Going Live: FINISHED

Concerning Dragons from Kieran Duncan on Vimeo.

MAV: Filming with John H!

The mere beginnings of my no doubt prosperous acting career.... working with John H in the green screen studio to film reference footage for his short film.

I have to admit, being dragged around by J.J and Tom while wearing giant condom outfits was a bit bizarre, but it was nice to lend a hand!

Going Live: Revisiting Sound Design

We have completed an initial draft of the film (which is still under wraps for now...) but I wasn't 100% happy with the audio balance and narration. Some of the levels were a tiny bit off, and the narration felt a little cramped in the middle. I'm really happy we revisited this, as I think the new audio track is a vast improvement over the old one. Thanks to John and Tom for their stellar work on the audio, I think it sounds ace :D

Going Live: Dragon Transformation

I've been avoiding this effect for a little while as I wasn't 100% sure what would be possible given the time we have left. It worked out rather well though!

I started off by using the ID matte for the tree to mask out the eagle leaving only it's ambient occlusion pass, the tree then expands to fill the entire frame with blackness as the eagle begins to desintegrate and the dragon materialises around it. 

It's a similar effect to the one I developed for Ticked Off, but it looks pretty slick and is relatively painless.

Going Live: Shot 02 Composite

I've spent a LONG time wrestling with the passes for shot 02, the main issue is trying to get the shadows for the town to soften accurately, while retaining a stylistically sharp shadow for the dragons which are high above the landscape. If rendered accurately the dragon shadow would be extremely blurred due to the penumbra softening the edges.

I eventually managed to render out two seperate shadow passes and composite them together to achieve the desired effect.

I then precomosed this shadow pass and treated it like a single shadow pass to composite with the rest of this shot. I've still got a lot more to do on this shot, particularly at the end when the ground burns away to reveal shot 03, but at least this problem is solved!