Behind the Scenes
Synopsis
Get ready for a colorful, high-stakes chase through the undercity in 'Neon Nights.' Set against a futuristic-punk backdrop, follow the story of Tala, a young thief with dreams of a better future for the sewers she calls home. With her eyes set on a dangerous prize, can she make her dream a reality? Or will she get caught trying?
Renders
The rendering process was initially one of the most challenging aspects of my production. While some issues persisted till the very end, it also became one of the parts I enjoyed experimenting with the most. Because of the cyberpunk-inspired aesthetic of Neon Nights, I knew lighting would play a pivotal role in creating the right mood for each sequence.
While I had a rough idea of what colors and light setups I would use going into production, I really struggled with finding out a visual direction that was both aided my story while also being graphically striking. I think this was due to a combination of not taking the time to do style frames and style exploration during pre-production, and also just due to a lack of experience with stylized rendering.
Eventually though, through long hours of YouTube tutorials, workshops, and experimentation, I landed on a style I was happy with. My favorite part was playing with low-key lighting because so much of the film takes place in darker areas.
Original Animatic
Neon Nights changed significantly since its original inception, not just in the sense that it's fully animated now, but also with how the scope just grew and grew. Looking back now, I realize that I added over 10 shots and 30 seconds worth of animation compared to the animatic. I'm overall pretty satisfied with how the added shots impacted the story and pacing, and I'm pretty baffled by some of the narrative beats that I originally excluded with the transitions between shots being pretty jarring. The constant feedback from my peers and Mr. Karlson played an instrumental role in shaping Neon Nights into what it eventually became. It was through their fresh perspectives that I noticed potential areas of growth that I would've otherwise missed.
I underestimated the difficulty of some shots, and overestimated others, and I think part of that is how I got more comfortable with Maya throughout the semester. While I had experience with animating on it, I wasn't working in it what seemed like every hour of every day like I was with Neon Nights. By the latter half of the semester, animatic shots that I thought would be difficult proved to be simpler than I thought which gave me more room to see how I could push the acting and animation, instead of feeling like I was fighting the program. All of this to say that I definitely feel like I've grown a lot as an animator throughout my senior project and watching the original animatic now is a reminder of that.
Pre-Production
The pre-production phase outside of the animatic seemed to go by really quickly as we went from pitching our ideas to almost immediately starting production. The first few days was dedicated to rig testing, which included making sure that the pre-made rigs I chose were capable of the movements I envisioned in some of the shots as well as making any alterations so that they better fit our desired aesthetic.
I found that the Delta rig (blue) was very robust, offering lots of nice quality of life features and overall being very appealing. The Space Pathos rig (yellow), on the other hand, was more limited in its controls and I found that rotating certain parts to push poses caused the rig to break in strange ways. However, as the production went on, I would learn to enjoy working with the rig because its simpler controls and chunkier shapes made it much faster, and in some ways more fun, to pose.
Production
I was apprehensively optimistic about going into production, but I think part of that was just getting antsy to get into Maya as soon as possible. The way I laid out my semester initially, was that I would complete shots from blocking to render from week to week. While in my head this made sense so that I could make large progress with every critique, I quickly found that this pipeline was difficult to keep up with, it also left little wiggle room for implementing feedback. I was so tunnel-visioned on completing the film that I didn’t build in time to hear different perspectives from my peers which was such an integral part of the class. Early on, this led to a lot of lost hours because I would work to polish a shot to completion, only for it to not read very well from a viewer’s perspective and I would have to start over. I adapted my workflow to be more staggered so that I complete the blocking and breakdowns of a series of shots one week, then polish and render the following week this way Mr. Karlson and my peers could give suggestions or propose different directions to take the shots.
Post-Production
The way I set up my pipeline made it so that some "post-production" took place while I was still in the middle of animation. I did this for several reasons. I knew going into creating my senior film, I wanted to draw inspiration from recent 3D animated films that pushed their style through 2D elements, name Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Spider-verse series. There were certain effects I had in mind that I was more comfortable creating in After Effects than in Maya. I wanted to experiment early and often so that I could land on an aesthetic that fit my film, and to have time throughout the semester to receive feedback from my peers. One of my biggest fears was saving all of my post-processing to the end and making drastic changes only for them to fall flat because I didn't get enough feedback.
I ended up having lots of fun with post-processing and compositing especially towards the very end of the project. I think this was because I do come from an illustration and painting background so I was able to apply some of those design principles into my animation. I was able to make fine adjustments to things like hue, saturation, contrast, values, etc. to make the images pop the way I wanted.
Poster
