Search

Up to date animation!

abimation
Mar 8, 2019
6 min read

This post may be a bit messy. It's really just to display what I've managed to animate so far and where I am with particular parts, what I considered what I changed and what I discovered.

To start off with, this is the current version of my film, with everything I have of it put together:

The password is Moon. Including the capital. I was really happy putting this together as it came very close to the animatic and there was only minor timing changes here and there. Where there was changes I felt as though it was an improvement. So for the moment I am feeling more confident than in the past that when my film animation times in at 4:30 -ish minutes that it will be pretty close to that in the end.

Obviously the whole film will be longer because there is the moon phase interludes that I hope to include to go in between the 6 sections of the film. I'll talk a bit more about those further down in this post.

In the mean time I'd like to reflect briefly on the work I've done animation wise this semester.

I think this year's been really interesting animation wise for me. I felt like while this film became more simple than it was to begin with, it's still a more complicated film than Dissonance was. Which could seem intimidating but I actually feel as though I have really been enjoying animating these sequences. I can easily see them being a higher standard of animation than Dissonance. In Dissonance I didnt have a face to deal with so this version is so much more complicated than Dissonance because there's eyes to deal with this time! Eyes! Eyes are very important to this film because some of the emotions are complex and need to be sensitively animated so that they convey the right feelings to the audience.

I also feel like I've learned a lot about secondary actions whilst animating Phase 01 (i might change the name btw because I'm not sure about it but it's the working title at the moment). In Dissonance there was maybe only one opportunity for use secondary action but here there's lots of it. I've made an effort to try and make my camera angles and actions engaging and interesting and not flat. So I've had a few excuses to use secondary actions. The example below is 3 different versions of a complicated action that I spent some time trying to figure out.

Initially, I had intended for the head turn here to be slower like a gentle surveying of the surroundings. However when it got to animation I found that the design of the character just wasn't going to support something like that. The nose didnt transition correctly and because the hair moves in more of a binary left or right with minor fringe changes the disparity in these 2 items was jarring. An example of that is bellow. It's patchy because I didn't even finish it.

In this next version I decided to have the head move far faster as more of jack skellington during "what's this" moment, where everything is so interesting that you just can't stay still. I kept the timing of the initial pose and added some character with the disbelieving blinking which I feel allows her to breath before she begins the bigger action.

To keep the feeling of the excited movements I included very few inbetweens for the pupils and those I did were very extreme smear frames so i could emphasise the speed of her darting eyes even further.

However I showed this version to a few people because I felt as though it was a little bit off still. I couldn't put my finger on it myself but I wanted to see if there was anything in it or otherwise. My BF told me that the eye darting was jarring and that I should maybe slow it down. He also found the single frame transition of the eyes from looking left to looking to the side jarring as well. I had added that frame as a leading action, to show that she was about to move her head around to face the camera but if it looked weird, it looked weird. So I took all that into consideration and animated the next version.

This version no longer has the leading pupil frame and has more in betweens in the eyes elsewhere. No more extreme darting. I think the feedback was right, I'm really happy with the way this is animated now. I'm very pleased with the overlapping actions and the character I think I've given her. This sequence does get split in 2 but looking at the above animatic I may change it a bit in edit because I'm a fan of this sequence and the shot in between doesn't add very much. This shot is from the first moment where she finds herself in her manifestation of inspiration and so her excitement ramps up after this but this shot is a change from bewildered to intrigued and pleased. So I feel like I captured that well here.

This next shot is here to explain a little bit of my pipeline and how I've been working and what I've been finding with it.

I've been working through a pipeline that I modelled a little bit of what I guess is a pretty traditional 2D pipeline, I understand that everyone is different but this one is closely modelled on both Aaron Blaise's pipeline from his personal academy and toniko Pantoja's workflow. Which means I've been roughing out key frames for shots first, before then breaking down each shot to lean into a personality and then finally inbetweening. Ideally I'd like to start giving myself timing charts so I'm really learning a pipeline and I can reference to myself while I work thorough a whole film. As I think my next step is to keyframe the entire film so leaving timing charts to myself so I know how I was feeling about the timing of that scene at the time of keyframing would be a great experience.

Anyway getting off topic a little bit, below is a look at how I originally animate the inbetweens after the keyframes and then below again is the clean up because the keys didn't quite capture the movement correctly and it made her look as though she was bouncing her head a little in the middle of the motion.

(these two were meant to loop and remade them a total of 4 times making sure the loop forever option was chosen but I can't seem to see them looping at all. I have no idea what's happening there.... you might just have to refresh the page).

Finally I'd like to talk about the camera animations. I only aim to include 2 in the whole film. The very first shot, where the camera zooms to her looking at the moon and another in scene 06 where the camera pans down from the moon to the stone statue that she carves. The camera's are hardly used but on both occasions they are used to show a shift in importance to the narrative.

Originally when I thought about this scene I thought that I would also have the protagonist move with the scene and then continue to have the camera come around 180. I decided to animate the camera in after effects and then add the character by hand but after beginning to key the camera movement and adding some inbetweens I thought it was far too juttery and didnt really need to be done. So I think a cut will be a better idea. The moon still has motion and so I really dont feel like taking the effort to hand animate the character in, instead of just having her be a static element inside the camera movement, is just a waste of my time.