Applied Animation: 17th - 23rd April 2017

This week I started work on making my animatics. Before this though, the group and I discussed the issue with the city ident. The problem being that this one didn't really gel with the others since it was an illusion of the yellow square instead of a physical thing in the environment.
To fix this we have now settled on an idea that is in a construction site with one half of the logo being lifted by a crane to fit together with the other half in order to form the square. This still keeps the individual modern and technological feel and theme of this particular ident while making it fit better in the group of idents we are creating.

So after changing the idea I had to remake the storyboard for this ident. I added a little extra interest by making the crane accidentally bump into the other half and then having to go up and over it otherwise I think it could have looked a bit boring. 

To make the animatics, I simply took the assets I had drawn in the storyboard and exported them separately. For the jungle animatic I placed each layer of trees on a new layer and enlarged them over time at different rates. This creates the parallaxing 3D effect. For the real thing however, I think I will have to make many more layers of trees to get much more depth and I will also be doing this in After Effects to allow for more flexibility and ease with the camera work.

The city and space animatics are both a bit more simple and also I can more or less take the animation from the animatics and replace the assets with the final painted ones. The physics of the half square hanging from the crane took a while to get right since I wanted to add the swinging and realistic looks to it. The space animatic is very simple with only the camera pulling out. In the final thing however, the spaceman will be drawn frame by frame as he is floating and then as he grabs onto the square. I want to make this very smooth to look natural and also just give the scene a bit more interest with something actually happening. 

While I'm happy I got these animatics done, I didn't manage to do as much work as intended over the holiday because of the immediate COP deadline and also because it was the holiday. This week we will review what we have made with animatics and then go forward onto production.