Cymru Am Byth was broadcast in May-April 2006 on S4C to very good ratings. The show afforded us a great opportunity to do a lot more character animation, coupled with some live-action compositing to keep me happy. Although the design was by Ryan Neal, the dragon was built and animated by Romano Marenghi and composited by myself in about eight weeks.
The title sequence was shot in one day by Aron, Owen, Romano and myself on Cowbridge Road, Cardiff in our first experiment with an HD workflow. The added resolution from the HDV camera meant we were able to track the camera paths a lot finer and also adjust the framing if the shot was too wide. Although originally much longer and more involved, the title sequence was a chance to finally do the opposite of what we'd been doing on Con Passionate up until a few days previously - put CG into live-action, rather than the other way around. Now that I had a full version of PFTrack, I put it to work tracking the necessary camera paths, which it did effortlessly. I even used it to reconstruct the floor plane and provide shadows for the dragon. Annoying, I ran out of time when doing the pub shot so there's a little bit of a slip where the camera wasn't completely finished, but no-one's noticed by me!
The brief was to make the dragon sit in the scene and comment on the action, although we tried hard to not call too much attention to the animation. There's a fine balancing act between putting an animated character in the scene to grab the audience's attention and putting an animated character in the scene that jumps around all over the place and distracts the flow of the narrative. Many blockbusters fail on that point.
From my point of view, the hardest part was not really the compositing so much as the lighting. All the lighting was done with the Brazil renderer in Max which is an accessible system that produces some startingly realistic results. For most of the scenes, I just used the skylight for global illumination and then one or two extra area lights to provide directional sunlight or man-made light. Invisible planes were used to create shadows on the dragon so that he looked as if he fitting into the environment. Compared to the endless rendering of Con Passionate, most of the dragon stuff rendered in a few hours! Motion blur was then added in After Effects.
We were all really pleased with the results. Although they only appear on screen for a short time, they sit very well in the shot and don't clash with the documentary scenes going on around them.
Cymru Am Byth was broadcast in May-April 2006 on S4C to very good ratings. The show afforded us a great opportunity to do a lot more character animation, coupled with some live-action compositing to keep me happy. Although the design was by Ryan Neal, the dragon was built and animated by Romano Marenghi and composited by myself in about eight weeks.
