D&ad; Sound editing

To get rid of the white noise and reduce the whistle I needed to reduce the frequencies where this whistle occurs then replacing them with another effects equalizer. I also put a voiceover voice enhancer effect to increase the depth of the sample.

D&ad; Sound editing

I then cut the sample to make the audio fit better and automated it with the volume setting. As the sample got louder and quieter this automating was needed to allow a constant volume. After this I began to edit the music samples in a similar fashion, this time to ensure the music wasn't interfering with the voice over.

D&ad; Sound editing

When I first recieved the narrative sample, I was a little confused as to what I could do to resurect it. It was incredibly quiet with an echo and an extremely high pitch whistle over nearly every 's' word. I started by taking it into soundtrack pro to boost the volume intialy as logic struggled to increase the volume without loosing quality. As the sample had a lot of high end feedback I decided to only increase the low to mid frequencies. This enabled the production of a sound that was editable in logic pro.

D&ad; Development, Finishing touches

Finally I modeled a simple lamppost to give a bit more detail to my cityscape, I simply copied this into my cityscape and duplicated it. I set up a simple camera path and rendered the animation in a tiff image sequence.

D&ad; Development, assigning road and pavement textures in Maya

Create a poly plane and assign a lambert shader to it, plug in the road texture made in Photoshop to the color selection of the shader window. This should apply the texture to the poly plane, repeat this process but with poly cubes for the pavement then duplicate. This is the result I got in my render view.

D&ad; Development, pavement texture

First make a UV snapshot of the material you want to assign your texture to, open in Photoshop. Using the same process as before, this time find a lighter texture. I applied a grey layer to the edge of the texture to give a curb effect.

D&ad; Development, creating a road texture

First of all find yourself a nice asphalt texture, open in Photoshop and add your road markings by using the marquee tool and fill white lines for the centre of the road with two thinner parallel yellow ones at each side. Create curved yellow marks for the edge where this road will join another. Duplicate to make a full road network not forgetting to create an alpha channel to make sure the invisible bits won't be seen when assigned to a material in maya.

D&ad; Maya Buildings

These buildings were created using Mayas building paint effects tool, the easiest method of creating 3D buildings. The method is simple, there's a choice of 3D objects from trees to buildings and everything in between that can be created with a simple couple of mouse clicks. The paint effects can the be converted into polygons.

D&ad; Development Texturing in Maya

After creating a UV map of a building made in maya, I took an image of building an cut it out it to fit the map of the building. After applying this texture to the building map I decided to add windows by creating a second texture for the building map this time using white squares on a black background. This texture reflects the light giving a glass effect. The sky was created by making a polygon sphere with a HDR image of a cloudy sky texture applied, simples.

D&ad; Ideas cityscape

Having been assigned the job of creating a cityscape for this project, I decided the best place to start would be looking at some examples of other peoples work on computer generated futuristic cities.

D&AD; Black Holes, Maya Earth

The rest of the group were away today, so I decided to spend my time creating the earth and moon in Maya. This touch of photo-realism I think is key in capturing the imagination. I wanted to go back to drawing board this session as I think we need to revisit the concept, focusing less on black holes and more on inspiring young minds. This will have to wait till Tuesday now

D&AD; Black Holes, Mark's After Effects work

This is an for the idea level of production intended for the motion graphics we plan to use for much of this short animation on the topic of black holes. Good work Mark!

D&AD Brief; I have chosen a brief

I after much consideration, (actually I lie.) After listening to the song for the music video brief I have decided to go with the Black Holes brief. The first time I heard the song it wasn't so bad, however the second and third times that I heard it, I started to feel like shooting myself. This is not what you want if it's something that would have to be listened to over and over again. This isn't the only reason for my choice however.

I feel my prior knowledge on this topic combined with my basic After Effects and Maya skills should make a good contribution towards the production of an educational animation on the topic of black holes.

D&AD; Choosing a brief

When first given the list of possible live briefs to choose from I was able to narrow it down straight away in two possible candidates. The first of which is one that I can see been very popular as I feel it would be the easiest to tackle and possibly the most interesting out of the choices I also had a high interest this area and began looking into the production of music videos as a possible career oppurtunity.

My other choice is within an area that has been of great interest to me since my earliest memories. The Black holes brief would give me a chance to expand on my current knowledge of Maya and After Effects whilst at the same time I can be sure it is not something I am likely to loose interest in. The only thing I am skeptical about is figuring out how to communicate this message to a younger audience.