I really wanted to attempt to create a beautiful sunrise at the beginning of my animation, I think a sunrise can signify many different things especially the idea of new beginnings and rebirth. I had somewhat an idea on where to begin but I decided to check if youtube had any tutorials and it turns out it did!

I found this amazing tutorial, something I can hopefully revisit in the future as I really love her art style, very game like and really beautiful use of shadows and lighting.

( Sun rise video)

(Sun video)

Very similar to how I’ve composited the rest of my work, I simply saved every file as a PNG, imported it into After Effects and the tried to figure out how to make the timings work with my frames. It was definitely trial and error but was for sure something that I enjoyed doing and will come back to at a later date. I think that for me, learning these skills in this project is going to be incredibly useful for me when it comes to my personal showcase next term and my collaboration Project. I would, of course, love to be to incorporate this into my final film, perhaps it could work behind the credits or the title.

Below are examples of some of the layers I made in order to attempt to create a sunrise.

 

Research sources List:
Google: Googled references Images in order to create a moodboard and colour scheme to work from.
Youtube: Youtube tutorial on ‘How to make a fake anime’ which inspired me to use compositing on After Effects.
Development
This week has been productive, I have managed to create my final designs for all of my characters especially in regards to colour as that was something I was still pondering over. I have also redone my storyboard which is alot clearer and easier to work from which not only means I can start my final animatic but also start to create finished and rendered backgrounds to use for the final piece. This week I created a background with the aid of my moodboard and colour script and went as far as to composite it into After Effects and start playing around with lighting effects and pixel effects. I am still rather unfamiliar with the workings of After Effects but I’m pleased with the experimentation I have created. I’ve also began animating a few scenes and managed to render and finalise an idea that I’ms still not sure If I’m going to bring back into my final piece or keep as an experiment. However this piece with my main character sleeping in the background (which was an idea I had for a previous storyboard) has taught me how to uses masks, lighting, blur effects (which I did in photoshop) and much more.
Strengths
I’m now starting to see how my concept as a whole can come together, I feel that the clarity of my storytelling is there and is reflected through the way I have chosen my scenes, character expressions and camera angles. I’m starting to feel positive about the render experimental scene which I can’t wait to start adapting to the rest of my scenes and begin to finalise my character animation.
Areas for Development
Although I thought logically I could get the backgrounds done first before attempting a fully rendered animatic as process wise I wanted to logically create the background and the animated scene at the same time before putting them all together. I’m now concerned that I should perhaps do the whole animatic as the requirement for this brief is to have 10 Minimum seconds rendered and the way in which I’m going is attempting to animate the whole animation. I need to instead create my whole animatic and then select the area I wish to animate and if time allows it animate more.Research sources List:
Google: Googled references Images in order to create a moodboard and colour scheme to work from.
Youtube: Youtube tutorial on ‘How to make a fake anime’ which inspired me to use compositing on After Effects.