Applied Animation: Encountering Problems

During our final little fixes in post production, Katy and I encountered a major hiccup in the works. Whilst i was rendering out the need clips from After Effects, we were unaware that Katy's preferences weren't the same as mine, as her program was set up to interpret footage at 30 fps whereas mine was set to 24. This caused the footage to run quicker than originally planned and messed up the lip sync. However, with us running so close to the deadline, we were unable to fix this problem without running over the deadline.

Katy and I are both upset about this and know that we have handled things poorly towards the end of this project. We didn't manage our time very effectively and this has caused us to make silly mistakes that could have been otherwise avoided. Having said this however, it is definitely something I have learnt from and I am determined not to make the same mistake again.

Applied Animation: Adding Foley Sounds

Katy and I sat down together and searched through the BBC sound library to find foley sounds that we felt would be appropriate for our animation. After searching through many, we settled on using two separate rural environment noises. We had decided that we wanted the environments to sound distinctively different from one another to help enforce the idea that these were two similar yet different environments.

We feel that the foley we found also helps to set the mood within each environment, with the Boar environment containing British birds and sounds of the countryside, whilst the Wolf environment contains more exotic sounds, as this is supposed to be set in eastern Europe.

Applied Animation: Post-Production

Now that I have completed all of my animation, I can focus purely on post-production and work towards competing the animation on time. Like I said before, this was a process that was taking a lot longer than I expected and it was putting me behind time. I had to create individual Alpha layers in order for the track Mattes to work and it was this that was taking me so long to complete.

In order to help me move along with the post-production, Katy had kindly agreed to take charge of credits and titles, whilst I continued with the alpha layers. I found this task extremely frustrating and tedious and in hindsight, I would have benefitted from completing this task sooner rather than waiting and giving myself only 2 weeks.

Despite this, I did manage to get the alphas done on time, however, there isn't a huge window to fix any problems if any occur. Time management is something that I have struggled with throughout this year and I feel that it is something both Katy and I have dealt with quite badly throughout this project. However, this has taught me the importance of keeping on top of a schedule and I will definitely work towards this in the future.

Applied Animation: Progress Meeting 25/04

During our final crit, Katy and I hadn't been able to show much, as we had fallen behind by a considerable amount. However, we did show what we had and received some positive feedback about what we had so far.

With the fact that we were behind in mind, Katy and I spoke about how much we had left and which course of action would be the best to take. This is when we decided that we should change our approach to give ourselves the best opportunity possible to finish. Originally, Katy and I were going to animate the robin in our respective scenes, however, with post production taking up more time than we imagined it would, I would focus on post production, whilst Katy would take on the Robin.

Applied Animation: Animation Progress

In order to begin animating, I decided that it would be a good idea to separate the body parts on separate layers. This allowed me to focus on certain elements of my character that were moving whilst others remained stationary and it also made my workspace tidy and organised. This process reduced my work load by a fair amount and gave me the opportunity to focus on lip synching, as this is something I have never done before.

I feel that the animation I did throughout was fairly easy, considering I've never focused on character animation before, however, I did struggle with the body language of the wolf, as it was hard to find relevant and useful reference. In particular, I struggled with the paws when I wanted them to be lifted, as I didn't have any reference to go on.

Applied Animation: Post-Production Test

With Katy under way with animating the boar scenes she was responsible for, I decided that it would be a good opportunity to conduct a post production test to see how track mattes would work to aide us in our goal. Track Mattes are something that I've never used before however, I found them very straight forward to use.

The only problem that I will have with this method is the fact that I will have to create an alpha for each character and I see no other way around this than to do it frame by frame for some areas. This may take a lot more time than we originally thought, but I feel that it will be okay if we factor enough time in for it.

Overall, I'm pleased with the outcome and I feel that we have been able to achieve what we wanted to do, Katy agrees that this is the best use of our textures and we both feel that this will work well for what we want to achieve.