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Taking advantage of a rare day off the recently recuperated, DI Alec Hardy decides it's time to blow away the cobwebs and get back into his old fitness regime. Only, he should've known better than to leave shopping for new balls in the hands of his colleague DS Miller.
No detectives were harmed in the making of this short film. Just a bit of damaged pride!
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— The making of Miller's New Balls —
OK, so I guess by now you've established I'm a bit nutty about all things Broadchurch particularly its two lead detectives Miller (Olivia Colman) and Hardy (David Tennant). However, working on my fandoms doesn't mean I compromise on quality. It's when I'm working on something personal I usually challenge myself the most.
Real life actors are deemed a difficult bunch to work with at the best of times. However, if there's one breed of actor who is likely to test the patience of any amateur animator — it's the 3D actor! Because, as anyone who has ever animated anything in a 3D package knows, what works one day, never usually works the next. It's often a very long, slow and frustrating process that can take several hours, days or even weeks to complete! However, this time, I did stop short of throwing my whole computer in the air. It's just too precious!
Processing the work and creating artificial visemes
I don't animate full-time. Nor do I own high-end, movie generating software. And, realising a .gif wouldn't work, I decided to return to a process I have used before to create an animated video using the virtual platform Second Life. It involves using Photoshop's animation frames, combined with QuickTime's screen recorder. I find it retains an animated files quality. The files are then imported, into iMovie. (I did say I like to keep things simple!)
Speech patterns; in this instance, the chewing motion, is created by rendering the same head, several times, with just a few subtle changes made to the visemes. It would have been a stable run had I not made a grave error early on in the process. Accidentally, I changed the pixel size on the DAZ render, which left me with several, incorrectly sized figures that I would now have to try and resize and overlay manually. I guess we live and learn. Sometimes the hard way!
Stage progression: This illustrates the postwork undertaken in photoshop in reverse
Character Info: ©VirtualrealiDT is a commercially licensed poseable 3D character - created using the DAZ Generation 4 ++Morphs model. The character has been meticulously crafted from photographic reference and re-textured using commercially licensed skins combined with licensed 3D products. The character is in constant progression and may appear in a number of varying projects, which are modified to suit.
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