OUAN504 - Animating, Establishing Shot

As this was the opening scene and consequently the first scene that the audience will see when they watch the animation, Wing and I wanted to be concise and to the point with making sure the audience recognised the setting and understood the environment they were watching. To do this, I thought of using perhaps a repetitive or overdone shot involving focusing on the moon before dropping down to near ground level in the surroundings. Despite being perhaps a little generic, we thought the shot would work well and be instantly recognisable in terms of the time of day and setting the initial tone of the production. No animation will take place during this scene in terms of character movement as the characters are yet to be introduced at this point. However, careful consideration and thought will be dedicated to the use of camera in this scene to produce an interesting visual introduction to the piece - and I think this is a key element to the animation as much as any other.

I started the scene by creating the relevant cameras and positioning them accordingly. I found the best way to navigate the different cameras was by using the panel view, and once this was open I could view the different camera using different perspectives. Using this method I set the camera up that was intended to record the vertical shot. This took some careful tweaking to make sure it was in a position where once the camera was moved downwards it stopped in the correct position to frame the establishing shot. A tool that helped enormously when create the smooth transition for the camera was the graph editor. The graph editor encourages and aids in the ability to make smooth animation. It gives you the tools to adjust the rotation, translation and scale of a character or object on a graph with the x axis being the frames the action takes place within and the y axis being the position in the Maya workspace that the object is. Using the graph editor is an extremely accurate and versatile way to animate and control the movement of the animation. Within the graph editor there is a range of tools to help with this, such as the ability to play with the tangents. You can alter these by hand, manually. Or, use the preset options such as 'linear', 'spline', and 'fixed'. These presets essentially alter the shape of the line on the graph and consequently the motion. For example, making a tangent, 'linear' would straighten out the tangent and also the movement of that specific action, causing a steady pace of movement as oppose to varied movement. These are some of the tools I used to get the movement I wanted, and it was important for the scene to make the movement as smooth as possible along the line it was moving.