Sound...

Sound is crucial to our production, especially since the end of our short film is solely depending on sound to deliver the ending twist. It did take a while to find a whole bunch of necessary sounds for the production but I managed to find quite a few sound effects as well as some good tracks to play in the final scenes. I kept consulting the whole team and collectively we filtered out which ones we liked and disliked.

Here are just a few links to the sounds that will be in the final film.

This is the heartbeat sound needed for the final scene.

http://freesound.org/people/samfk360/sounds/148897/

This short tune will be playing during the hospital scene.

http://freesound.org/people/cheesepuff/sounds/110215/

This short piano tune will be used for our credits.

http://freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/128551/

We've used a lot of sounds and can't list/link them all here.

However, all of the sound effects we will be using can be found at http://freesound.org/. We decided to use this site because all the sound is free for use in non-profit productions.

All the providers of these sounds will be credited in our final assessment submission.

Sketchbook Crayon Drawings...

Before we began rendering I realized that the scenes were missing the pictures that Katie draws within the dream world. So I quickly whipped these up for the appropriate scenes where the sketchbook will be seen within the shots. Notice that I stylized the drawings the same way as the Hospital Room drawings.

Sketchbook Drawing Scene 4

This is very first image Katie draws in the dreamworld. I simply referenced this image to the Tyre Swing Tree that we had already modelled.

Sketchbook Drawing Scene 9

Scene 9 is a high angled down shot which shows the sketchbook clearly. This scene is where the bridge builds itself.

Sketchbook Drawing Scene 13-14

This is Katie's last drawing before becoming ill in scene 13 just after the butterflies fly by. More visible in scene 14 when the sketchbook drops to the ground.

I also had to draw up a few more crayon pictures for Katie's hospital room because there were extra pictures in the final hospital room layout.

Detty The Teddy Bear

Detty is Katie's personal bodyguard. He protects her when she goes to sleep. He also makes appearances in the dream world and in the hospital.

Blockee Cubes

Blockee Cubes block secrets from getting out. Unless you can decipher the word they represent, you will never know the secret.

Environment Re-edit...

Encountered multiple problems through the importation of the flowers which were morphed using blended shapes.

Dreamworld Final

Our final look for the Dreamworld. 

All the objects in grey have their textures turned off because the scene would lag majorly if they were on. This was the biggest problem we encountered. After Jitesh helped me import the flowers, I reordered them into our scene and made sure they were visually appealing for all our appropriate camera shots. As I turned on the textures the computer froze.

Dreamworld Wireframe

We had to revert to working in wireframe mode as to try and reduce the computers processing time while we animate but because all the flowers have already been animated with blend shapes there was still a bit of lag. This was also due to having all the multiple blend shapes within the scene. We tried to delete all the blend shapes but that just messed up the animations of the flowers.

Dreamworld Bounding Box

So we tried putting everything in Bounding Box mode as to fully reduce processing time which allowed the computer to run fine. But it would be very difficult to animate in this mode because you wouldn't be able to visualize anything animated.

Flower Blend Shape Groups

This is just half of the blend shapes of the flowers that we have in our Dreamworld environment.

Flower Blend Shape Army

These are all the blend shapes for the flowers. There were just too many shapes that I couldn't separate them all so I just left them overlapping each other. They were hidden off camera anyway. This probably was the biggest contributor to crashing Maya several times. But they were necessary to be there for our flower morphs to work.

With help from Jitesh and immense help from our tutor Raj we came up with a solution after trying all the options above. So I just went through all the individual shot layouts and deleted everything that wouldn't be seen within the shot. Went into the outliner and deleted objects at a time, even entire groups. Most annoyingly the blend shapes that weren't needed for any animation in certain scenes. Deleted all unused layers and unused texture nodes from the Hypershade. This was was extremely daunting but highly rewarding as our scenes no longer lag or freeze with the textures on.

Layouts...

Did some of the layouts for the beginning scenes, all ready for animation.

Scene 3 Layout

This is the scene when Katie first draws on the sketchbook.

Scene 4 Layout

Katie's first picture is revealed in this scene before she moves her sketchbook down to reveal the "Tyre Swing Tree" materialized behind it.

Scene 6 Layout

In this scene Katie begins to walk off as a flower grows beside her foot.

I double checked that everything was in order from character placement to camera placement.