Create a promotional advert for a real world organization that conveys an important message regarding a real world dilemma.

Total length: 30-40 seconds

• Homelessness

• Deforestation (rehabilitation of native fauna and flora) NSW National Parks, Conservation and heritage.

• Bushfires (Firefighters)

• Flooding (SES)

• Coral reef Bleaching.

• NASA James Webb Telescope. Mars Missions. ISS.

Naming conventions for the asset list, abbreviations are a huge help i.e. CHA (Character), VFX (visual effects), SFX (Sound effects). A description of the asset also greatly helps.

Script for NSW National Parks

Scene starts with Kangaroo Rat living in a pristine forest environment, suddenly wildfire breaks out and threatens the creature.

It begins to run away from the danger (left to right).

Rain ends the fire, but then the creature is swept away in a flood.

Free of the flood water, a tree almost falls on the creature. A scene of mass deforestation scares the creature.

The presenter a NSW National Parks ranger picks the creature up and places them into the safety of a nice protected forest.

Homeless

A man lying down on the street. With his setup of a sleeping bag, blanket and rubbish cart.

The camera stays in the same position, across the street with the man in center of frame lying on the sidewalk.

A time-lapse begins with the man unmoving from underneath his sleeping bag. People walk past, cars drive past, rain and day/night pass.

The oppressing time-lapse ends when a character sits down to talk to the homeless man, give him a business card.

Ramahel, 1024820: Post-Production, SFX, editing

Moses: Animation of Kangaroo Rat

ZAC: Creative Lead, Storyboard, Previz,

This project had its hardships. Initially starting strong with 4 group members in total and a agreed upon rough draft of a script I created. The idea I spearheaded for the promotional animation for an organisation, was that of a character driven narrative of a native Australian fauna going through intense hardships due to natural disasters. Being rescued by a national parks ranger and taken to the safety of a new lush habitat. celebrating what volunteers are capable of achieving and a call for recruitment of more volunteers. Conceptualisation during pre-production went smoothly, with members creating concept art and turnaround sheets for the 2 main characters of the animation An environment concept artwork was created to capture the essence of the raw destruction in the wake of a bushfire (the main antagonist of the story). I intended for a member more comfortable in the 2D realm to work in tandem with the 3D characters to create dynamic 2D backgrounds and VFX elements. Unfortunately that member departed and left the group a less strong team of 3. With the workforce significantly crippled so early on, at first it was discouraging and daunting. But I discussed with the group the extra workload needed from everyone and re adjusted certain scenes to cut down production time.

I spent a great deal of time and expended patience modelling/rigging the Kangaroo mouse character in Maya. After a failed attempt at polymodelling the character which is without a doubt one of my weakest skill. I decided to scrap it after using it as the placeholder rig for the previz. I fell onto the backup plan of grabbing a similar model online and modifying the mesh to fit the characters concept of the kangaroo mouse. I was ecstatic with the result after changing every aspect of the original model, I felt it was adequately close to resembling a anatomically correct Kangaroo Mouse. The rigging was a huge learning curve that I intended on overcoming. I started with the tail rig, which thanks to previous experience I completed in a time. The rest of the rig took a substantial amount of time, troubleshooting and many versions to complete. I reached version 11 before I was satisfied with its performance. At times completely remaking the rig due to a technical issue (like the lack of an important IK handle). After the controls were attached, everything named correctly, skin weights fixed and Arnold textured. It was ready to animate with.

I animated shots 1-4, re-pathed the cameras, added extra lighting to the scenes, modified all the textures in the environment and created the 2 smoke simulations. Using a tutorial uploaded from Reza on YouTube I created the smoke sims in another attempt to emulate a bushfire without creating a complex fire simulations, created strong orange area lights to give the sense of a fire approaching.

The setup for the render wasn't to arduous to begin with, I reused the knowledge I had for denoising a render in Arnold. Until I reached shot 3 and Maya 2022 refused to render the animation. After some troubleshooting which was difficult without any error or crash reports, I narrowed it down to a simple bug between Arnold renderer and Maya. The only solution was to finish the rest of the renders on my home PC.