Week 7

Following on from the work I did last week, I wanted to animate the Antagonists counter to her attack. In the initial Animatic, there was again just as a basic reaction shot, followed by the sword being drawn. I felt that the animation was relying on these reaction shots too much, and wanted to experiment with camera angles and movement. I came up with the idea to have the camera follow the perspective of the ray that leads into the reaction shot. 

The camera angle of where they use their sword is a low angle to show the size and power of this character, it makes the character seem more large and imposing than he otherwise is, and helps convey the strength of this character, as he swats away the blast as if it were nothing. 

My initial test proved that the concept worked. Again I added the green streaks as the antagonist character moved, to helped give more visual interest to some otherwise basic shots. 

As stated in previous weeks, most of the scenes with the antagonist character need a redraw. 

I again utilised the use of camera shake and motion blur to help give the impact of the blast more weight and impact. I hoped that it would also give the animation a sense of believability, and I feel that it was successful in this endeavour.

Once the redraw was complete, I began to add colour, as there were many independent entities in the frame, all moving at different times, I felt that it was best to colour the piece in a  series of layers in order to be less destructive with my colouring. 

WIP. Note how multiple layers are used on the sword close up.

The final animation piece. 

I did not have much time to work on much else animation this week, as the first piece took a substantial amount of time. However, I did use this to test the layer mask function in the animation suite, which would allow me to shade using a multip layer, something that I had been unable to work out until now. As the setting of the animation will be at night with bright neon lights, I chose a harsh purple light to shade the animation with. I really do think that this helps take my current animation to the next level. I plan to shade the rest of the animation when all the main character animation is complete, as that is more important at the moment than adding shade. 

For this animation piece, as it was quite static, bar the shading, I wanted to really focus on the expressions and camera angles, for the shadow sequence, I chose to place the camera angle above Robyn in contrast to the previous part of the animation I animated. I did this to really convey the sense of dread and how small and insignificant she feels, after all, this dream sequence is being dreamt by a tiny child after all. 

Amid purple was used on a lymultiply layer, which gives of a hard cast cold shadow. This is clipped to the layer below it, this being the colour layer, so that the shadow doesn't go outside the lines.

 To Shade non-destructively. you select the hue of what colour you want the shadow to be, in this case, I wanted it to be purple. And of a separate layer paint where the shadow will be cast.

 Next, the Layer folder will be clipped to the animation above removing any excess paint.

And finally, the mode of the folder will be set to Multiply.