Amber Evans
​​​~ Effects Artist ~
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Production Practices with Hassan Taimur
Hassan Taimur has worked on a range of TV spots and music videos for The Mill and OWL House Studios. His knowledge of crowd simulation and technical direction has assisted the creation of music videos for Devin Townsend and Steven Wilson from the Porcupine Tree.
Upon arriving all the students were put into groups based on their specialty, ex. Animator vs. Lighter. They were four people put into a group which contain at least one animator, one lighter, one effects artist, and one generalist. Since all the students had different specialties, the groups ended up being pretty even with the exception of animators. I was put into group one, which we named Team One.
Hassan Taimur explained that we were going to be in a "studio environment" and that we will experience what one work day, 9 to 5, is like in a studio. He gave us multiple storyboards to choose from that we had to replicate in a CG environment. My team choose the storyboard of the "O-Juice" drink. The storyboard was broken down into three shots, which we had a lot of free range on. Our main requirements were that the scene was placed at a beach where the ocean was made of orange juice, the sand was made of orange pulp, and the clouds were shaped like orange peels. The bottle for the O-Juice was to look like a beer bottle and have a cap that looked like the rind of an orange.
As our team debated on how we were going to set our scene up, the "Producer/Higher person" came to us and said that the beach should look like it was on Saint Lucian. Eventually we were also given the requirement that our O-Juice bottle had to had rinds of the orange around the logo.
My team decided that we would break into specific jobs. Our animator would animate the camera moves and set up the basic scene model. Our lighter would light the basic scene and start adding minor details and texture. Our generalist would start modeling the O-Juice bottle and texture it. Our effects artist (myself) would make the ocean and sand made out of orange pulp.
We got our reference images:
After deciding who was going to do what, we all went into our jobs.
My job was to make the sand pulp and the orange juice ocean so I began experimenting in Houdini as to how I would accomplish that. My first thought was to instance little oval spheres on a plane that had multiple points. It worked out quite well until we run into the problem that we could not import the Maya cameras into Houdini. That took a lot of troubleshooting, almost the whole day to figure it out. In the process of troubleshooting, we decided to try to export the mesh of the sand pulp into Maya so that I could texture it and render it from there. It turned out that I wasn't able to make a mesh using instanced points so I had to redo the sand pulp using the copy-node method. It also turned out that the mesh was too high poly for Maya to handle so it started to slow down immensely and by this time it was already the end of the day. Because of the camera problem, we were not able to export the ocean made of orange juice, so all we have are still images of what the sand pulp and ocean juice would have looked like in the beginning stages.
Something as simple as making orange pulp for sand and an orange juice ocean took the whole day because of unexcepted problems. We worked well as a team and everyone delivered at the end, even though it wasn't truly put together as a whole piece.
It turns out that our previs shot were suppose to be competing to "get the job" for the storyboard we were doing. After we presented our previs video and shots, Hassan praised our work and was very happy that we accomplished so much in a short amount of time. We had gotten everything he had asked for except for the orange peel clouds.
Here is the final previs piece:
Product Still
Beginnings of Orange Juice Ocean
Beginnings of the Sand Pulp
All in all, the process showed me how much actual teamwork is put into one production day. Troubleshooting takes many people as does just making one decision. Dailies are important because you can show your work and make sure that you don't get off track or become too focused on one thing that makes you forget the major outcome. You can't forget to talk to your teammates because it's important to communicate and share your ideas. Everyone has a job and work to do in this environment.