Lulu (short) - Dare to enter

[dtrimble]

not bad at all, never talk down about your work. My opinion on how to make it better, if you where to do it again, would be some more exaggerated poses and expressions. She is a cartoony woman, when she is bitter, make her look even more bitter! When she gets her idea of how to get payback, really open those eyes, she should be metaphoricly shining like a light!(because she just figured out what to do.) Also I notice your artist actor responds to the error before it happens, and that doesn't work, have the error come on screen, then he responds. Beyond that I was impressed on how well the cartoon figure worked out in the shots, great job!

[Heaven871]

Wow, thank you very much for the reply. I was sitting here and wondering about what you know that I don't. I mean, Lulu is not close to be finished. So I guess you wrote about Lolo, my test short for Lulu.

Lolo was made to see how character animation works with XSI and a dozens of other problems I would encounter.

This threat is about Lulu. Yeah, women have other names than Lulu and Lolo but I thought it fits. Lolo the pre-version of Lulu :wavey:

Back to Lulu.

Lulu is my soloproject at the german film school. We had one year to produce a short with XSI or Maya. I decided to do it with XSI because the character animation and modelling better fits me.
Maya is great for writing scripts and doing dynamic stuff. Just my opinion, don't sue me :p

As one year is a pretty long time for doing something and you all might remember time management from school. "Oh gee, the test is tomorrow, I have to learn .. umm .. something." Time went by, and went and went. I did a lot of funny tests, composites and finally started modelling the locations. That took about 3 months.
Now, 7 days before deadline .. oh my good. Have you seen "The Ring", seven days to life. Gee, that suits .. I still have to animate, render, model and compose a lot of stuff.

Be back for more. Stay tuned if you enjoy.

http://www.garryrunke.com/lulu/pics/lockerroom.jpg

[Heaven871]

:beer: Hope you survived the first shot of my character.
Today I'll bring you the story of the short.

Lulu is a woman like any other woman out there. Never does what she's supposed to, never listens, never acts.
Not today. Her girlfriend asked her to do her job for a day. And she "kind of" said yes.

The short starts with Lulu sitting in a locker room. (oh and, if you ever want to get pics of locker rooms, don't search for "locker room" you'll get nasty stuff).
She reads a paper that says never ever touch the bíosphere of her girlfriend.

Then the adventure starts. She gets in an elevator that lifts her 5 stories through a glass and chrome complex. See pic below. (try to render that .. :annoyed:)
Arriving at the top she wants to spit down. Then suddenly a sphere appears of nowhere and tells her what she should not do. She agrees and walks on ... 3 steps. Then she checks again and, voila, spits down. A nice "pearl harbor" shot comes and she perfectly hits a strange generator at the bottom of the room. (again 5 stories, glass and chrome)
She continues her journey and comes to a strange room with a lot of hightech stuff and a nicely blue shimmering generator that says "do not touch the glass".
Sure, she touches the glass and a nice glowing effect attracts her to touch it even harder. Again the sphere appears and hits her very hard against the head. "DO NOT TOUCH THE GLASS" is written in it.
Beeing pretty annoyed she opens the last door. See pic up there. A gigantic volumetric light welcomes her.

To be continued if you enjoy ...

That's a pic of the glass complex. Not only unrenderable, but also hard to create a depth-of-field pass because of all the transparent and reflecting things. Well, solved at least that problem.

Have a great day.

http://www.garryrunke.com/lulu/pics/maincore1.jpg

[Heaven871]

Ahh. 4 days till deadline. And I am not finished at all.

Here the rest of the story:

After Lulu enters the volumetric place. She is in an kind of space station test center with this thingie that spins astronauts around.
(maybe a centrifuge) She pushes some buttons and sees the biosphere (umpf. Good I wrote this, not that I have modelled one yet). She hesitates but in the end takes the biosphere and shakes it. Snow is flying around a plant. Nothing happens. She puts it back in place and wush, everything is destroyed. She is totally annoyed and starts the machine. It starts spinning around and while it gets faster and faster we see the machine she spit on in the beginning.
A short circuit takes place and we are back in the cockpit with Lulu. Her face pretty distorted by the speed. She reaches for the "emergency stop" button but it is no longer working.
She speeds up and suddenly the camera is beeing shot out of the environment, out of a vcr and you can see the lights of it blinking. A man is coming and kicking it and throws it in a corner.
The camera moves back in and we see Lulu hanging in her chair. Everything is destroyed just the biosphere is still alive. It rolls slowly to the edge of the board. It falls, but lulu catches it in the last second. Uff, lucky girl. As a gift a new plant grows in the biosphere.
Tata, happy end.

Would be nice if you could post some comments on the story or the pictures. I can survive bad comments, too. :surprised

Another room I have finished yesterday. Lulu is beeing hit by the sphere. I'll work on the transparency of the sphere.

http://www.garryrunke.com/lulu/pics/gangofglory1.jpg

[Heaven871]

Oh god. It's getting hot around here. Teachers start asking if we can make it. One by one is dropping out. Ahhh, push your thumbs for me. :buttrock:

Today I finally finished the little biosphere of Lulus friend. Remember? Never ever touch the biosphere.

Now the last part of the film can finally be animated.

3 Days left. Wish me luck. :airguitar

http://www.garryrunke.com/lulu/pics/blume.jpg

[FallenSwordsman]

Ack - I only caught the first picture you did of this - the subsequent ones you posted are a lot better. Its looking great - hope you can hit your deadline on time. Stick with it though!

[Heaven871]

One day left.

The last 27 days I had to work 14 hours a day even on sundays. I can't stand it much longer. I hope this project is finished by tomorrow.

The scale was definetely not right for the schedule. Well, that's why I am here. To learn and learning by mistakes stays better in mind.

Sorry I couldn't post anything yesterday. But I spend my time before falling asleep at my university while surfing for those cool DigiQ combat tanks.

Oh, gee, I must get such a tank. Radio controlled micro stuff rocks.

Here is the pic of the last room. Takes 30 mins a frame to render (1400 MHz).

Time is running out. I can still do it. Give me the strength I need.

http://www.garryrunke.com/lulu/pics/mangler1.jpg

[FallenSwordsman]

Hey - just posting to say best of luck with hitting that deadline! It is looking great from its humble beginnings to now.

Lots of coffee needed....then :beer:

[Heaven871]

:hmm: Thank you very much for the luck. It came in very very handy.

I didn't hit the deadline. The rules say: make a beta copy, a vhs copy, a storyboard (:scream:), a description in german and english, a making of etc.
Took longer than I thought.

Buuut as the teacher was a second away from me he decided to leave the room. Yeah well, should I run after my fate?

New deadline new luck. Short is finished anyway, just compositing work left now.

I'll leave you with another pic. Stay tuned, in around 14 days the final short should be online.

Thanks for the support.

http://www.garryrunke.com/lulu/pics/maincore2.jpg

[Heaven871]

:bounce:

Finally the short is ready and compressed. Preparing stuff for compression sucks big time.

Thank you very much for everything. Enjoy and try to understand it. It's worth it and it has several messages.

Lulu DivX 9 MB (http://www.garryrunke.com/lulu/Lulu_GarryRunke_DivX.avi)
Lulu Streaming Quicktime 15.5 MB (http://www.garryrunke.com/lulu/Lulu_GarryRunke_Mov.mov)

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