Final 2D Animation

Here is the final comp for 4_70, I am overall happy with the look, and here is the raw animation to see how rough it looks without my post compositing effects.

Here is the final comp for 3_50, which I think turned out ok.

Final Animation for seq 4

Final Animation Progress for Seq 3

Final Animation Progress: Seq 2

Well for some reason my videos on Youtube are being flagged for copyright even though they contain zero copyright material.

This shot 2_60 was really hard to animate, the last half were Saul looks at his needle got cut and I expected for it to not make it into the final cut, which it did.

Final 3D Animation Progress- Seq 1

There is about to be a lot of finalized animation shown on my blog, as 3D animation wrapped up. I'll be giving my notes and thoughts about the shots as they need be.

Shot 1_100: I just did some small clean up for this shot, the other animator did 90% of the animation, I was just responsible for making the walk try to feel a bit more natural and ease into the ending pose with his arm extended a bit smoother. Like with all my shots, there's always room for improvement but I had to let this shot go to focus on more important shots.

Art Book Progress

I scanned in all of my old drawings from early on when I wanted to do the dove animation fully traditional, and placed and designed them for the art book.
Here are the final pages for my section:

Press kit progress

All of the animation is done and is slowly being rendered out, so the only work I have besides helping rendering and compositing, is getting the press kit done. This will be submitted to festivals for consideration in their film line up.

1_100 Animation

I think this shot is finalized? I had to do some clean up animation on the walk, trying to make it more naturalistic. 

More animation progress

More animation progress (seq 2)

More animation progress

Trying my best to finish up these 3D shots, made progress on the 2D side of things too.

More blocking/spine animation

More progress to show on the 3D side of animation. Shot reference for almost all shots, need to animate more closely to it.

I also did a comp test of the dove in AE to see how hard it would be to animate and then track the camera movement done in Maya in AE. I found that toonboom works very well for this but you need to always be checking to avoid a "floaty" look.

Blocking/Splined animation seq 02 and 04

Here is a sample of some of the 3D animation work I have been doing for this film during the past week.

Even More Dove Tests

So I got busy learning how to use TVPaint for the dove animation and well, that didn't go very well. I wasn't happy with the selection of the brushes there, so I switched over to Photoshop and that worked pretty well (although, I really do miss my animation paper and light box 😔).

I experimented with trying to mimic the effect of drawing with the flat side of the pencil on paper but the limited texture pattern on the brush really gives the effect away.

Anyway, the crew and professor really like the solid drawing, but they said when doing the real one to make it more clear to the viewers that it is a dove, and not to turn it into a blob as much. We will see what a final shot will look like next week I believe, so stay tuned!

More Traditional Dove Tests

This was a very early test shot I did the day after I did all of the animation you saw in the last blog post, I spent a while studying real pigeons and I was trying to make it more of a blurry/quick moving bird, rather than a spirit bird. I got feedback from class to do 2 things:

1. Remove the eyes, abstract the bird more- should not be a real bird but is a ghost/spirit 
2. Try out doing the animation digitally, in TV paint and in Photoshop

This made me really sad, as I absolutely love traditional animation because it forces me to slow down and really think and understand the drawings and emotions that are driving the actions behind them.

But oh well, I guess because of how small the team is (now down to 5 people) we can't have me just doing the dove for the whole half of the quarter. :,(

Traditional Dove Tests

So our 2D animator flew the coop (no fowl play involved) so I was now in charge of the 2D dove for this film, hurrah! :)

I did the 4 key frames of a bird flying traditionally because I needed to understand how a bird flew before I started to abstract it and morph the image.  

I played around with a lot of different traditional materials, like these tests were done in china marker- I liked it because it did not smudge but the downside was that I could not erase it so it was was permanent.

These are composting tests to try to see what the final look could possibly look like. We wanted to try to push for more of a solid abstract shape next time.