Film Production Notes - Workflow and Techy Stuff

Documents

As I have been creating the assets for my film in Illustrator, I've had to design and follow a workflow that works well with the project I am undertaking. The biggest problem I have been facing over the holiday period was the Illustrator / After Effects dynamic in which files are required to be set up properly and organised in correct folders before importing and animating.

I have created Master files for each document that contains assets. This is so when I create a copy ready to be imported into After Effects, and I notice something that could be improved, I can adjust it in the Master document without it affecting the After Effects document e.g.

The Master Document

The After Effects Copy

Font Trouble

Another aspect I've had tone careful about is the use of royalty free fonts that I have downloaded. When I saved the Illustrator file that contained a font I had downloaded, I got a warning message indicating the font wasn't able to save properly in PDF format (an option I decided to keep on whilst creating the Illustrator files)

To get around this, I changed the type I had created using the fonts I had downloaded into Outlines that are made up of anchor points so they could be saved as objects and not type. (seen as orange dots around the edge of each letter in the word 'Phone' for the Phone_Box asset in my scene)

Effects

Some assets in my establishing shots required to have certain effects on them to emphasise what they are. The most common effect I've used is the outer glow effect. At the beginning of production, I applied these in Illustrator and then imported them into After Effects, however after testing the document in Ae to see how it looks, I realised I couldnt animate the glow effect since it was locked to the actual object in the layers that made up the assets. To remedy this I've decided to apply the effect in Ae itself instead in Illustrator. 

Applying an Outer Glow effect to the object in Illustrator

When animating an object, the effect applied to it in Illustrator could not be animated along with it

Importing into After Effects

Import as Composition - Retain Layer Sizes NOT Footage! This is so each asset in the ai. document can be separated and animated individually.

Quality - Rasterising 

The reason I chose Illustrator instead of Photoshop to create the assets for my film was because of the crisp look I could get to the objects. Illustrator uses vectors instead of bitmaps which means the assets won't lose quality and look terrible on screen when animating (particularly rescaling). A lot of my shots feature assets that will need to be resized a lot during animation so Illustrator is definitely the way to go. 

Animating

Colour co-ordinating the individual layers really helps in organising and quickly seeing which layer is which

Illustrating the Background - The Sky

To make the background for my establishing shots at the beginning and end of my film, I set up an Illustrator file with a point width of 1280 pt. and height of 8000 pt. I then used the gradient tool to set up the different levels of night sky i.e. really dark blue at the top of the art board through to light blue and finally yellow which represents the light pollution caused from buildings.

I then imported the rough edit of my building backdrop to see how it might look in After Effects when the camera pans down.

I soon realised how large the document was in height so I reduced it down to a more reasonable 5000 pt. and moved the yellow colour on the gradient along in the gradient set up so it fit in better with the buildings.

My next task was to add the other assets into the Sky_Master document such as the moon and clouds.  I put the clouds on separate layers so they could be animated to move left and / or right to create a sense of the weather conditions being a little breezy.

Illustrating the Characters

I have been switching between illustrating the characters and the layout and prop assets over the past few days. I decided to use the same colour palette for the characters I drew in Photoshop. Here is the colour palette I imported into Illustrator from Photoshop for William.

I named each swatch so the colours corresponded to the different parts that make up the characters ie. suit, bow tie, legs etc. so when it comes to creating individual paths for the characters' parts I can easily see which colour is required. 

I also saved the swatch set as an ai. file so I can open it in other Illustrator files later if needed.

Exterior Asset Illustrations Update

Exterior Asset Redesigns - Making Things More Zany

Exterior Assets in Illustrator - Progress

Various Exterior Assets

The Two Large Apartment Buildings

The Backdrop