Animating - Shot 8

Because of Shot 5 being such a pain to animate I left myself little time to complete any other shots, therefore I gave one of my other shots to my other animator as he had completed all of his due to them being easier shots to animate with not much character animation so i gave him the montage shot to complete as it had a good character animation opportunity. I did however take the final shot to animate because it contained a walk cycle which I wanted to do as a challenge to get across the feeling of pride and boastfulness in a walk.

My first step was to redraw the background for this shot. I had previously redrawn the background for my animatic however I felt that when I imported it into Flash it didn't have the quality I wanted and also look pixellated enough to destroy the link between the vector based character and the pixel based background. Once I had redrawn the background I needed to animate over this. I started by creating a pose that showed pride and boasting. My finished pose is shown below in the image.

Top left: a still outlined from shot 8 Middle: colour palette for upgraded Chip Right: proud Chip pose

A noticeable difference in this shot is that Chip is coloured differently to the background. All through the animation I have used spot colours from the background to colour Chip but here I wanted to show that Chip had been upgraded and was now different from the other boring, same robots because of the NSS survey machine. I used a blue because none of the other colours used in the animation are even close to blue so theres a nice contrast however I have also chosen to tone it down to a slightly more pastel version so it stays within the realms of my other colours and compliments them whilst remaining different. Once I had the animation and the colours sorted I added the background which Jason made for me and the Shot was complete. I chose the green again for the last shot because the colours for each shot go round in a circle ending up back at green which was something I decided on early in production as I thought this was quite a nice idea seeing as the beginning and end shots were supposed to be in the same place but from different angles.

selected stills from the finished animation and the colour swatch for the background

Finished Shot:

Now all my shots were complete and I then collected all the shots together and the music etc and put them all into after effects and edited the entire piece single handedly as I felt I knew best what the cuts and timing should be so I thought this would be fastest. The animation was now complete.