Compositing Process

Now that I feel my skills have come rather long way and my understanding for After Effects if more or less at a competent level I felt rather excited to start compositing all of my layers into After Effects. Throughout the layering and editing with colour corrector, Masks, blur etc. I did have to sometimes go back and repaint things if I felt they weren’t looking exactly how I intended them to. For example I wanted to rework on some of the clouds as I felt they were too small and chunky in my first edition.

I really enjoyed this part of the process, again I’ve always wanted to create backgrounds inspired by Studio Ghibli but never done it before.

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Rough Animation Scenes

Here are my rough keyframes and a few in betweens for some of the more dynamic movements in my animation, as I said before I’m still not completely sure which part I want to fully colour and render but I thought if I at least animated most of these parts it can highlight my skill regardless which one I choose in the end. I’m really pleased with both these scenes, I love the connection between the spirits and my young girl character, I think it reflects the nature of my fable and her relationship with the creatures perfectly.

With the yawn scene, again I’m rather pleased with how this has turned out, I wanted to focus on the change in her facial expression and her hair while she’s performing the action to give it as much realism as possible. Next step is to outline both of them ready to be used in my final animatic.

Extra Background Concepts

So this scene was inspired by this photo that I actually came across on facebook of posts of abandoned areas and places around the world, I felt that this image resembles calmness, however, a calmness which is due to the panic that was possibly happening in the past having subsided.

In a lot of apocalyptic scenarios, a very typical scene is cars being stuck in gridlock and people panicking, although this may have not been what was happening in the photo below at some point in time, it is what I took creatively from the image.

Another childlike response that I have seen in films and sadly the real world in 3rd world countries, children have fun or perhaps even make fun with their surroundings when they have nothing else. I wanted to capture this scene to show how my young character is living in this world which would have once been racked with fear and panic but is now embracing it as it is.

As my animation is set in the future I wanted to make sure my cars were modernized as well as when it came to the number plates to create my own language. Once the car were finished in Paint Tool Sai I then did the same as I did with the buildings and put them into Paintstorm where I added the foliage and dirt effect to age them.

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car grass.JPG

Animatic

Now that my storyboard is at a point which I can start animating from I decided to start work on my animatic. First considered which scenes I was going to animate for my final 10 seconds and built on them up to keyframe stages, I’m still undecided exactly which part I want to render so, for now, I will focus on the parts which I am considering. My animation skills and techniques as a whole have improved quite a bit compared to last year, I’m more patient and make sure to keyframe properly as well as go over an animation a few times to make sure the movement is fluid.

Below is the beginnings of my animatic, there’s still a lot of forms and pieces missing as I wanted to concentrate on getting the key movement down as well as planning out the timing. I included the experimental scene at the beginning as well as a title page to see if it was something I would want to include. Again I really do like this scene but I’m just concerned that I won’t have enough room to fit it all in. Maybe if I planned my storyboard around fitting this in I could have made it work. But this is something I can always come back to the next term.