Anim3010: Production Practices

This week was a continuation of compositing backgrounds and adding shading! I made sure to pay attention to where the light was coming from in the background when adding the shading the characters.  Note the colour grading of this gif was edited wrong, with too much of a yellow hue, most notable on the skin. it will be fixed in the final edit. Note: the Roll has been flipped, fixing the continuity error that it created.  With this, I was able to put together the first version of the final cut which can be found here. Next, I will need to add the sound effects and also make the cuts a little tighter so that the animation flows more smoothly. 

The majority of this week was spent painting and adding backgrounds to around half of the animation sequences, in addition to the shading. This actually took less time than I anticipated. That being said it still took a long time overall. For the backgrounds I used Worcester as inspiration, I went to the city centre and took a bunch of reference photos from which to create under-painting for, I also made sure to make the colour palette of the city far more purple to make the aesthetic that was designed during pre-production. In total I there was 28 different backgrounds painted.  Below are the segments of animation composited with the background. I made sure to also include ambient lighting that would come from powers and lasers, and also make sure to add drop shadows so that the characters were not just floating in the frame, but instead feel like they are in fact part of the environment.  Note tha...

This week I wanted to tackle two parts of the Animatic I was the least happy with. I feel that the animatic in these two scenes was very static and crudely drawn. My goal is to make the character animation feel realistic and authentic so these parts of the animation needed a good redesign.  I began by taking a series of videos of myself doing the "lifting" motion that I wanted to the character to perform. Once I got a video I was happy with, I took screenshots of the "keyframes" and rotoscoped my character on the top. I then went ahead and added the in-betweens to smooth the animation out, the in-betweens were not Roto'd but instead only referenced, as I do not want to rely on Rotoscoping, as it seems more like a cop-out rather than an expression of skill. Seeing as the rock would be taking the brunt of the blast, and was in fact floating, I animated it being slowly pushed back by the rays and then popping back to its starting back then the onsl...

With this week came one of the most challenging parts of the animation. The onion skin tool came in very handy when creating the in-betweens for this part of the animation. I also changed the orange to the purple, so that it remained consistent with the rest of the animation.  I worked on the in-betweens and also added the keyframes for how I wanted the effects to look. I wanted this set of effects to have a chaotic effect on them, so there was less concern with having them match the previous frame, which added them to the chaotic nature of them. With this part of the animation I wanted to try with some more detailed effects as they get close to the camera, so with this, the effects are not just a single colour with hopefully adds to the aesthetic appeal of the shot.  Once the in-betweens were done, the colour was added.  WIP The final outcome of the scene. I am very happy with how this came out, as it quite of easily could have worked...