Process and Production: 6th - 12th February 2017

Unfortunately due to train delays, I missed the crit session itself, however I did show people my animatic later on and got some good feedback.

I received quite a few positive comments about how the establishing shot and the ambient sounds set the scene quite well and the expressions being funny. 

The main thing I was told could be improved was making the moment when he hints to the champagne a bit clearer. This can be easily fixed by just swapping the audio for a take where 'champagne' is a bit clearer while still carrying the nervous voice. This also comes to my audio mixing which I haven't done properly yet. So from this feedback I can work on making the moment a bit clearer to understand.

After this I got to work in creating the background for the opening and final shots. I knew that I wanted to do a bit more of a detailed background this time, but I also liked the idea of making it somewhat sketchy and textured.

I looked at backgrounds from many classic animations, focusing mainly on the painted style ones. I really love the contrast of background to characters, especially when black outlines are not used on the backgrounds. This creates a great difference between what we should be focusing on. 

I built the background in a way that would let me easily create a subtle 3D perspective effect. I'm incredibly happy with how this effect turned out. I exported 5 separate .png images to work with in creating this effect. The 1st was the backing wall and decorations followed by the 3 layers of tables and then a light bloom effect coming from the lights on the roof. Each of these was animated enlarging slightly more than the last to create the effect that the camera was moving through them. I then also added a subtle blur to sell the depth of field. 

In Adobe Animate, each of these layers were made into their own symbols so that I could go into them and animate anything inside. So for example, I went into these symbols to add the main character and silhouettes while keeping the movement and depth of field consistent. These images are also linked with photoshop so that I can always go back and edit the colours or textures. I will also have to make a variant of this scene towards the end where I can animate the chair falling backwards onto the floor.

This week we also got briefed the pixilation task. I have only done pixilation a few times before so I'm quite excited to do this. I want to really use the medium to my advantage by creating something that couldn't be done normally. I had an idea for animating someone punching someone and them sliding all the way down the hallway and slamming into a wall. I will keep thinking up ideas before I eventually create it as I think I need to make a bigger start on the main task before I can do anything else.