Little friends - last tweaks

Today I made a few fire skeletons and dark world skeletons to populate the shots
Our fate rests in your hands now Hamish~

Late update (from monday)

This week I'm helping with the backgrounds. Adrian needed a bit of help to figure out the angle of shot 8 so i doodled the outline of the tree and island from Jo's rough shot for her. I also started to modify the tree and island from shot 10 to match it to shot 9's tilted angle. I need to work a bit more on this but I'm confident we will be set for friday's deadline.

shot 10

so many frames @.@... All I see are frames....

shot 9

GOSH this one was hard! O.O

Shot 8

Rough for shot 8

Shot 3

Finished the inbetweens on shot 3. Oscar will clean up the body and Jo will make the flames. In the previous version the dragon was out of frame and came in frame from the right. Now the shot starts with the dragon already in frame, as it was suggested to us during the last viewing/progress meeting.

Shot 5

I've finished inbeweeting shot 5 (the landing of the dragon), and cleaned up the main keyframes. Oscar or Jo will finish the clean up while I continue the rough inbetweens on the rest of the shots. I left the fire relatively rough because Jo already did a great job with the fire on her little creatures and Oscar was happy to have a go at it.

ROUGH version:

Keyframes cleaned up:

Some jellyfishes

"You little beauty"

As the title says:

Rough Animation/ Starting clean-ups

The first change I should talk about is SHOT 5 ( the landing of the dragon) which I've modified last week according to Keat's advices:

OLD

 

NEW

We were also advised to focus on animating so I gave some of my rough shots to Adrian to clean up (SHOT 4 and SHOT 7). Jo came up with a plan of attack for our 3 last weeks on the project.

Jo's Plan of Attack:

Also I've rough-inbetweened SHOT 6, cleaned up the line and finished the fire mane so I can move on to another shot and Oscar can do the proper cleaning on the dragon. Here is what SHOT 6 looks like as I'm giving it to Oscar:

I looped the fire towards the end of the shot because this is when the glitch will happen so I did not want to spend too long on fire that will be "glitched" anyway.

Shot 5

I wasn't too happy with the intensity and speed of my previous roughs for shot 5. It was good to see strength in the landing but I still wanted to try for something more elegant and "floaty" which I think I've managed to do better in these new roughs.

OLD

NEW

I've also fixed the timing on shot 7, after my team mates pointed out that the head snap should happen faster ( I think it was Oscar and Jo? I'm sorry I can't remember who exactly @@)

OLD

 NEW

Rough Keys

These are all the rough keys I did this week

 

More progress

Shot 1 - I have added some particles in front of the camera for a better feel of depth and distance. They fade as the camera gets further away from oscar. I need to figure out where to add jellyfishes tomorrow and get the cosmos background that Adrian wants to make from nebula paint.

Shot 2 - redid the composition with oscar playing with jellyfish. Jellyfish diverges from oscar as anticipation for dragon (big creature.. im tired of typing it or saying it so ill just call it dragon from now on). Animatic doesnt show it but the jellyfish will squash and stretch before leaving oscar, as a clue of its fright

Shot 3 - no change

Shot 4 - changed the wide angle shot for a top shot with slight rotation and zoom. I think the creature movement reads quite well because the shot starts with it approximately at the same spot it was on the last frame of the previous shot. added particles and jellyfishes for a feel of depth again

Shot 5 - no change yet but the plan is to accentuate the dragon's arrival and re-position the smaller creatures. I also want to make some minor angle tweak so it differentiates more from the following shot (shot 6). I will take the after effect file from Hamish and tweak it tomorrow as well.

shots progress

Me, Adrian and Jo are rethinking and polishing our shots. In order to discuss this with Jo and Adrian I need to post this GIF somewhere so here goes.

Files for Model Pack

These are the files required for the 2D model pack

Proposal

After watching pieces of the new animatic I wanted to try out a new perspective for the shots that introduce the creature. Seeing the character interact with the jellyfishes would give the idea of a harmless and friendly environment, which is what we want at first. Having the creature fly so close to the camera and on the left side of the character would solve our dull angles problems. Also I feel like a low angle shot from under the rocks to the left of the island could introduce more depth and a new dynamic to the spirit world, which looks a bit flat at the moment. The jellyfishes and piece of island to the foreground would be blurry to leave the focus on the central island and creature. The piece of Island to the top left would move away, leaving more of the central island into the shot for the viewer to discover. I wish to discuss this at the next progress report, get everyone's (tutors included) opinion.

creature movement research and starting rough animation

For our biggest creature I'm looking at references of sea snakes and eels swimming:
 

Also I'm finding footage of Sen to Chihiro very helpful:

I've done a very quick test to wrap my head around the idea of weight affecting the movement of the creature (goodness there's a lot of typos in this gif, sorry @^@)

and these are the rough keyframes from the first shot when the creature appears (see animatic):

Storyboard update