Secret Agent Entry: David Schoneveld

#141

Good luck guys. You have some seriously cool stuff in this thread.

Juan Carlos

#142

Cool. Cant wait to see what you came up with.
I also finished just 10 minutes ago :slight_smile: Now I need to add credits and thanks to united nations of friends. Than I need to do 30 second teaser and some making of.
I can see we are working in similar speed.
Good luck

#143

Congrats on finishing! Look forward to seeing the final…

By the way I might’ve spoke too soon about the trailer thing. (Someone responded on the FAQ, makes it sound like you should do it anyway.) So I guess we’re gonna try to pull one together if we have time.

#144

It’s been a long road. There are so many things I want to refine, fix and improve. But every project has to come to an end. I learned more in this project than I can remember… is that ironic? Anywhoo. Loved the challenge, great theme, I’m happy with what we did in the time we had after work hours. Hope you guys like it. It pains me to finish in some ways, and feels so good. Welp if you even read this, lol.

Please to enjoy our entry.

EDIT: Forgot to credit the music, my friends band that broke up 5 years ago…
Handle, Album: View From Above

#145

Cool stuff man. Well done.
Congratulations on finishing on time. I can see you have some realy good shots there. I like the car skid when the text comes in… very nice. Voiceover it a bit anoying (sorry to say) perhaps because I had to watch it twice to understand what he is saying. I agree that some shots could be polished a bit but in the end it is very good and I can see that you put a lot of effort doing that. All the green screen, matching lights, explosions and smoke… lot of work… believe me I know :slight_smile:

Good selection of music… plays along nicely… what band is that btw?

#146

Nice work. I like your fx very much!! Esspetially this smoke behind agent in half zoom shot! Awsome

#147

updating audio to my original edit*** stand by

#148

I was done last night, then I went back, fixed the audio, fixed spelling mistakes, tweeked a fewe more places. But audio should now be cool

Play Video >>

#149

Things I’ve learned through the process, here are a few…

 1) It’s always more work than you think, even when you think it’s more work than you think.

  1. A project of this size needs more than 2 people to do 99% of the work (post production work) Or that could be put another way. The size and scope of this project restricted refinements to ever aspect by the volume of shots.

  2. My weakest link in this process is Editing and Sound. Next time I’ll get someone to help edit it and do the sound.

  3. You got to nail the story down tighter, no tighter than that. No really short, and concise, funny each shot makes sense and adds to the whole. I read that before but now I understand it more.

  4. You never know how to do everything. Even after a lesson like this I know my next project I’ll have a ton more lessons. That’s why I can’t wait to do it!

#150

Congrats on going all the way David. I couldn’t even get started. Hopefully next time though. Can you give a breakdown later of how long each aspect of the trailer took? like how long did you spend on modeling, fx, etc…

Thanks for sharing your process. I’ve learned a lot through your pain :wink:

-George

#151

yeah I might re-do the making of, after seeing pierzak’s making of and now that there is more time.

#152

Good Job you have a bunch of good shot!! Congratulations!

#153

Just when you think its over. With the 3 day extension we’re going to fix the color and exposure of the shots. I talked to a compositor at work who was very enlightening. too busy to sum it up now so lets see how it goes tonight!

#154

Just curious which camera you used to shoot your live action stuff David?

Looking forward to the updates.

-George

#155

Heya,
Thanks for your kind words on my entry thread.
Congratulation for making it on time! Pretty impressive material you’ve got there. Great effects and funny video :smiley: The last line made me laugh hehe
Cheers.
-IS-

PS: 3 days extension FTW >.>;;;

#156

Congratulations on finishing, it’s been a crazy time I agree . This face mask looks pro men!
Good luck!:beer:
-BB

#157

So I talked to the lead Comper here at Asylum, had great constructive advice and criticism. For one, he said the color ramps I’m using, is very 90’s. What I thought was a great idea at the time, I then realized, wait, that’s true. He then proceeded to explain why my cg isn’t integrated as well as it could be and what’s missing, pointing to details in the plate and to my cg. He made it sound so obvious and clear! Once he said it (hard to explain all that he did) I was like oh course! It was like a masters class in compositing. Awesome. So I re-comped some shots, and some things became really clear as to problems with them (when I started playing with the gamma). I then leaned the only way to get good at color correction is to do a lot more of it. I’m not going to be great in one night… Anywhoo, ended last night with a adobe premier issue. That’s the waaarst program ever! Not really, and I’m sure as you learn your way around it, one can figure it out, but daaamn makes me so MAD!

So I was talking to a friend and said all the jobs I had on this little project. Here’s some and what I learned.
writer - concise ideas, learn to tell a lot with a little. Obviously there’s books on this, and I’m really just scratching the surface. I wanted to make something “cool” but learned that cool isn’t cool with out some interesting element of story that combines it, and makes it meaningful/interesting.
producer - managing everyones schedule, time, coordinating location permissions, arranging for the needs of everyone who will be there… get someone else to help with this.
director - really mix this with editing. I need to learn better editing in order to see if I “got the shot” working with shot time constraints, working with the DP… I think it might be easier to just be the director and DP on shoot of this size. DP was great in getting and seeing better lighting, and had lots of great input. I learned I had more exact ideas of framing that I thought.
editor - films don’t edit themselves. Cutting betten shots, telling a story with timing and natural transitions, HARD! I’ll practice this on an easier subject.
PA - need on, can be running around doing everything!
gaffer - learned that light I see isn’t light the camera sees. Like the spy escape shot, it’s too dark and I pulled it up in comp but I had one light on the ground and it looked good enough in camera initially, but the actual information stored wasn’t enough. Lights can either be closer, or brighter.
grip - running cables, didn’t learn much, nothing too complicated this go around.
art department - props don’t build themselves, things that are easy to make on the compter can end up being a pain. Simple button, where you going to get the button from? Um… this? no, that? no, aaah the other? Not that either! It takes time, and not alway sproductive time, a lot is spend just looking for crap.
location scout - ANNOYING! Should be easy, wow its not. Just a office, well not where I work it doesn’t look like a regular office, not here or there, can’t film there. How about this? Well it’s not ideal but it’s all we got! Once you know a location take pictures and save it in a locations book.
wardrobe - either tell the actor, very clearly what to wear or bring it yourself. Just saying dark shoes doesn’t mean he’ll bring dark “spy” shoes. Not a big deal in the end but it’s supriseing how thinking you don’t care too much about it then seeing what it looks like when you don’t plan that to a tee. Take the time to get propor wardobe plans.
story board artist - my sketchy style is ok but it needs to be colored in photoshop inorder to be readable to others. Boards are almost pointless unless put into an animatic.
pre-viz artist - turned out to be easier and faster than I thought. generic rig from highend 3d and quick slaping things together… but the ease of this also turns out to be hard when finding locations.
modeler - I’m a poly modeler and U ised subD for the first time in like 5 years, watched tutorials and just working with subD made me a better poly modeler! Also leaned a lot about the importance of beveling edges and how that size hels show scale, and material.
animator - it was simple animation, but I noticed that some of the places that could have been improved was more natural animation.
rigger - made the pivot point of the gunShip above it and it made the motion of the flying look more natural, almost like a pendulum.
lighter - oh lord where to start, learned I knew practially nothing, learned there is a huge can of information waiting to br cracked open. Learned I need to read more fundementals of computer graphics to get a better understanding of the renderer. Learned about linear workflow (stll learning, and figureing that out)… the list goes one, I have a lot more to learn thats for sure!
fx artist - well I’m a professional fx artist. everything I did was easy for me in this project. Well I learned that timing fx to the plate is probably the hardest part of fluid dynamics for me at this point, timing meaning if the plate is slow mo, how do you make fluids look slow mo? Quite hard, slowing them down but getting them to cover a certain area is sometimes the balance that is too itterative to achive.
comper - oh man, I was “schooled” in this dept. Wanted to learn AFX and I used it. Love it in some ways but in others, it seems lacking. I want finer control over mattes, and color. I had a hard time getting used to the AFX workflow. Love the timeline but miss node based compositing. I think I’m going Nuke for fx/cg integration and AFX for motion graphics titles, etc.
sound editor - music… welp just found something that worked but I need to spend the time to get someone who specialses in this for a leap forward in quality.
sound mixer - I recorded my friend to do the VO (voice over), but had already edited to my original VO. I didn’t think ti check the total run time and just worked with directing him. Ended up he acted it out much slower, and my edit was basically locked. I tried to cut his down to fit but in the end it became hard to understand. I also pushed him to be very animated with big highs and lows with the accent he used plus my cutting it so close it became hard to understand. My fault on both accounts.

production coordinator - had to figure out how to do FTP make user accounts for people helping me out. It ended up being too much work to have more people help b/c I had to rip the footage to frame, zip it up, uploading, send them the link, make them a user account, write a complete clear description of what the shot needed and what they were to do, find or make example images for them to see, just too much work, easier for me to do it all.
I/O guy - learning how to keep bit depth, resolution, pixel aspect ratio, and figuring out premiers exporting. Basically I made the footage square pixels, and tiffs. and worked from those. I knew it lost some infomation but from there it was easier to work with.

to sum up…
I’d rather just be amazing at everything, but since I’m not I’ll have to just keep working and learning.

Overall I give my work, what i did on this project a 78% I’d like to make some fixes to bring it up to an 80-82% We’ll see. I don’t expect to win, but really glad I did it. Hope this helps some of you guys live some of my experience.

#158

Yea I think the best part of these challenges is the learning. It pushes you to learn new things and the comments from others help keep you going. Going through this made me realize, it’s not easy. Every entrant who finished should be proud of what they accomplished. Everyone who entered obviously has a passion for cg, it’s nice to see.

#159

Nice analysis David. I’ve been doing just the same - dwelling and thinking what was right and what was wrong… anyway what I want to say is that there are Oscars, Annecy, Baftas etc but this is a Paris - Dakar. Just finishing it gives one all the benefits. Glad you managed to find out so many.
Cheers men!

#160

Good job, Dave! It looks fantastic and I can’t wait to see the final tweaks. It’s great that you learned so much, because I think that’s the most important of this competition.