Blue Pencil Test

I finally got off my ass and fixed shot 8, compiled all the other shots into a Blue Pencil Test (secondary animatic) and made a bunch of scenes using the shots. The film used to be just over two minutes with all the extra animation, currently (including all the unfinished animation and based off of the timing in the Blue Pencil Test) It'll be exactly 1 minute 50 minus the credits.

Here's links to the separate scenes and the BPT itself. The black frames in the film are either missing animation or parts of the film where there's no animation, so they're included in the total run-time of the film.

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Full Animatic V2

bird rig wing smudges

It took longer than I expected to get the wing smudges and the tilted body done for the bird, but here they are. The only parts I'm missing now are a few extra torso and arm pieces for the Londoner and one or two more frames and poses for the bird.

Rough sketches for layout work in painting.

After shot 12 was changed, I realised that I'd forgotten to do rough concepts for the new layouts in each shot. Here's a few ideas about what sort of shots I'm going for;

Next pair of Rig parts

I wish Blogger would let me upload PSDs to show off, but unfortunately I can't do that, so all I can show off right now are screencaps.

They've all ben structured exactly like the front rig parts, the only difference being that there's less detail on each of these versions as they show up less and don't show off as much of the body/ detailed parts of the Londoner's outfit.

Tomorrow's job will be going through each one of my shots and finding what bits of animation I won't be able to do using the rigs, then making extra body parts that correspond to those bits of animation.

The best part about how the files are structured is that if any of the body parts don't work the right way in any of the shots, it's very easy to make new ones to replace or add to the original batch.

The only thing I'm slightly unsure about right now is how well I'll be able to rig the character and how I'll go about swapping body parts out, but I'm 100% certain that I can solve that problem by checking online or asking the tutors, so it's not a major issue.


It feels good to be productive again.

Making After Effects Rig parts in Photoshop CS6

Given how many shots I wanted to do with the Londoner facing the camera, it made sense for me to focus on making the parts for his rig first.

There's a lot of moving parts to the rig, and I had to split his cloak into three parts in order to maximise the ability to make it flow when I put the rig together.

Likewise his face has a lot of moving parts; there's not a single static piece of geometry on it due to how many shots that his face is included in.

For all the shots where he's fallen/ sitting on the floor, however, I think I might have to draw out separate static leg poses and warp them in aftereffects. The good news is that there's only one or two instances where that happens, so I won't have to draw in many extra frames.

In total, I have to make about 2 more rigs for this guy, one for the side view and one for the back view, both of which are less detailed and show up in shot far less often, so I won't have to be as nit-picky as I was with this one.

After that, the only rigs I have left to do are Rear, Side and Front views of the Falcon and then I can jump straight into putting the final animation together in After Effects.

Ideas for animation style

This is horribly horribly late in to the project, but Sean showed me something recently that got me thinking about how to make my life a whole lot easier in terms of animation;

After effects tutorial on Mesh Distortion and Head turns

In turn, this reminded me of the style of animation adopted by Vanillaware in most of its games; making puppets in photoshop and then animating the frames in aftereffects;

Vanillaware Trailers

Muramasa Trailer 4

Muramasa Trailer 1

Given that most of my film is already roughed out so I already know exactly what sort of animation I'm going to be doing in each shot, I won't have to waste any time figuring out what parts I need for each puppet, and painting each puppet will be a day's work at the most

Admittedly this will probably take about a week of messing around before I can get it spot on, but the time I save on drawing and painting each character frame by hand and the knowledge that I'll gain about aftereffects from doing this will be invaluable, so It'll be well worth doing as far as I'm concerned.

Revised storyboard for Shot 12 and last few pieces of animation

I'm starting to finish off the bulk of my animation. Shot 12 is taking far longer to get roughed out than it reasonably should have done, and at this point I think I'll have to leave out perfection just to get it done. However, the good news is that it's almost finished, as all I have left to do for it are a few pieces of animation that can easily be duplicated, the finalised flight sequence and the lead in to the painting, then the rest of my work will be a mixture of adding anticipation to shots that lack anticipation, tidying up the looser shots and doing cleanup/ colouring, and getting the backgrounds done.

anyway, here's the revised storyboard and a link to the flight sequence.

Flight Sequence Part 1

Flight Sequence Part 2