Project 7: Mouse Trap

Goal To synthesize all of the skills you have learned throughout the quarter to create a short film with a small team of peers.
Resources

This project will be the longest but also the most rewarding so far. In a small group you have approximately three weeks to create a short film from preproduction to a final rendered product.

The groups are arranged as such:

    Group 01: Taylor, Advaith

    Group 02: Jeannette, Bindita, Sophia

    Group 03: Viviane, Alaina, Jingwen

    Group 04: Kyana, Huaye, Chelsea

    Group 05: Natalie, Blake, Duncan

    Group 06: Kyle, Kyra, Ishan

    Group 07: Omar, Naomi, Diana

The film will focus around the game of Mouse Trap and the mice that interact with it. Your aim should be to tell a story in the most simple and entertaining way possible, with a runtime of no more than one minute and thirty seconds.

This is not a project you will do all at once then turn in at the end. There will be specified checkpoints for each day of class and you should expect to go through many iterations of your story, set, motion, lighting, etc. The major deadlines are outlined below, and what is required will be covered more in depth as each deadline approaches:

There is a new Mouse Trap dropbox on Catalyst. Designate one group member as the individual who will submit checkpoint files for each part of the project. Files will be due for each part before class at 10:30 AM each day when the project is due.


Part 1: Story Pitch

Due: Tuesday, 11/15

Useful Documents

7 Steps and Armature

Each team will develop a story revolving around the mice and their interaction with the Mouse Trap. As an additional requirement, you will need to choose one of the following armatures and tailor your story around conveying its message:

The most straight forward use of the Mouse Trap is to activate it and have a character get caught in the trap. However, you are free to explore more creative ideas.

The story must involve at least two characters and no more than three. For simplicity, it is best to stick to mice, but if your story calls for it you can have other types of characters. You can create characters from scratch or use ones you find. In general go for quality, not quantity.

You will be required to express your story in a variety of formats as the project progresses. The first phase of the project is brainstorming with your team and constructing 7 steps that outline your story and ultimately illustrate your chosen armature.

  1. Once upon a time...
  2. And every day...
  3. Until one day...
  4. And because of this...
  5. And because of this...
  6. Until finally...
  7. And ever since that day...

Turn your seven steps and armature in as a text document on Catalyst.


Beatsheet

Each group should also provide a beatsheet. The beatsheet describes the specific actions for your story in chronological order. It will help you structure your stories and in turn help us better understand your narrative.

Turn your beat sheet in as a text document on Catalyst.


Thumbnails

Each group will also draw a series of thumbnails representing the major story points of their film. These don't have to correlate directly to shots but it is still good to think in these terms. Consider how to support visual storytelling when drawing:

Scan in your thumbnails and submit them to Catalyst.


Story Pitch

You will be pitching your story idea to the class by having the members of your group act out your story.

In preparation, print out a packet that includes your 7 steps, armature, and thumbnails, with enough copies for each staff member and group in the class.

During your pitch, one group member can provide narration if necessary. The staff and your colleagues will give you feedback. The staff will be considering whether your project is feasible in the amount of time you have. If we feel you are getting in over your head or if what you have presented is not challenging enough, we will let you know.


Staff Check-In

Your group is required to meet with the staff to go over your story progress on Thursday (11/10) or Friday (11/11) of this week. Set up a time with any of the TAs or staff to go over what you're working on so we can make sure you're on the right track. We will be making sure that every single group meets with the staff before the end of the week.


Part 2: Animatic

Due: Thursday, 11/17

For the next phase of production each group will begin translating their thumbnails into an animatic, which is just a 3D rough-in used to establish a film's shot composition, layout, and timing. Use your thumbnails as a guide for how many shots to create, but realize you may need more shots per thumbnail to express more complicated ideas. Conversely, there are times you can compress several thumbnails down into fewer shots.

Think of the shots in your film as their own miniature productions. Each will live in its own individual Maya file, and each will have its own unique set of challenges to overcome. The animatic shot files will also serve as a jumping off point for most of your production work. As the project progresses you will add more refined motion, lighting, and effects to these shots until they slowly transform into the final product.


Film Assets

Your first task is to begin developing the components needed to assemble your shots. Review your story and consider any extra props, sets, or characters that you will require. Each extra asset will take some amount of time to develop (some more than others!) so now is a good time to trim out any extra props or characters that are not important to the story.

Compile a list of these assets into an "elements list" and submit it to Catalyst. Name it elements_list.txt.

Next, make a first pass at developing each of the items on your elements list, whether they're props, rigs, or set modifications. Prioritize! Don't spend a lot of time on modeling props that are not very important to your film. Hopefully most of these were culled from your elements list.

There is production space available on the network so now is the time to begin using that. You will find a folder already created for your group here:

\\csenetid\cs\unix\projects\instr\capstone1\mousetrap\group[#]\

Note that your group number is based on the listing at the head of this assignment write-up.

Be careful to work only within your group's folder! Everybody has 'render' access now, which means two major things: 1) You will be able to use the "render farm" and 2) You can now modify almost any file on capstone1. This will be conducive to working in a shared production hierarchy later, but remember that with great power comes great responsibility! Be extra careful not to modfiy or delete files/folders that aren't yours.

Your production folder setup should look something like this:

This is a slimmed down version of the hierarchy you will use in this year's capstone. Right now you only need to worry about the assets folder, where your props, rigs, and sets go.

Later on you will be doing a lot of rendering, so we have a render farm set aside to assist you with this task. It's 20 or so machines that just sit in a dark basement somewhere and render out frames for you. There's a catch, however! These machines are pretty picky about the file paths they use - so this is a good time to start naming your folders and files in a way that appeases the them. File paths should only contains lower case letters, numbers, and underscores. No spaces. No capital letters. No other special characters. Make sure ALL of your paths meet these requirements!

Additionally, when specifying texture file paths in Maya you will need to make sure to use a network path and not an "O: drive" path. For example, the following path would work:

\\csenetid\cs\unix\projects\instr\capstone1\mousetrap\group0\assets\prop_static\box\textures\box_texture.png

But this path would have problems:

O:\unix\projects\instr\capstone1\mousetrap\group0\assets\prop_static\box\textures\box_texture.png

This is because the O: drive is a mapping that our lab workstations use to refer to the network. The farm machines have no concept of the O: drive, hence they need a direct network path.


Preparing Assets to be Used in Shots

Before setting up the shots themselves you will need to prepare your assets for referencing.

So what exactly is referencing and how does it differ from importing? Importing copies another Maya file and its objects directly into your scene. Referencing just points to another Maya file without actually copying any of its objects. The implication here is that when a Maya file is updated any scenes referencing said file will see those changes. This is a fairly handy method of automatically sending geometry/shading changes out to all of your shots at once.

Be warned that referencing comes with its fair share of limitations and can sometimes break stuff, so it is best to tread carefully and only reference "clean" files. To clean out and prepare a given asset for referencing make sure to look over the following check-list and address each item:


Setting up Your Shots

With your assets prepared, it's time to reference them into a new Maya scene and organize the Outliner. For a given shot, you will want to bring in all the props, characters, and sets you need. It doesn't have to be everything in your entire assets library, just the ones you need for that shot.

Go to File → Create Reference..., navigate to your asset file, and click Open. In File → Reference Editor select the reference from the list and make sure that the Unresolved Name field starts with the network path "//csenetid/cs/" and not "O:/". If it doesn't, just go ahead and replace the beginning of the path and hit Enter to commit the change.

It's pretty safe to key the attributes of referenced objects assuming the above preparations, but other interactions can be a bit more dangerous. You may want to heed these warnings:

With all the objects referenced you'll want to group them in some manner for organization. Make sure that you're consistent from shot to shot. A group division that works fairly well is characters, set, props, and lights. For special case shots you may also end up adding additional groups like effects, but don't worry about that for the animatic.

Now that everything is organized there's a few other things to set up before moving on to animation:

The final step is to add some motion. This may be a good point to save out a copy of this file to use as a shot template so you don't have to keep repeating the above steps.

The animation required for your animatic is minimal. Remember, you're going for positioning and timing. Move and rotate your characters' top cons to their approximate starting locations and orientations.

Poses may help readability of your shots but keep it minimal. Do the key "golden poses" only! Animate how the character is going to roughly move across the screen. And for editing purposes pad your shots with 24 frames on either end - and make sure the motion doesn't completely stop during the padding.

Frame and position the cinematic camera next. You may even find it easier to do this before animating your characters. It will most likely be a back and forth between the camera and animation until you end up on a composition that works. And if you are thinking of animating the camera, DON'T. Okay, so that may be a bit harsh. Just make sure that any camera animation is delibrate and contributes to the narrative in a meaningful way. You don't want to do camera motion just for the sake of camera motion. It can easily end up just distracting your audience.

Once you've finished your shot click the playblast button on the production shelf, save an iteration via the button on the shelf, and move on to the next shot.

 

Editing

The final step is to edit your animatic together. Create a new Premiere project in CS6 and drag the individual playblast files into the project panel. These settings are recommended when you first create the project:

Render out and upload a first version of your animatic to Catalyst. Use H.264 compression.


Part 3: Motionmatic

Due: Tuesday, 11/22

With your story coming along and animatic hierarchy set up the cogs of your production are now beginning to spin in full force. The next phase is to develop a motionmatic, which is a reel of your film similar to the animatic but with more sophisticated animation. It's no longer just about timing, layout, and camera composition, it's about developing character motion from blocking up through polish.

You are not required to iterate any further on your thumbnails. The goal is to make your story read well based on the motionmatic alone. Polish doesn't have to necessarily happen yet, but you want to block in something for everything (even if minimal). Before going too far into detail on shot motion be sure to address the feedback you received during the previous class. Fix things at a higher level and then refine.

When finished, submit a copy of your motionmatic to Catalyst before class on Tuesday.

Here are some miscellaneous tips to help you along:


Part 4: Rendermatic

Due: Tuesday, 11/29

In addition to further developing your film's motion you will also begin working on a "rendermatic". The rendermatic enables us to evaluate lighting and effects much in the way the motionmatic enabled us to review animation.

Most of the time in production lighting takes longer to update than motion, since new motion relies on re-playblasting while new lighting relies on re-rendering. It's perfectly fine to have two reels: 1) A motionmatic with the most updated animation and 2) A rendermatic with the most updated lighting but outdated motion.

Since this production cycle isn't very long you probably want to condense it all into your rendermatic and just continue updating that. Feel free to copy over the Premiere file of your motionmatic as a starting point for your rendermatic (don't worry, this is the last time you'll be doing this).

For Tuesday we require at least one rendered shot per sequence so we can get an idea of the look and feel of your film. Focus on what you predict to be your most difficult lighting shots. Note that you will probably want to do an entire pass on your film if possible, even if it's rough, so you can catch any render errors now rather than have them sneak up on you closer to the deadline.

Submit your rendermatic to Catalyst.