Post Production

Live Action

The beginning of the film starts out with a live action footage with a cut out filter.






















Originally this idea was to be in a live action with no filters at all. this was to look like this:











But after thinking about it, artistically it wouldn't work out with the flow.

Here's the location and 'behind the scene' image on that day of filming:


The location was in my garden. For about a year or a good 8 months, we haven't maintained out garden and the set was good enough to mimic what I was after. The character is played by a BOY actor who is a family member.





















Composition

The establishing shot of the film was accomplished with a program called Terragen.

Original











Edited:











































This shot is just random screengrab of compositing the intro.


Here are the explosion scene Charlie sent me with alpha map enabled:













This is the bazooka smoke trail:














And the result is just wa wa wee waa :D



















Sound
Sound was quite easy to put on. Once we acquired our sound source, I used Adobe Audition to synchronize the audio with the footage:











Good thing about Adobe Audion is that you can blend audio clips and play with channels. For example, when we needed to have a sound come in from the right channel and exit from the left channel, we could easily do this without editing the orignal source.

Props

Donkey























































Rooster





































Hyena




















































Rigging videos

Clips

Hyena Rigging




Blockout 2009


NewBlockOut_2009 from Mohamed Warsame on Vimeo.

Vehicle Creation and props

Datson Car




































































































































___________________________________________

This is another truck that is very common in Africa and the Middle East. It is understandable because it is a purpose built car for the terrain in those regions. Although from looking at the vehicle, it is obvious who is the manufacturer but I kept the name of the truck manufacturer hidden in case they go crazy.




This is how the scene is looking:

Bad guys (Animation)

This section shows off both the technical and animation parts of the bad guys. When I was rigging the bad characters, I knew they were going to be far away from the camera so I chose to not rig them in detail as I have with the main girl Samira Igal.

The parts that I haven't emphasized was on the fingers. There are joints on the fingers and if needed to have the character hold on to something, the animator would manually select the finger joints and set the preferred hand/finger pose. However, this has proven to annoy certain animators but they have worked around it.





Because the concept of the film is universal to the world, I thought it would be wise to pick elements of of these concepts even if they were contriversial. Such a concept is child soldiers.
I used the kids rig and armed them with the weapon models that the bad guys used. this scene was entirely animated by me.




This is a render test of the kids scene:

Bad guys (3D & Texturing)

Okay so I have scrapped this character and began a new system of "bad guys modeling and animating"

Civilian Modelling (Animation)

To be updated

Civilian Modelling (3D & texturing)

So I am preparing a blockout test. I dublicated my proxy model for Samiira to represent the civilians and gave it different colour. I though the result was a bit freaky:















Anyway, I have come up with a new system. This system will have multi mesh in 1 rig. Think of Sims 2. You can customise your character, from head feature to the cloths they wear. Well this system doesn't go that great in details of customisation but will have pre modelled features to choose from. There will be multiple heads, torso wear and trousers. The hands and the eyes will have no customization built in. This means all those characters will share one hand mesh.

Main Character Development (Animation)

Rigging

So I've started Rigging. This will be the first rig of mine that'll have the squash and stretch. I will post a video as soon as I'm done rigging the character. I will accomplish this using both maya nodes and scripts.




























The arms are done.













And so are the stretchy feature.
















This is me testing the spine and arm stretch.

This is Samira's rigging demo:






Experiments

Here are some cloth experimental:



Test Animation clip



This is more of a cloth test than walk cycle. Note: The character's rig isn't done hence the arm/hand glitch



WalkCycle/Cloth test from Mohamed Warsame on Vimeo.

Main Character Development (Texturing)

Finally, Samira has her sandles (I got them for her as a christmas gift :D)































I''ve been playing around with the colour and the feel of the fabric via texture experiments.






















































I think Samira is done from texturing point of view. I think its safe to move on to rigging from this stage.

Main Character Development (3D)

Character Modelling















This is the topology of the head.















This again illustrates the topology of the hand (the skin does NOT look like this)



































All of the above is Samiira's body














This is the blockout of Samira. This is going to act the low poly version of her as well as the influences when it comes to weighting.













Both (the skin mesh and the low poly cubes) are done and match perfectly. I also took the time to unwrap them so I can texture them later.


























These are cloth designs and experiments.