OUAN504 - Animation

We divided the animating work load in half and took on eight scenes each to comprise the full production. My scenes were a mixture of different things, some of which I wasn't quite sure how to approach at first, and I had to look some things up online. For example, aside from character animation, I also undertook some of the environmental animation, this was through the movement of camera and in one particular scene, the time-lapse scene, the movement of the physical sun and sky. The time-lapse scene was the first I did because it was going to be used several times throughout the animation and I was unfamiliar with how to do it. Ultimately it was a lot simpler than I thought and it was merely a case of key framing the rotation of the physical sun and sky on its axis. I did just over one full rotation over 120 frames, giving us 5 seconds of footage to use as we like, since the animation will be 24 frames per second when it's finished. The main challenge here with this scene wasn't actually the animation it was setting up a shot that I liked. I played around for quite a while moving the camera and rendering the scene over and over until I was happy with it. I wanted to make sure that throughout the day that is shown there is a nice variation of shadows and lighting, for this I made sure to get a relatively close up shot of the barn with the fence in the foreground. Being this close to the barn allowed the shadows from the fence, grass, barrels and other objects to be clearly visible, this created a cinematic and dramatic feeling scene which is what I was hoping to achieve.

It was during this stage when I started using, for the first time the book I had purchased over a year ago now - The Animators Survival Kit. I have of course read this book for entertainment, and enjoyed reading it in the past. However, for some reason unknown to me until this point have never used it for a more educational purpose. Well, on one particular scene as I started to animate characters I went into it blind and ignorant to the kind of reference and information I needed in order to complete this task. I was trying to complete a simple running cycle, and it just didn't look right. I took out the book and started reviewing the extremely detailed section of running and walk cycles. This made the entire process a lot easier and I immediately found the animating process more rewarding and enjoyable as a whole. I found myself using and putting into practice all of the concepts that we've been taught over the past year and making sure the movement was smooth, accurate and as realistic as it could be given the fact I was animating an anthropomorphic pig running on his hind legs. I suppose this is the first time, despite being on an animation course I felt like I was animating something for real. In the past I had mostly based my projects around the camera and the pre-production and post-production processes in order to create work but this felt a lot closer to real animation, and I was enjoying the whole process more than I ever thought I would. Throughout each scene involving character movement I found it thrilling to comprise a whole scene of movement and interaction from what started as essentially motionless 3D models of the characters and surrounding environment. I liked building up the movement and testing out the limits of camera movement and angles, whilst bringing the characters to life. In a sense it was like building up layers of movement until the scene was in a sense, fully alive. For example, whilst animating a scene where one of the pigs enters the barn by running through the entrance, I started out with his motion and then moved on to create subtle movement with the other characters by moving their heads and changing their positions within the scene. After the characters had been completed I moved on to exploring the way the scene could be translated to the audience through the use of the camera. I found this exciting to experiment with as each different angle and method of showing the scene gave a different result, and a different feel for the same action - it was a new avenue for me to explore character movement combined with camera direction in this way and I wanted to see how far I could push myself to tell the story in the best possible way with what I was learning.