Animating - Shot 2

One of the first things I chose to do as the director of this piece was to get my team together and delegate the specific tasks out amongst them. I chose to animate. Once I had done this I then divided the shots amongst me and the other animator so we would get the piece finished for the deadline. This is the first of my shots which is Shot 2. In this shot I needed to continue from shot 1 where we establish Chip at the back of the long queue and as this is a mid shot rather than a long shot I needed to show the frustration Chip is feeling from being stuck at the back of said queue.

I had already completed the animatic for all the shots and so I started by taking the timings from shot 2 in the animatic and translating these into Flash so I could animate around them and keep it to the same time length. I drew the keyframes at these important times according to the key frames I had already planned out previously so I now had the movement of Chip. The next step is to rough out the entire shot. I used grey lines to rough it out as i could then draw over these lines in black to get the finished animation. There were several drafts of these rough movements which i scrapped and restarted until I was happy with he final movement and composition.

rough keyframes from shot 2

Shown in this keyframe is one of the rejected roughs I scrapped. the image on the far right shows an ending pose I considered too far and too pushed. I was going for the looney tunes squash and stretch fun animation style but I thought I'd gone too far with it so I dropped it for a more subtle finishing pose.

Left: rough keyframes from shot 2 Right: the rejected "pushed" rough keyframe

Once I had my roughs, I could then begin to draw over the grey lines with a clean smooth black line to get the finished image. Because I already had the movement exact with the grey lines it was simply a case of tracing over the roughs with his black line. Saying this however I did choose to cleanup some areas that weren't quite right and to keep track of volumes and stretch etc so some lines were changed but the majority were right already so I just drew over them. After I had the outline done I then needed to delete parts of the line that wouldn't show through like the rear shoulder etc (this overlap of lines occurs because I like to work on individual layers on Flash because its easy to correct and select different parts if they're on separate layers) and once this was done I blocked in a white fill to match my character to the background because I was going for the black and white line art style.

Top left: final animation image Top right: more final images Bottom right: colour swatch for Shot 2

After I had the final animation completed, I then added my animatic background into the Shot so it was as it would look in the final animation. I was going to be using the pink I had already decided on so i took swatched of this and used it to spot colour onto Chip to tie him into the background and bring unity to the whole piece. Shown below is my first attempt at spot colour, I was going for a proper shaded effect however because flash is vector based I couldn't get this result convincingly, with the shapes of the spot colour warping and distorting all over the place distracting form the animation itself so I decided to reject this for a different effect.

Top: working view of shading on flash Bottom: finshed shaded frames before rejection

I began work on the background for this shot next as the background I had used to animate against so far had been the animatic background sand would not be the finished one. Jason had drawn a selection of backgrounds and set pieces that I could cut and paste around to make new backgrounds and modify his existing ones. I needed to take this and modify it to fit into this shot. I took his drawing of a robot slum and a landscape, put these together and coloured this pink according to the swatch. I then took the trees and front hill layer from my animatic background and put this over the slum as I felt this filled out the shot and the composition of the trees frame the shot nicely. I alos felt that because of the time I had put into the backgrounds of the animatic, I was able to use them in the final animation because the quality was good enough to match jasons backgrounds and didn't look like a mismatch of styles or clash. Once I had merged these two I had my finished background for Shot 2.

Top left: my original animatic background Bottom left: the final animation background Bottom right: jasons original background

Once I had added the finished background into the piece it started to look a lot more pleasing. I now needed to readdress my problem with the colour on Chip. I decided that instead of the shaded effect I should just block certain areas of Chip in the spot colours. Because the background is blocked in this way with no shading, I thought that Chip should have the same method. I took my design of Chip and blocked colour into areas that would be dark anyway, for example areas that were faced behind other surfaces on Chip casting shadows etc. I then graded these according to their darkness and coloured them with the appropriate colour swatch.

stills from final Shot 2

Shot 2 was now complete. I feel that the movement and attitude I have conveyed through Chip reflects his mood perfectly and shows the frustration and boredom felt waiting at the back of a never moving queue. I also feel the background composition is appealing and perfectly balanced with Chip with details in the right place and offsetting the level of detail to balance the frame nicely. The colour scheme also looks awesome with a perfect set of complimentary tones and amount of colour which creates a unique style and an eye catching look to the piece.

Final Shot: