on the balloon in space scene. 

We had a brief amount of time before the afternoon's lecture so I was able to get some quick snapshots and drawings done so that I can start moving forward with character design.

(Sorry for the horrible quality thumbnails — Blogspot's not very good at this sort of thing)

(Click below for a few more pictures)