(Animatics and Film in dropbox)
When I started this project I had several initial ideas:
I made two Animatics to decide what story I wanted to animate.
I did an animatic of the story of the two characters performing teakwondo with a positive and negative energy, and the story of the two characters in conflict, physically and verbally fighting with each other in two different rooms. I found it very difficult to choose which story to animate because I had very clear ideas about how I would make both.
After talking to Alan I decided to continue with my 3rd idea, of two characters in conflict who are dealing with it in different ways. I thought this would be a challenge because the two people are doing the same things but their dealing with it in different ways. One characters in very angry about the argument (CGI) and the other person is being very passive (stop motion).
STOP MOTION
I found the timing in the stop motion quite difficult because every shot is a key frame. so I think my timing in the stop motion scenes weren't very good, however the positions were easier to experiment with.
Another mistake I made filming my stop motion was that in a dark area of a shot I didn't realise my arm was in the shot so in editing I had to change the scale, which wasn't the shot I intended and ended up more zoomed in that I wanted.
A few key problems in my animation that I have learned from:
Timing.
in several sequences of the stop motion I didn't take enough shots of resting situations, which weren't very easy to eliminate in post production because holding a frame in stop motion looked unnatural to me (opposed to the 2D animation we'd done).
These are frames in my stop motion that I should have held longer to give weight and better movement to the puppet.
On the other hand there are some movements that I didn't research the timing for,and therefore lasted too long, such as the stamping sequence.
Another thing I felt was lacking in my stop motion was CONSISTENCY.
The lighting was inconsistent because I tried to do some light transitions from ambient to a warmer colour to show the increasing anger and pressure of the situation, however this didn't translate in my animation because the transitions were too sudden making some sequences very choppy. In the future I will think about maybe doing this effect while editing because I think it might be easier to control.
MAYA:
I found Maya extremely difficult because as well as learning how to manoeuvre it I had to understand how to make the timing work with the fast pasted movements of being angry and what shots I wanted to achieve with this. I had a lot of difficulties with my maya scenes because the key frames I wanted for someone to be angry require a lot of movement.
I filmed myself performing the scene for Maya to help me figure out the timing and poses. This was really helpful for the poses, but the timing was really difficult to imitate because Maya animated between my key frames in a very strange way.
What went well:
Although I very much disliked using Maya and my end result is very amateur, I think I achieved some strong key poses which were enjoyable to create and with more time and knowledge of maya I think I could make this a much better animation!
Some key frames that worked well:
PROBLEMS:
My maya scenes are still a work in process, and due to my lack of time management there are a lot of things I would have added and done differently:
1- I didn't have time to plant the feet so before rendering I changed the cameras to cut out the feet, which were all over the place on the ground. However the movements that I made would have been more effective if you could see the whole body.
2- I didn't manage to play around with the lighting very much which penalised some shots... I think I could have intensified the whole animation by using some spotlights or red lights, which were some of my initial intentions.
3 - Sound. This animation requires sound! However all my problem with maya made it very difficult to think about this until it was too late.
4- Refining the animation was something I planned to do before rendering for obvious reasons, however this is just an early version of what I want to be able to do on Maya.
Sketchbook images:
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