The First of the Ninth

Was an excellent short project to create a 10 second E4 branded sting to be shown between commercials and programmes on the channel.

We had 28 days from deciding to take on on until the deadline of 4pm last Friday. While we missed the cut off by 11 minutes l still think it went very well.

Initially brainstormed about 20 ideas at varying levels of ‘doability’ which is how I like to approach most open briefs. We whittled these down to 10 ideas that were worth pursuing but we had one clear favourite, a butterfly with wing patterns made of the E4 logo. I had in mind something quite naturalistic comped into some video, the butterfly landing on a flower, but quickly realised that that amount of modelling was above me and I would also have to source and learn how to use some camera-tracking software – all a bit ambitious with the time constraints involved. So we decided on a cartoon style instead. Even then I’ve only used Blender for video sequencing and some basic modelling and animation before so I still had a lot of things to learn. Luckily I’ve watched a lot of tutorials and walkthroughs so I had a fair idea of what I’d need to do and where the commands were. First job was the butterfly’s wings which was easy as I could convert the E4 Logo AI file that was supplied to SVG and import it into Blender. In hindsight it would have been better to create this directly in Blender which would have been slightly slower but would have left me with a better mesh to work with. The topology of the mesh we ended up using was both over complicated and badly laid out which interfered with the texture mapping – it’s slightly visible in the finished frames but not in the movie. Annoying and unnecessary.

Anyway, on to the body. The first time I’ve done mirror modelling and lots of fun especially when I stopped following the bad reference image I had and started making something that read like a butterfly. It was only going to be on the screen for five seconds or so and quite small so no need to go overboard. Did that on my last animation, modelling details that ended up only being one pixel wide at most. Put the wings in place, added a little texture and transparency, looked pretty good.

Didn’t move at all, but pretty good.

Next for the landscape at this point I was still thinking it might be a real scene so off to the back harden to photograph and film some flowers and foliage and luckily the glorious blue sky. Threw the images and video onto my computer and that’s when I realised I had overestimated what I might be capable of doing. I did have a nice picture of a lupin that I thought might be the start of a new direction Thankfully Richard came to the rescue with a new idea a sort of barrel-shaped landscape carpeted with flowers, simple ones. Phew…

And then I left this post for ages and I’ve forgotten the thread. Suffice to say the barrel idea also went by the wayside and probably over some wines we decided a helicopter theme ought to be shoved in somehow and voila: