Video Problems

Here's the first version of Captain Man ©. This man was used for the pitch for Nick with the promise that the final version would look more like the drawings, we're making a final version of him now. The script for this one is the character looking at the camera, blinking, scratching his face and farting. The animation was really a test to prove that we could make this animation and also to see if the idea had any charm to it.

Creating our animation involved box modeling; starting with a cube and creating points to add definition and shapes. Ideally we could have created the characters using the EP curve tool, but I didn't know how to convert them to polygons! Anyways, this seems fine as it'll add a bit more depth to them and help us keep away from a style becomming closer to South Park which is made in a similar way in Maya.

The background is a simple flat surface which can be fillled with a motion video. The characters are placed infront of the video and viewed from a side pane which makes the characters look 2D. I used my handy Mini-DV based camera for this which is limited by a resolution of around 520 lines. When you compare the capture on the left which uses a photo as a background with the one on the right using my video, you'll notice the big difference in quality. The characer can be rendered in a standard 720p HD resolution. However, my camera can't record video to match this standard so we need a HD camera from Uni.