The Deadline! Today

So the film is finally done and clocking in at only 4 minutes 30 seconds most people would be thinking that not a lot of effort goes into the movie, so here are a few figures to help the scale of the project be noted.

In chronological order from April 2008 -

Started working on the project ideas and a general design brief, we knew that it was going to be something to do with formula one cars that would be driving around a track possibly racing.

I started modelling the F1 car as we knew it would be needed. oddly starting from the front wing seemed to be the easiest place to start.

May - July
Research continued on the brief trying to find a purpose or cause to have the two cars racing, nothing came up.

The car continued to develop along with my Maya skills making the work a lot easier and quicker.

The FIA announce the change from Silverstone to Donington for the British GP in 2010. This suddenly presents us with an awesome opportunity to give our video a purpose. although the idea of using Donington was immensely optimistic it was still possible. Having never modelled an environment with my limited university teaching i started research on how to go about it whilst still finishing off the car.

August - September
The car model is complete and now the hard part of trying to rig the model so it can be animated. This took far longer than initially thought as I had to research everything before anything could be done figuring it out for myself as I went along.

The first draft of the rigged car was made, it looked terrible when animated.

We started to get in contact with Donington in the hope of getting their support. Communication between us and them was very long and sometimes we would wait as long as a month to hear a reply.

October
New university year starts our 3rd and final year.

Donington give us the go ahead along with a few design drawings of their plans in the rebuild. I also manage to find a huge pack of their submitted planning permission forms on their local council website. These forms detailed every modification and rebuild from small things like the types of apex's right up to the designs of each grandstand and major buildings like the new pit complex.

With this new information and permission to use the track not using the track would have been a crime.

I start making the track using their planning permission forms as a close guide to follow.

Jon starts making the buildings to fit onto the track.

I continue with the cars and re rig them using a royalty free rig as a base and modding it to accommodate the f1 car instead of the old Chrysler it came attached to.

November
The cars are still being rigged in a very long tedious process, I switch between the car, track and the texturing of the cars to try and keep my sanity. none of these tasks came naturally to me and so much more research was being done to keep up with each job.

Jon finishes half of the buildings

December

The cars are textured and look awesome
The new rig is modded to include suspension, driver controls, fixed the tyre rolling speeds as best I could and also spent a lot of time researching ways of animating it properly. It looks awesome
The track is finished and looks rubbish, dodgy road edges, impossible to lay proper textures on the surface and a real lack of aesthetic appeal to the track. The day after boxing day I start work on redoing it, this time with new help after much foraging on the internet for a new way of constructing it.

Jon Finishes the buildings but we decide it'd be quicker if i did the texturing.

Jon starts on the DVD menus, sound effects, music, and post processing work.

January
Continue working on the new track layout, its prooving much better looking and far more efficient to construct and texture once i've got the hang of it.
I start working on the storyboarding, This would normally have been an immediate job were this an animation involving characters and different sets however at this point we knew that the track and the cars were the most important and needed the longest time to work on. once these were constructed everything would come easily.

With the new story board completed we knew that we needed two settings, the track and a garage. this is a fairly simple setting and jon managed to set it up fairly quickly.

February
The track is now finished with only one or two bugs to work through, the lighting is put together after a fair amount of research and then the final textures are added to finish it off.

The garage scene lighting is far more difficult as this requires the use of the mental ray renderer to give a far higher quality to the shots making them almost lifelike. James Parsons is owed many thanks for really pushing me to keep working on those scenes and get the looking as good as they can get.

Thanks to a lot of research i'd managed to modify the car rigs to add a lot of flexibility in animating them, this meant i could simply draw a line which i wanted the car to travel on and it would not only follow it but turn the wheels with the corners as well. this meant that the animation which had been sheduled to take 6 weeks ( a shedule which we were now behind ) infact only took 2 afternoons. which catapulted us straight into the rendering phase. as we were now so far ahead of the schedule i decided to put extra time into rendering research. with pleanty of time to do test renders and work out the absolute best settings it saved us many many hours of rendering when the time came.

March
With just over a month to go it was crunch time. me and jon started to spend more and more time in the labs at uni and by mid march with 3 weeks to go we had already rendered out all the footage we required to make the movie. We could have stopped there and handed it in.

instead however i decided that with all that spare time, fully created and finalised assets, light rigs, render settings, animations and with labs of over 30 computers not being used during the night. It was almost unspoken when we suddenly started turning ourselves nocturnal in order to maximise the oppertunity we had infront of us. with 15 scenes already banked in there were only gains that could be made from working more.

In the last 2 weeks of march every single aspect of the movie was overhauled, perfected and re rendered, new angles were added and new moments were added into the script. Slow motion shots, rethinks of the plot, new effects were all added to the scenes as the presure started to build we just kept putting more and more time and effort in.

Jon finished the first drafts of the DVD menu and its extra features including slideshows and interactive maps.

April 2009.
the university decided to give the year group an extension of two days to make up for the terrible network problems we'd been having all year. fortunatly we didn't need this but we made sure we capitalised on it. with the extra 2 days as backup we played to the original deadline but increased our workload knowing if it all went wrong we'd still be safe. by the time we were done of the original 15 scenes rendered for the final product a month before the deadline, only 2 and a half of those scenes were actually used. over 50 extra shots and angles were rendered and roughly 30 of them made the final cut. this allowed us to be very choosy with the final edit, perfecting it as we went along.

Thursday 9th April 2009 - The New official deadline
I've spent the last two days relaxing with my girlfriend eating good food at a restaurant and sitting in the sun whilst jons been back home to visit family and gone out celebrating.

Over the course of the project we've managed to accumulate:
- 28,000 rendered images
- Over 700 Hours of rendering
- 14 minutes of usable footage
- 8 drafts of the final movie
- 6 DVD's with Donington DVD sleeves, designed by jon
- 2 styles of posters designed by jon
- 2 rigged textured and fully animatable F1 cars
- 1 Scale model of the Donington Park Track as it will be in 2010 ( you can put a satelite image over the top of it and it fits perfectly.

And finally 1 complete final year project handed in 2 days before the deadline with two incredibly worn out student now relaxing knowing that they've produced something to the best of their abilities. I can't wait for the marks