Final

The better quality version is on the class server!

I had to transfer the project to vimeo in a lower quality because the Quicktime format was too large.  So here it is the beginning of the penguin war.  I've decided to cut it in to parts because the project was taking a lot longer to weave together than what I expected.  So this is the first section - the Cold War.  Moving the camera around proved to be quite challenging, but the segment moved pretty quickly.  

I drew all of the background, settings, and newspapers in photoshop then constructed them in After Effects.  All of the penguins I drew and animated in flash.  I think they turned out better than I expected. I like the newspaper effect though I wish it would transition in to the scene better. It was really hard to perfectly match up the scene picture to the newspaper still.  I had to get it as close as I could.  It looks good but I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to things like that.   I made the text in After Effects and added animators to it so that it would scale up as it left the penguin's mouths.  I think the text is sort of hard to read because you read the letters backwards as the appear but it works. I had to use a mask to hide the word before the left their mouths.  I added a snow simulation to a solid (I left it as a 2D layer) so it would snow throughout the piece.  

I'm going to continue working on this project so that I can eventually put up the final product.  Below are some of the penguin animations that are from later in the movie and some of the newspapers that haven't shown up yet.

The current newspaper will transition to this newspaper (ignore the picture that is what I put on there as a sample)

Then a camera move to this newspaper and zoom in to picture:

After a newspaper change we come back to the grey penguins attacking the blue penguins with snowball bombs.  The snowball bombs are going to be made in photoshop and after effects so they aren't in this flash clip.

-The camera follows the bombs to the other fort where they make contact..few simulated explosions.  

The blue penguin leader ducks out of the way of the incoming bombs and gives the signal to fire their giant ice blocks.



Blue Penguin solider nods back to the captain and pushes the lever on the catapult that is holding giant ice blocks.  I drew the catapult and the ice blocks in Photoshop and built it in After Effects.  It is behind the ice fort so you can't really see it in that first scene.  The ice blocks are launched to the grey camp, a few penguins go down. Newspaper:

  The Headline says: Santa Clause is coming to WAR! Peace and Good Tidings hope to follow. Picture is the battle field from the silhouette of a plane's POV

  On the battle field the two head penguins are meeting on the battle field for flipper to flipper combat. 

Slap fight! woot! Then the plane (which will be more of a shadow) will fly over.  Both of them will look up and fall over on their backs...then wiggle around a little unsuccessfully. Cut to :

Update!

I have made some great progress in catching up!

So far I have drawn out all of the scenery in photoshop and composed them in After Effects to make my 3D scene.  

I completed designing all of the newspapers with headlines.. They are ready to go and just need to be put in place which I'm going to do once I have the still pictures ready.

I am in the process of drawing animated penguins but they are looking really awesome!  I had some trouble at first because I couldn't figure out how to turn the background color off

 when transferring the animations to After Effects but I eventually figured out how to do it. 

I still have a ton to do but this is all I'm working/focusing on at the moment.  I'm doing everything in order that way if I run out of time I can cut the scene short and add in the rest later.  

 

Here are a few of the newspapers: 

Newspaper 3

Newspaper 5

update

I am a little behind my original schedule but so far everything that  I have done is going well.  I've got most the newspaper worked out just working on a few effects to make it move more naturally.  I figured out that in order to zoom in to the picture its better if the picture is landscape instead of portrait size.  I still need to catch up with the work on the inside of the picture but I've picked out the text words I'm going to use.  I've sketched out how I want to lay out the scene so I just need to finish the pieces and set them in place. 

Below is part of my storyboard

Newspaper

Zooming in

Photo changing from still to moving/color change

I want the picture to fill the screen without any of the newspaper

In the scene. Penguin in the snowball fort. (text:Jerk)

3D Word flying to the other fort (with camera movement)

Penguin in the ice fort being attacked

Penguin knocked down. New penguin fires back. (text:Nincompoop)

Text flying through the air (I'll do this in After Effects)

Incoming!

Penguin 1 ducks and it hits Penguin 2

Changes to still with saturation to transition to newspaper picture

Zoom out to see newspaper

Newspaper: Mythbusters find sticks and stones theory to be Busted!

Camera movement from this newspaper to the next one around the same area. Black background as if they are moving in space but on a reel. (think Harry Potter)

Final 1

Pitch: What's better than one evil penguin blowing up things?  Two armies of evil penguins blowing up each other - booya!  

Proposal:

I'm taking the evil penguins to a new level = war time in penguinville!  I want to start of with newspapers running across the screen with different headlines giving some background on the war. Think Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix where they transitioned through a montage by flying in and out of pictures in the newspaper.  I really loved that effect and I would like to duplicate it in my project.   One of the headlines will read 'cold war' and underneath it is a moving picture of a penguin. I want the camera to zoom into the picture and have the picture become the scene.  There will be a color change to the whole scene (like the newspaper is all sepia looking and the actual scene will be saturated colors)

At this point I want to show the penguins (lets call the different sides A & B) throw text at each other to show them being in a cold war.  I want the area that they are set in to be 3D space. So will show the text leaving the mouth of side A penguin and travel over a distance where we are revealed side B's penguin and have the text explode or hit him.  I am going to use particle effects on the text to give them a more dangerous look.

After a back and forth with the text slinging I want to come back out in to the newspaper.  Then the a headline or two to catch up with how the war actually broke out.  Then back in to a new picture of all out war between the two sides.  The camera will closely follow snowball bombs from one fort to another and see the explosion.  See reaction of the attacking penguins.  and then a retaliation from the hit penguins.

Bring camera out to newspaper and then into the next headline saying 'Santa (or whoever) sends plane to end the war'

I want to end the war by having an airplane fly over the war field causing all the penguins to look up and then fall over on their backs.  

Assets:

Newspaper

Headlines

Text for newspaper

Text for Cold war + particles

Penguins- 5 for each side (I have the basic form of penguin I want to use from previous project)

- test flash animated penguins.

Sound effects (Pulled some from the UT library)

Snowball bombs + particles(already have snowballs drawn up just need to make them in to bombs)

Background 3D

- forts-2

- snow particles

- sky

- ground

- dead penguins (already have basic form)

plane

Camera movements

Schedule:

1st week: plan out the project, make a rough storyboard, decide on text to use, draw up snowball bombs and different versions of penguins, and start laying out background.

2nd Week: Finish laying out background, place penguins in position, test flash animated penguins,  start laying out newspaper, plane and camera movements.

3rd week: add flying text and bombs to the seen, polish the pengin's movements, put in particle simulations on everything that requires it.  Make final changes and finish anything that I left out.  

4th week: Add sound effects in and polish everything that needs to be polished. 

Story board coming soon!  Any suggestions or comments are most welcome!

Photoshop

Photoshop from Wynona Becker on Vimeo.

I recently bought photoshop so I've been playing around with it a lot. Here are some of the photos I worked on!

Particle assignment

Assignment 8

Return of the evil penguin!

I started this project off in photoshop.  The background is just an image that I pulled from google.  I drew the evil penguin with his lighter and I traced the TNT boxes from a cartoon image.  I also have a blue background layer that is made from a I  turned on its side in after effects in order to make a floor.  I imported all of these layers in to After Effects separately and made them in to 3D layers then spaced them accordingly.

I used text layers (just a bunch of underscores with a blur on them) to make the gun powder that the spark runs on and animators to make it disappear as the spark moves over it.  The spark is made of two separate particle system II effects on top of each other.  I made slight changes in the colors of them.  They are both line particles that fractal explosive with negative gravity to make them flow narrow and upwards.  The spark in the lighter is the same effect only the physic animation is jet sideways.

The smoke coming from the box is a particle system II effect.  The physic animation is set to cone axis and the particle types are faded spheres.  I had a hard time trying to get the smoke to slow down but who knows maybe there is just an item in the box with the TNT that becomes very smokey when on fire.  

The TNT box has an amazing Shatter effect on it (Thanks Ben!) making the explosion look really cool.  I had a bunch of effects added in to make the fire part of the explosion look the way it does.  The first one is a particle system II effect plus a Mr. Mercury effect mixed together to get that bubble of fire cloud shape in the middle.  The P.S. is set to a twirl animation with line particles and Mr. Mercury's animation is set to fire.   The orange dust cloud around the first effect is also made from Particle system II and Mr. Mercury but also has a Gaussian Blur added to it.  The P. S. has an fractal explosive physic animation and is made up of cube particles.  The Mr. Mercury is also set to a fractal explosive animation.  

Added on to this intial explosion are embers and two fire balls.  The embers are made from P. S. II with a Guassian Blur attached.  The P.S. II is adjusted to have a fire animation in a line particle format.  Then I brought down the birth rate to .1 and adjusted the radius so they would be spread out.   The two fireballs are made up of four layers, actually eight layers if you count the shape layers I used to mask their arrival position on the screen.  There are two layers on each fireball - one gray & black and the other orange & yellow.  I made the grey & black have less of a birth rate and less opacity in order to see through it to the orange particles in order to give it a smokey fire look.  The orange layers have a fast blur set on them.  Besides those differences the four layers are all set to P. S. II with a fire animation on a cube particle.  They all have Gaussian blurs applied to them as well.  Then I set them in place and had them move positions in order to make them fly.  

I also added in a camera and just panned across the screen to follow the spark.  Then I zoomed in to the picture on the z-axis in order to get closer to the action of the exploding TNT box.  

That pretty much sums up how I made this mass chaos due to evil penguin. 

Text Assignment

Text Assignment from Wynona Becker on Vimeo.

I used the first part of the Pledge of Allegiance for my text assignment. The word 'Pledge' has an animator on it to make it scale up as we fly by it.  I used an animator for rotation on 'allegiance' to make it pop up.  Then I used a stencil to put the American flag behind the word 'flag' and added a ripple effect to the word to make it wavy.  I used a shape mask to make 'the United states of America' ride on the twisty path.   I had the camera weave in and out of the words.  After we went by the words I had their opacity lowered so they would disappear. 

Assignment 6

Evil Penguin!

Untitled from Wynona Becker on Vimeo.

I don't know why I'm in an evil penguin mode but its working for me.  I love penguins, really I do.  I drew everything on photoshop, each on a separate layer.  (I traced the evil penguin from my favorite book: Evil Penguins: When Cute Penguins go Bad)  I brought the separated layers in to After Effects and made them in to 3D layers.  After that I arranged where I wanted everything and created a camera and key framed its motion.  I added animation to the snowball that the evil penguin is holding.  I'm not sure why the snowball is see through and then turning solid.  It shows up normal, as a solid, in After Effects.  Other than that this project was really fun I really enjoying using cameras and 3D in After Effects.

Assignment 4

Assignment 4 from Wynona Becker on Vimeo.

Hey There!

The poor penguin is getting attack by snowballs!  I used curves and eases to get the snowballs to move slowly at first and then quickly as they splat down.  

-The background I made in flash

-The penguin is an image from online that I color corrected on photoshop

- I made the snowballs, snowball after-poofs, and clouds on photoshop

- I found the snow effect on After Effects and added it in.  Its probably too sunny for it to be snowing but I thought it looked cool so woot for snow!

Assignment 3

After Effects Fun!

Assignment 3 from Wynona Becker on Vimeo.

For this assignment I put together a bird's eye view shot of a kids room. There is a plane flying from the ceiling fan and a car race on the floor.


I started by bringing in still pictures in to photoshop:
A bed - I looked for a more kid-like bed but I was limited since I needed it to be viewed from straight above

A bed - I looked for a more kid-like bed but I was limited since I needed it to be viewed from straight above

Toy plane

Fan

Toy race Track

Toy cars

Carpet

I used masks (on all but the carpet) to cut out the objects from their original pictures then copy/pasted them to their own layers. The carpet I used the clone stamp to enlarge over the entire area. Then I resized and arranged the images on to the spread and then edited them to look a little more natural. I used the burn tool to make the bed look more 3D. I blurred everything on the floor to give it a feel of being at a greater distance than the fan.


Then I brought all of the layers in to After Effects.
First, I set the rotation for the fan. (After setting the anchor point of course) I set the fan as a parent to the rope and the rope a parent to the plane and the plane a parent to its shadow. I added a motion blur to all of these except to the plane because I felt the blur made it to hard to identify. The shadow still has a blur on it. It's also scaled up a few sizes and has a lowered opacity.


The little race cars are each following a motion sketch. They both have motion blurs applied to them. They are magic cars that race on their own! This kid has cool toys.

Photoshop Assignment

I started with a Halloween picture of myself as a vampire.  I went through and touched up blemishes and other weird spots with the healing brush.  Then I went through using the Dodge tool on the face area and Burn tool on my hair, lips, eyeliner and background.  I really wanted that pale blown out to give it a vampire feel.  I blurred out the background as well as the edges of the photo.  After that I sharpened the eyes only to make them pop more.  The black eyeliner wasn't quite the way I liked it so I used the blur tool to make it smoother around the eyes.  Then I created a mask layer isolating the eyes and saturated the picture to make it black and white with only the eyes in color.  Next came the background.  I found a picture of a castle wall on google and used it as the background.  I used the selection tool to grab as much of the face and hair as I could then applied it to a new layer.  Then I put the castle picture on to its own layer.  I lowered the exposure on the picture then burned the right edge of it.  I went through and blurred the whole picture to make it look more in the background and to blend it with my hair.  I had to smudge around the hair to make it look more natural.  

Before:

Before Mask:

Before matte:

Final:

Introduction

Howdy!

I'm Wynona Becker (no, not like Winona Ryder or Wynonna Judd but pronounced When-oh-na) but feel free to call me Nona. Anywho, I'm a senior RTF major (not so much the R) at the University of Texas graduating in May. My focus is mainly in Post Production. My dream job is editing for TV on a sitcom/drama.

I work for KLRU-TV, Austin's local PBS station. This is my fourth year working for KLRU. I started in the development department but then after a year and a half I transfered to the production department. I assist the producers with daily work and help on the local shows: Austin City Limits, Central Texas Gardner, Docubloggers, and Texas Monthly Talks. Just recently I produced and edited my own segment on the show Docubloggers. The segment is an interview of children's book author R. L. Stine when he visited town for the Austin Book Festival.

Last Spring I moved to Los Angeles with the UT-LA program. I completed an internship on the movie Spread starring Ashton Kutcher. I worked in the production office and occasionally got to go to set to observe and help out. I learned about everyone's position and the inner workings of a movie from more of a producer's stand point. One of the classes I took in the UT-LA program required us to make a short movie as a group. I took on the position as editor for my group. We created the YouTube spoof making fun of a Jimmy Kimmel sketch.

This past summer I interned on the documentary Tattooed Under Fire directed by Nancy Schiesari during its post production phase. Some of the things I assisted the editor with were pulling stock footage, verifying information, finding sound effects, and transcribing.

Other non-RTF facts about me: I love penguins, the color green, tennis, and cheese.