Saturday dawns and a trip to Homebase was in the offing, so accompanied by my sister and her bloke we headed off for a jolly to look for some paint. We’re in the process of destroying our kitchen and so far it’s not going to well. Like most people we are very good at destruction, but not so hot on redecorating. We chucked out most of our old kitchen furniture and started stripping off the horrible 1950’s wallpaper with the grimy floral pattern. There was some sort of sale on at Homebase so it was predictably quite busy. After a while we settled on a few paint testers, some boxes for my sister’s herb garden, some flowers and a can of diet coke.
After Homebase we drove to the nearest garden centre to pick up a few pots of Thyme, Oregano and Parsley. Mission accomplished and we headed back to the ranch for some lunch. With lunch done and dusted I thought I’d crack on with my machinima project. I quickly realised that Premier Elements was not the programme I was looking for, so I downloaded a trial version of pro and started to investigate. Moving from Windows Movie Maker to Premier Pro is like going from a rough and uncomfortable tree stump to a huge 3 seater leather bespoke custom made sofa; the difference is just phenomenal. At first I was confused and lost, I couldn’t even cut clips, but after a few hours of playing and lots of YouTube videos later I began to get my head round it.
In my last couple of posts I mentioned WoW model viewer and how it can be used to animate specific wow characters. I decide to start small and to work on a Treebadger introduction credit. I started by finding a wolverine model and using fraps I filmed the wolverine doing 3 separate animations. First of all he ran, then he jumps and then he attacks. The whole idea is to get this one 3d character to start at a very small scale and then for it to increase in size like he is running towards the screen. As he gets close he then jumps and attacks with a vicious swipe of his blade. Eventually what I want to do is add an effect that simulates the slashing of a screen like he’s cutting a big piece of paper which then allows a light effect to come in and flash/blur the whole image. After this has been achieved then the Treebadger credits can appear out of the whiteness of the blinding flash effect.
Unfortunately doing this was harder than I anticipated. The problem is that I’m using 3 separate clips rather than one animated whole. By using 3 separate clips I have had to make sure that the models appendages and actions closely fit together, and in parts the animation seems a bit hodgepodge rather than the smooth whole I wanted. I’m thinking that some sort of 3d animation programme maybe helpful as I can export the model and should then be able to copy the action and animate the wolverine into one smooth motion. I’ll keep working on this and let you all know what I come up with.
On a side note big-up to Sam Pierce/Sedrin from SlashDance for emailing me back about my pan/zoom shot query. Thanks a lot Sam best of luck to you and the rest of /dance in all your up and coming ventures!
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