I've barely stopped working all day (and I started nice and early at 8:30am), as it's been a mad rush to finish our animation. But we managed to get it done, with only a minute or so to spare until our deadline.
Our Final Submission
The day started off great. I'd come into the studio to a folder full of components to animate that Paul had spent the previous night making. This meant that I could combine both mine and his components in After Effects to make up the street that was going to be one of the main focuses of the animation. I had tried to work in Paul's style of working when creating my own components so that they would fit seamlessly in the composition, and I think we had managed to do a good job. I'm very happy with the outcome of this scene, as it doesn't look flat and it feels that the character belongs.
The stress came from straying away from the timings and the planning set out by the animatic. Theo and I had very different ways of working, and because we had such a small time frame to get the project finished, there wasn't much room for discussion or error. Theo animated all the character movement, and whilst I was impressed with the work he had done, some of the sequences were much shorter than expected. I also had to work out the timings for the animations he sent me, as he wasn't experienced with working frame-by-frame in Photoshop and his exported work played far too quickly. Though it wasn't ideal, I just had to run with it as we didn't have much time. I tried to put the sequences together in After Effects the best I could, and I just simply extended other scenes, making longer than expected (mainly the scene with the side-view of the street, and the character walking down the street towards the camera).
Another thing that proved to be a problem was the way that Theo had animated the character getting hit by one of the objects. Again, we were really impressed with the motion, but it wasn't produced at the angle I was expecting. We originally agreed to have the character shown from the side, so the falling back would be parallel to the camera in the scene. This way it would be easy for me to simply add the weapons flying in from the side in After Effects. The new angle, whilst more dynamic and interesting, made it much harder for me to work with the weapons. In the end I simply opted for animating/positioning the knife frame by frame in After Effects over the top of the image sequence of the character. I masked out the parts that shouldn't have shown through. This certainly was not the most optimal method of animating, but we didn't have time to re-work the character animation, or come up with another solution, and in the end it seemed to work fine anyway.
Overall I'm really pleased with how this project has gone. I've never worked so intensely in my life, and I'm proud of myself and my team for turning the animation around so quickly. There are certainly things I would have liked to have changed had we had more time - for instance, I would put more effort into making the backgrounds more consistent throughout (the start street Paul produced seems a little out of place when compared to the building designs in the following scene), and there are some background animations that would have been nice to implement that were scrapped - but I think we've done very well.
No comments:
Post a Comment