Evaluation

Overview
In General, I am happy with the visual look of my piece. However, I do not think it is an ideal solution for the track. That said, the brief was very loose from a creative viewpoint and I do feel the piece produced was a unique and 'out of the norm' response to the track which will make the piece stand out if used as promotional material. Unfortunately, due to errors with the camera work the footage isn't ideal.

Workflow
Having developed a feel for working in a structured workflow in task 1, this was easy to adapt to this project. The main difference was the introduction of Nuke, which replaced AfterEffects for the majority of tasks. The main workflow for the project was: Premiere to edit the rushes --> nuke to key the footage --> Maya to animate and render the hoop --> AfterEffects for motion Graphics --> Nuke for the composition and correction filters --> Premiere for final edit. This was a very effective workflow and other than forgetting to render out my AfterEffects composition at the correct framerate, worked really well.

Product
While it is far from perfect; Overall, I am very happy with the animation of the hula hoop. When I came up with the idea to us a CG hoop I was very unsure how well it would work but despite it being a lot more work than originally thought, I feel the outcome works well.
Unfortunately,  due to an error with the way I set up the camera on location, I ended up with far too much motion blur which wasn't ideal for keying the footage. This was also not helped by me capturing the footage interlaced. I realised this was the case while working on the first shot. However, due to the timescale of the project, decided not to recapture the footage. In hindsight, this was a massive error and it really reflects in the final output. That said, I am happy with the overall look and flow of the piece.

Conclusion
Based on the various restrictions of the project, I am happy with the outcome. Apart from the obvious footage issues and not being able to source a professional dancer in time, I am happy with the project. I do feel it would have benefited with some more planning before filming the footage to get some more interesting shots. The best thing I have taken from this project is being comfortable in my ability to project a good product from Nuke as well as integrate it successfully in my workflow.

Final Product

After Effects Pixel Matrix

For the projects background, I wanted to try and recreate a pixel matrix that are used on a lot of the time when broadcasting from a television studio

As the track is very repetitive, I wanted this to be reflected with a simple repeating pattern in the background. 

I started by making a composition that was 140x80 pixels which will hold all my shape animations. I then embedded a scaled version of this inside a larger composition over which I used a line array to create an 'outline' for each of the pixels. 

Rather than keyframe all the shaped to move with the music, I used the keyframe assistant within after effects  to convert the waveform to usable values. Then using the code and pickwhip tools I attached this drive the scale and intensity values on the shape layers. This sequence was then rendered out and import into my Nuke composition.

 

Nuke Keying + Compositing

Having spent a day or too getting used to the nuke interface...I am NEVER comping in AfterEffects again. The plan is to get the hula hoop and dancer comped together then do a Sound control pixel matrix in the background. I started the pipeline by trying out different keyers to see which worked best with the footage. I found, for the majority of shots, keylight worked the best, although i am still not completely happy with the results in places. This may be a case for roto work later on.
I then garbaged out and rescaled to frame the dancer.
After rendering out the maya animation I imported it and merged two copys onto the main pipeline. This allowed me to rotoscope parts of the hoop to appear in front of the dancer to give the illusion of depth. (I'm sure there is an easier way to do this using z depth but i couldn't find it.)
I then added a light wrap effect to give a tint from the background as it will be a light desplay and will therefore act as a backlight.

I'm now going to hop over to after effects to do some motion graphics for the display.

Hula Hoop

I originally planned to use a particle emitter to have the main the guy 'Draw' the hula hoop. After a few tests within maya and nuke i could not get the look I wanted largely down to the particles not holding a shape. I thenmoved on to designing the hula hoop as an actual object. However, I didn't want the hoop to be a solid colour, so designed a rig with glowing balls inside the hoop that move in the oppsite direction, changing the viewers perspective of the speed of the hoop. As the edited sequence includes a swap of hoops I've designed it in two different colours do show a differential between them. I am rendering out using motion blur within maya mental ray renderer.

 

Maya Animation

As I had chosen to use keyframed animation I set up a rig using a locater to make animating it easier. Based on my research and referneces the far side of the hula hoop is normally tilted downwards. The rig allowed me to set a tilt on the hula hoop itself so that i could just rotate the locator and the tilt would always stay correct. I'd already done a rough key of the footage and exported an image  sequence so i was able to set this up as a background plane to use as reference while animating. However, this proved annoying as on several occasions I started rendering and forgot to remove it.

Filming update

Unfortunatly,down to the tight turn around on this project and Charlies tight schedule; I have been unable to arrange a filming session with her. I did however set up a portable greenscreen and film a guy I have used in some of my videos before. The 'invisible hula hoop' was a lot harder to direct than I had origionally though it would be. This was not helped by the size of the greenscreen. I did try several different styles of hula movement, until we found one that seamed to work.
Overall, I am fairly happy with the rushes from the camera; however, i fear the intense hot spot caused bybacklight, mixed with the dirtiness of the greenscreen will cause some problems when it comes to keying.