Gav Rymill

A Light Fist

I've developed the Grey/Trask chat a bit further. There are unfortunately a few glitches which I haven't ironed out, and I'm not sure of an easy way to do it. I reckon that rolling the dice on more generations would eventually produce clips that I could use but it eats up a lot of money trying to get things right.

I've also been doing a lot with Viggle and Pika this week, but nothing worth seeing beyond a few weird and messy experiments.

Brief Side Quest: Missing War Machines

I've been thinking about how missing bits of otherwise recovered episodes have been dealt with in the past. The War Machines is a good test case because in this clip we have the start and frames of the missing seconds, so we know how it was shot.

The VHS and DVD releases both cut away to WOTAN, using differing duplicated footage. I wanted to see if we could get closer to what was removed by the censors.

I tried three different ways to generate new footage of Krimpton. Hedra output...

4 Little Episode 3 Bits

In the Sea Eagle, the output worked rather well (perhaps a little too realistic in the middle!), although it doesn't actually match the shot in the episode. What should happen is that the wench is called to bring wine, and in the telesnap she's standing at the table waiting to paid. So in this animation it doesn't align because she comes to the table and the wine's already there, but I was just playing around. To iron this out, I'll photoshop out the drinks and try to make extra keyframes to ...

Doctor Haystack (Faux)

This isn't an authentic single shot but I was enticed by the fact that there are several telesnaps in this scene with a similar view, so I thought I might be able to do some interpolation between them.

Some of the movements are too slow, and others are too jerky, but it's quite fun, as it gives an overall flavour of the interaction, although doesn't connect to the audio.

I will redo this properly but first I'm going to do a breakdown of the shots to show that the above actually c...

Kirsty, Polly and Apology

Hi Everyone,

I'm sorry for the lack of updates. Lots of difficult stuff going on personally and financially. Paradoxically, not being able to work on this lead to me pausing Patreon as I don't want to upset anyone - but this meant I had to cancel some software subscriptions, which caught me in a vicious circle!

Anyway, I'll be doing a couple of posts today, and I might do a post about all the clips that haven't worked out. Sometimes a lot of time and money goes into bits that don'...

Highlanders Moments (Mute)

Hi all,

Sorry the Highlanders updates have been sparse. I've had a frustratingly low hit rate of good results, but I'm happy with many aspects of this lot. Maintaining the likeness continues to be a challenge, but I'm pleased with the outcomes of much of the body movements. I've got a new tool to play with which will do good dialogue but requires a bit of mo-cap so I have to lip-sync all the lines perfectly!

I've put a lot of time into the telescope shot of the gallows which hasn'...

Wheel in Space FIVE animation Iz Skinner

Hello all!

Here is the final episode of their animation! i hope you enjoy!

Gav

Iz Skinner's Wheel in Space Ep FOUR!

Hello!

I hope you're enjoying these as much as I did. The sheer amount of work which must have gone in to planning each character movement and then capturing them all. When you consider the Wheel's control room which is full of the cast and extras, it's an amazing achievement for just two people.

Episode five to come shortly!

Thanks for all your support!

Gav

Iz Skinner's Wheel in Space 3D Ep Two

Hello!

Here is episode two of Iz and Steve Skinner's animated version of the Wheel in Space.

Gav

Iz Skinner's Wheel in Space 3D Animated

Morning all,

I'm sorry I've not posted lately. Things are a bit tricky. By way of an apology I've got something rather marvellous to share with you. The incredible Iz Skinner (TARDIS TimeGirl) and her partner have completed their recreation of the Wheel in Space missing episodes, and she's said I can share them here.

It's all done with mocap, just the two of them in the lounge with webcams, and it's rendered in Lightwave. I love how it's textured so sympathetically.

I'll upl...

Cockade Piffle WIP (Probably Abandoned)

Morning all,

So I've been struggling with this clip for a week, and it's still full of glitches and problems that I'm trying to smooth out, but a new tool has just come available which might be the best way to deal with multiple characters' speech, so I think I'm going to give up on this as a lost cause, and switch to a new method to see what results it yields. But in the meantime here's where I got to.

Broadly speaking I was pleased with it. I think it's fairly coherent, and I'm ...

This might prove very useful...

So this is really intriguing. Runway will now take an existing video and transform it into another style. As an experiment I fed it a couple of clips of my Wheel in Space animatic with its flat grey characters and asked it to make it realistic. On the first test I gave it a telesnap for reference and for the second I just asked to look like 1960s TV.

The results, although not good, are really compelling. The lack of human movement is just because there was none in the input video. The w...

Six Seconds Stargazing

Evening All,

I've been grappling with this one for a few days and I'm mostly happy with it. The movement is a little stop-start and I haven't successfully got Troughton lip-syncing to his astrological verbiage, however I'm delighted at the overall appearance, and the sense of movement in the tassel on the recorder and the wobble of the chain.

Troughton Trivia - Flute & Blood!

Hello!

Here are two snippets of info I thought you might enjoy, delivered via the medium of wonky video!

Gav

Fun in the Dungeon. Fungeon.

Hello!

I'll do another update in the next couple of days as there's a few more clips which weren't quite as successful but I'm having a lot of fun with a tool called Kling which has proven better than Luma. It has a motion brush feature which not only allows you to tell it which bits you want it to move, but more importantly, which bits you don't want it to move.

Kling is also really receptive to colours being used as guidance in keyframing and prompts, so I got good results with ...

Keyframed Photos to Video

This is outside the remit of what I'm doing really (since my goal isn't to approximate shots using other references - well, not at the moment anyway) but the results are pretty impressive. The software will take one or two photos of the same scene and generate movement through the environment.

I think the first example is really good, and I'm in awe of how it's perceived the background, with consistency to the walls and roof as they disappear and reappear behind the actors. Also the wa...

Exciting Discovery! We've Been Wrong About The Opening Scene! [Mini Documentary]

Thanks to some brilliant observations from Rhys Williams, I've been able to work out how the Loose Canon reconstruction is incorrect, and how the broadcast version differed from the script. There are still some unanswered questions but we're a step closer to understanding what the episode looked like.

(And you have to love the irony that I'm worrying about this at the same time Ian drops his version of episode one, which features drone shots and a cast of thousands...)

Four Bits of Varying Success

I've had a lot of shots just not working out this last week, for various reasons. There's a lot which is nearly there, but things just glitch or don't flow properly. Anyway, I thought I'd share four snippets each of which have problems.

The last two are a brand new tool called Kling which uses generative 3D and I'm pretty impressed with the movement. from single telesnaps. As soon as they introduce their end keyframe feature, we should see a dramatic improvement. As I've said before, t...

Brief Bit of Boating

Here I used two telesnaps as start and end keyframes to create movement. I don’t know if these telesnaps are really this close together temporally but if they are then this is extremely close to recovering a missing clip. Added a bit of film grain for verisimilitude.

This moment is when Polly and Kirsty are scoping out the Annabelle.

Extended Horseplay

I've been experimenting with the start of this scene and got some quite nice results with the horse. There are some unnatural movements here and there but overall I rather like it.

Horsing Around

Pretty happy with how this came out. I had to do some jiggery-pokery (technical term) to merge different elements of two attempts, and then I did some extra post production. I haven't attempted to add any lip movement to this, but I might try that next.

Revisiting Telesnap #37

I hadn't intended to go back to shots I'd already done until I'd had a crack at everything once, but I couldn't resist running this one through the newer software, for a direct comparison to the version I'd done earlier.

The software is doing a very good job of working out all the words from the audio, but it's missed a few, so I'm going to try it again but dubbing over the original audio with clearer words to see if that helps, then I can restore the original audio in the final edit.<...

Sword Interruption

Ah, this so nearly works! If only it was possible to control it a little better. I did some work behind the scenes to try to ensure the frames would blend together, and there's a lot here which is nice. But obviously the magical transformation from hat to sword is not desirable, and Ben's reaction time is a little slow! But I love the fact that it creates a reaction for The Doctor when the sword appears!

Telescopic Gallows

Evening all.

This is another shot created from a start and end telesnap and I think it's worked pretty well. The software has made the shot pan for longer and with far more extras than would have been on set, but I find this a delightfully authentic in its overall feel.

I'm going to try extending the clip by five seconds to see if it will generate any fun business with the ropes. Three other test clips today failed spectacularly and aren't worth sharing.

Gav

Highland Fling

Final test for today. Doesn’t quite work as the software has struggled to understand which clothes / body parts belong to which person. Not surprising as I can’t work it out myself when looking at the telesnap.

But let’s look at the positives. It’s done well to understand the general scene, and the way the shadow of the group moves across the heather is the kind of small detail we tend not to appreciate. Also the simple fact is that it understands to keep the upright rifle in th...

Polly in a Pickle Cliffhanger

Now I think we're seeing the real potential of this process. We've got a start and end image and the software has really understood the assignment. Her hands go rather wacky but overall I think this successfully encapsulates what's going on, and that's really what we're after. We want the artificially generated movement to help tell the story of what was happening in the scene, which the telesnap has captured.

Opening Shot of Episode One

This is another shot created with two keyframes but what's different here is that I created the start keyframe myself. The movement is rather quirky but what I love here is the fact that the software has done a really good job of separating the people so that they move independently of each other. There's excellent depth to the shape of the bodies and I'm impressed that it's created the essence of Jamie, despite having so little to work with.It's handled the legs of Kirsty and the Laird very ...

When is a jar not a jar?

Another test with the keyframe feature, since we have two shots with Kirsty and Polly in the cave. Amusingly, I think it's interpreted Kirsty's posture as trying to open a jar or packet of food. Polly unfortunately moves like a character from a horror movie. Still, it's interesting. The candle is perfect and I like the gentle camera movement. I might try a couple more of these.

Polly Eyes

Luma's DreamMachine now has a feature where you can give it start and end keyframes and it will create the middle movement. I thought I'd try out the end of episode one where we have two shots of Polly in close-up. It's moderately successful, although the eye movement is uncanny and it's generated too much movement, but still quite a convincing appearance of real footage.

Trask Episode Two Cliffhanger

Hello!,

Well, I'm really impressed with this new software which has just been released by Hedra.. Quite natural movement, eyes, expressions, etc. It has both text-to-speech option and also WAV interpretation. The former leads to more accurate lip movement, but this uses the audio, so the timing is better, despite it not fully understanding the words "belay" and "swabs." In due course I'll properly recreate the body going into the water which should complete this shot sequence nicely. 2024-06-21 17:06:13 +0000 UTC View Post