Bibliography

Research:

'Fighter aircraft of world wars 1 & 2' by Francis Crosby

'Concept aircraft - The aviation fact file'

Manchester Science and Industry Museum

http://www.mosi.org.uk/

Sounds and Music

http://http://www.youtube.com//

http://www.freesound.org/

First of the few film footage:

http://www.archive.org/details/TheFirstOfTheFew

Evaluation

I thought that this has been the most interesting and productive project I have done. It have been interested in it all the way through. Mainly because 3D modelling and animating is something I enjoy! I am also very happy with my final animation movie. I have come up with a really good story board which includes an old film called 'First of the few' and with that added some of my animation of a spitfire, it also shows the contrast of old and new, with a very old black and white film with a very modern updated animation. However I also really enjoyed building the model Spitfire. Building the spitfire really taught me some of the history of the plane, but also learning how it was built, understanding the shapes, curves of the plane.

I did receive a comment on the plane when it was being textured.

"There are a few bits that are noticeably "off". The wings are looking very thick for starters."

However I thought I was too far in development to go back and fix this issue, my time is limited. Though i did notice another problem that the tail was dipping down. I fixed this so it was straight.

Though there are some bad points. One is the resolution of the 'First of the few' film. Sadly I couldn't find a high resolution version of the film, they were all limited to this size. I wanted my animation movie to be 1280x720. I didn't want to scale the 'First of the few' footage bigger as it would become very distorted and pixelated. The film is already damaged as it is now with hairs, marks and scratches on it. So I've had to keep the film footage the same size and the animation footage the same. I could of made the animation footage smaller, but then the video would be to small and I wouldn't be happy with it. However keeping this in mind, I could have made the animation footage black and white and make the animation look old, like the film. Keeping the same stlye.

Final Animation!

I have finished my final animation! You can either watch a high quality version on CD1. Or watch it online on Youtube.com.

If you also check the Youtube link thre also maybe Feedback from other viewers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKrcF0peS2s&fmt=22

Getting ready for the final

I also wanted to create a crash scene with an enemy plane. However I don't have an enemy plane. So I am going to have to think of a different way of showing it. I am going to have a driver eye view of the plane crashing.

On the 2nd CD look for the video 'scene16'.

I then wanted an under water scene with bubbles, I did this.

On the 2nd CD look for the video 'scene23'

For this I need some water noice. I checked youtube for an underwater sound. Due to constraints I coul not do this, I don't have any underwater sound exquipment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7SCsVXiF4Q

I also needed a shoot scene like the one of the film.

I also re-created this, on the 2nd CD look for 'Scene131' and for the second part look for 'Scene132'.

This scene adds a lots of action to the animation.

Another scene that I thought of that wasn't in the film and I wanted to add was a lock on shot of the plane flying. One that you would see in in a game. So I had ago and I went and did it. I really like these scenes because it looks real! I really like the effect it makes you feal like your really there.

On the 2nd CD look for 'Scene25'.

Music

I have used two music tracks, both the same songs but different versions. I need music that fits the theme of the animation and if I have more then one track in the animation it must fit the same style of music. I already have one song in it, which is the Battlefield 1943 theme but at the beginning I want some more music to give it a dramtic start. I have been searching around and I have found this song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5HqlYBowvg&feature=related

Half way through at 1 mintue it changes to the the 1943 theme, so I'm not repeating it I'm going to keep the first bit and cut the second part out.

The two tracks are on the second CD

Animation Scenes

Scene 2 a/b (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene2a' and 'Scene2b'.)

This will be one of the first scenes. It's simply a squadron of spitfires flying across. This will be shown just after the film footage of the planes taking off. This has been rendered in 3Ds max. I have used a stationary camera with the plans flying by and a cloud in the background. Total time of 10 seconds, this is a very simple scene, but as this is only the beginning I don't want anything to dramatic.

Scene 3 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene3')

This scene will be mixed in with the pilot to station master conversation. I don't want the pilot to station master conversation to just be constant talking as it will get boring and uninteresting, it will add a bit more action into it and will also be a small build up to the fight. This is a simple tracking shot of the planes flying, the cloud in the background just adds some more movement. With out the cloud the plane would look like it's going no where.

 

 

However in this scene there is a problem, the wheels wasn't linked to the plane so it got left behind in the animation, however this can be mistaken as another plane, or a bird.

 

Scene4 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene5', the file names are a bit out of order as they were made at different times.), Scene 5 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene9'.) and Scene 6 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene10b'.).

 

These three scenes are the start of the attack. They will be played one after the other.

 

Scene 7 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene11')

 

This next scene includes water in it. I thought to give my film some variation I should have a water scene in it, so it's not just sky. I had some trouble creating this water effect so I had to search for a tutorial. I found out there are lots of different ways to create water, but I decided to stick to the easy solution and a good solution it was. The way to do it was to use the water texture in 'Arch and Design', it has pre-set settings making it easier for me!

 

Scene 8 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene6a')

This next scene is a simple swoop down and over. In this animation, if you look closely the animation is a bit uneven, it's not smooth. This is probably because I used the wrong animation assign controller.

Scene 9 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene4b')

This scene there is a plane flying over and another doing a barrel role, this is making things a bit more exciting. However, when saving it to an output the settings were wrong, they were set to 'Thoughsand of colours' and not 'Million of colours', so I have some nasty streaks on it.

Scene 10 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene7')

This time I wanted something different again. So I went to have a look at the original film and I found this:

So I thought I could do an animation of this, and I did. I think this scene looks really good!

Scene 11 (This can be found on CD 2, called 'Scene12b')

I now want a fighting scene. Again I went back to the original film.

So I re-produced this scene. However in this scene the spitfire is using it's guns. I'm going to take into account of my earlier post about bullet fire and motion blur. Also, for the bullet fire sound I'm going to render the sound with the animation, this will give me more control of when the sound should start.

As you can see in the image above the bullet comes out of the turret and on the right you can see the wave form of the bullet sound.

There is a test clip of all this in action on the 3rd CD called 'Test Animation 1'

Beginning introduction titles.

To create the introduction titles I wanted to have a war time theme. Something that will stand out, something that wont look out of place and something that will make it look dramatic. So for the background of the titles I need a texture that looks warn, roting wood or rusted metal. I have decided to go with rusted metal, rotting wood doesn't have that strong, but cold feeling to it. I found this image on the Internet:

It's a very poor image, but it's perfect for what I want. It's a very small image but that can be sorted out. I loaded it up in Photoshop and made the image the size of the final animation clip which is 1280x720. I then went into filters and chose Distort > Defuse Glow.

I can now add some text onto this.

I have added some text and also added a nice drop shadow, just to make it look a bit more atmospheric.

There will be four of these, one that introduces the original film, 'First of the few', 'Battle of Britain', '1942' and 'Michael Whiteley'. These will fade in, and fade out. These affects will be added in after effects.

As you can see I have control over the brightness and contrast. The plan is at the beginning of the image it will be black it will then brighten and then go back. You can see that some rows have diamonds in them, these are key frames, these key frames are fixed value so at that particular time it will be that value. The first key frames are -100 so it will be totally black. The second key frames for brightness will be 30 and for contrast it will be 50, it looks better to have a higher contrast because it will stand out more and seem like it's flashing, the third key frames will be -100 again because that's the fade out.

A small hiccup

In the film there is apart where a Spitfire spots the German planes, and then shows the German planes flying by. My issues is that I do not have a German plan to animate with, I haven't built one. I don't want to seriously cut a lot of film or remove any important footage because then I will be building my own story, I want to stick with the original First of the few story line. So I'm going to keep the exterior shot of the German plans flying by.

Animation Start

To put all my scenes together, add music and to add special effects I am going to use Adoby After Effects. I will need to import all of my vidoes into this program, and them put it all together, cutting scenes up so I can remove bits of film I don't want and also cutting film because it maybe to long. It can be very fidderly, making sure you don't cut out any sound from the films so when someone speeks they don't get cut off.

As the orginal film footage keeps switching from exteria back into interia shots means I have to do alot more snipping of the film because I don't need the exteria shots. I could just put the whole film in as one whole section and just put my animation footage over it, but that will give me less control of how much of my animation footage I can put it. So having them cut up like this means my animation can be any length of time.