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To play this movie file, you will need to have the DivX (5.0.2 or higher) codec installed on your computer.
This project just started out as a test of creating a completely computer generated "movie set". The live action footage was shot before there was any kind of story or set design in mind. (I worked the story and set design around the footage I was given.) I did all of the CG work in this movie. (Everything except for the actor is CG.) I made and rendered all of the models for the background and characters in 3D Studio Max. (Except for a desk and a keyboard, which were models I downloaded off of the 3Dcafe website.)
All of the 3-D work was done on a PC with an AMD K6-2 300 MHz processor, 256 MB RAM, and a Matrox Productiva G100 (8MB) graphics card. Since this isn't a very fast machine, I had to keep the polygons counts as low as possible. For most of the scenes, the camera is stationary. This allowed be to just render one image for the background of each scene. There was one scene where the camera tracks the live action actor walking and sitting in a chair. Since the camera is moving, I had to render the background for each frame in this shot. Since I had to render so many frames (which took over 24 hours) I only got one chance to do this. Unfortunately, the CG portion of this scene does not match exactly with the live action portion. But I did not have time to re-render it. (In order to make the desynchronization less noticeable, I split that shot up and put some other footage in between.) Also, since this was the first time anyone at my school had done anything with bluescreen and CG, nobody thought about measuring the set or putting reference points in to aid with the camera matching in the CG. (So I had to "eyeball" the camera tracking in the CG portion.)
After rendering the CG portions out to TIFF file sequences, I composited the CG and live-action footage with Adobe AfterEffects, and edited the scenes in Adobe Premiere. (These to programs were run on a G4 Macintosh.)
| Computer Animation | |
|---|---|
|
Jeffrey M. Jacobson |
| Live Action Shoot | |
| Acting | Joyce Stahmer |
| Filming |
|
| The Transformers®, Soundwave, and all other Transformers related characters and elements: © Takara / Hasbro. | |
| End Credits song |
"Transformers Commercial Song 2" by Ford Kinder & Anne Bryant |
Here's the web page that is displayed on the computer screen in the movie.
(In case you were wondering, "Ran Hibiki", who supposedly reported the news on that page, is the name of a character from the game
Below is the storyboard that I made for this movie. When I made the story board, the live-action footage had already been shot. Since I was the only one who was going to be working on the movie (and thus using the storyboard), I didn't need to make it very elaborate. (That is, it only needed to be readable to me.)
