Tron Defiance - Last Update

I've thought long and hard about the Tron Defiance film, it has been coming along very nicely but many things have kept getting in the way.  Lots of distractions, like trying to move to a new house, baby on the way, other paying gigs and short films taking up all of my extra time.  I lost heart.

I knew it was something to be proud of, I had kept watching what I had completed in Tron Defiance and I was really excited about finishing it, but time just got in the way, so the project has been scrapped.  Luckily I had finished enough to be a great animation piece to show, so I polished what I had and uploaded it to YouTube.

I'm sad that I won't be finishing it, but I'm also very relieved to not have that production weight on me.  It was quite surprising the amount of work per shot and the workflow was frustrating:

-Animate the character in Daz 3D studio
-Bring animated character in Cinema 4D, apply textures (created in Photoshop) and position correctly.  Then render 3D elements with separate passes for material luminance and 3D data.
-Bring rendered animation and 3D data into After Effects, apply 3 glow layers and 7 lens effect layers.  Position other 3D elements like clouds and reflections into the scene.  Render out the final animation
-Bring final render into Premiere, position into sequence, use Soundbooth for any sound production.
-Render out final piece.

The hardest, most time consuming part were the character animation in Daz Studio and bringing it correctly into Cinema 4D.  That was just nuts!  If one little piece was wrong it would screw up the entire animation key frames and I would need to start over.  Daz Studio was just not a good idea to do character animation in, I probably should have used Poser but I was not familiar with it.  I SHOULD have used Maya, considering THATS WHAT IT'S FOR!  Argh.

I still believe that animated characters were the way to go, but I think I just went about it the wrong way.  I couldn't imagine trying to use green screen actors instead.  Costumes, actors, green screens, motion tracking, composition, refilming, etc., wow, that's like double the work per shot.  And if I didn't do motion tracking, then I would not have been able to have the great sweeping cameras, it would have been pretty flat.

All in all, I'm proud and excited that I was able to finish enough to be a viable demo of my skills, in a way this is part 2 of my updated demo reel which I just released last week.

Here's to the future!



2011 Demo Reel