OUAN504 - Animating, Entering the Barn

This is the first scene in the animation where we see the pigs. I tried to tie scenes together in an interesting and unsuspecting way by cutting suddenly form the previous scene which is where we see the poster on the wall into a lot of movement from the pig running into the barn with the camera following from behind, almost like a steady cam shot. This scene in particular probably took the most time out of the scenes I was allocated to animated. I think this was mostly because of the camera angles I was trying out, and attempting to make work. In the end I settled for a shot that begins outside of the barn and follows the 'strong pig' character as he charges into the barn and vaults on of the sty fences to 'rendezvous' with the other characters. I tried to create movement across all of the characters for this scene, for example even though it isn't clearly visible I tried to make sure there was overlapping movement across all of the characters during the duration of the scene. This gave me a good grasp of the situational aspects of the scene across different characters. The smart pig and young pig taking notice and becoming aware of the other character's arrival. As well as that, this was the first scene in which real animation outside the manipulation of the camera was involved and I wanted to make it as high quality as I could so that the audience gets an immediate sense of how the characters move and interact with the environment based on their proportions and size. The characters we designed are supposed to be relatively small, and coupled with this, their proportions are quite interesting as their limbs are short. The movement had to compliment this factor and so I did some research including reviewing 'The Animators Survival' guide in order to get solid information about how to over come this.



The animation came fairly easily, after a few frames I got the grasp of the way keyframe animation works in Maya and it became quite simple to control. It made me think in a way I've never thought about animation because instead of drawing a character over and over I was moving individual components of parts of a character in order to make them move. So, when I was creating the running sequence I would move the left arm and think about the movement in the right arm, then the legs and the body and head individually. I think this process gave me a better grasp overall about the nature of animation and the ways to think about movement. The movement involved in this scene was a run sequence followed by the character vaulting over the sty fence. The most difficult part I found was the run cycle due to the unusual limb lengths the character had. I did my best to follow a traditional method of creating the run cycle with a similar pattern, modifying it slightly to accommodate for the character's proportions. After this the vault was fairly straight forward and I used some references in order to get the correct positions throughout the duration of the vault, which lasts a short amount of time. During this movement from the 'strong' character, there was also movement from the other characters as they notice his arrival. I tried to make it look natural as if they turned their heads and came to attention as they saw him, hopefully this came off well.



Aforementioned the camera movement was a difficult decision during this particular scene, but in the end the shot following the pig as they enter the barn is one I quite liked and the shot the pans upwards during the vault and the remaining action in the scene worked quite well. Previously, it was difficult to find good camera positioning that documented this scene well, and showed the action in an interesting for the audience.