We have now started the Student animation Film Project(SFP) as I wrote in my last post. Me and some other classmates have managed to gather a crew, and we have already started our journey to create an animation short film. We are still working on the plot, but I will post it as soon as we have it nailed to the wall. What I want to write about in this post is the style of the film, and what kind of animation film we will make.

The film is going to be live footage mixed with 3D animation, like in the movies "Transformers" and "I, Robot". What we do is that we shoot all the scenes for the film in live footage. Then we track all the scenes so we can mix our 3D animation into the live footage. The second process is called tracking because we use software to track points in the live footage which can be translated into points in 3D space. The process of mixing live footage and 3D animation we call compositing, even though compositing does not have to include both live footage and 3D animation, we call it compositing because it describes the process of combining visual elements from separate sources.

As for the style of the film it will be a realistic animation and render style, and the goal is to make the 3D animation that's added to look as natural as possible. The style, especially the style of textures, will be more dirty than clean, as we are going to portrait a near future or a parallel universe not to far from what we are used to.

That's it for this time, and I will be sure to update this post with some pictures as soon as I can.