PACKAGE FOUR: Animation for Previs

Appropriate Levels of Character / Mechanics Animation

The animation I did focused on the character’s upper bodies, since it was far more of acting than a physical performance. The lower body remained irrelevant until animating the walk for Teacher. I used my self-recorded references to animate the shots.

I found one thing I have continuously struggled with are pacing and timing. These two things are my weak points, and although I have gotten significantly better, I can’t help but feel like I could improve further. A specific animation I found difficult was the first latch shot where Priya unlocks the first part of the puzzle box. Due to the fact that it is a close up shot, the attention to the detail of movement was extremely necessary.

Structured Animation (Key Poses, Breakdowns, Polish)

For my animation, I took to using Pose to Pose animation instead of Straight Ahead to have a good accuracy of movement. I focused on all the key poses first, then the breakdowns, and then in-betweens. When encountering more complex movements, I found myself struggling to get the accuracy of the poses, especially with an effective silhouette.

I continued referencing the 12 Principles of Animation by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston and some additional ones contributed by animators of modern day. The biggest issue I faced was the movement of objects I was unable to reference, such as the flying orbs or the puzzlebox’s complex system. I often had to improvise using different objects of what I would have assumed to be relatively shaped similar to it. Since this would also affect how the weight of the object Priya would hold. I often had to shift the rig to act as though it were struggling to pull the object. Specifically in my arc shot in the middle where the colours float and fly.

I initially began animating the orbs using Motion Paths for the animation, as I keyed in the frames and kept altering. It wasn’t particularly a good animation and also difficult to animate as it took so much time. However, after consulting my teacher, he introduced me to the CV Curve tool and attaching the orb to the curve, becoming very easy to manipulate. This made my work far easier than I initially worked on in my first animations, and saved me so much time.

https://youtu.be/bJpWUTiTeek

Exporting Playblasts

I repeated my playblasts over and over again. When I needed to check the believability of the animation, I playblasted a lot and kept polishing the animation. Using my judgement, I decided to finalise it in my shot list as complete when I found myself satisfied with the animation, and the scene in general. When I was satisfied, I switched to a lighting viewport and rendered out the scene with lighting.

Here’s a number of certain shot progressions I did.

https://youtu.be/JOi82ylwkSg

Editing Final Film (with Sound)

Upon completion of all my animations, I brought them all together in Premiere Pro. The interesting part of it was how the final clips ended up changing the whole film with some video and audio edits.

For the video aspect, one of the most fascinating things I learned was how to make a split screen of two separate clips on the same screen at the same time. By using the Crop Effect I was able to have two colour orbs escaping the puzzle box at the same time. For the film itself, I found it would be interesting to cut between four separate playblasts during the arc camera movement to show how Priya’s life is “filled with colour” because of the puzzle box. I ended up doing the same with the ending shot where colour disappears from the world.

For the audio aspect, I used previous sounds from my animatic. I added all of the previous sounds in my animatic, but it was just visual clutter, and a majority of them were from scenes I cut later on in the process. I cut down on a number of sounds and just focused on some. I did end up using Mixhit song, but the BenSound song didn’t feel effective. I tried using the slow tick of a clock I established at the beginning of the film, and the silence spoke more than the initial music. (I did credit them in my animation because I felt it was appropriate to do so.)