Applied Animation: Competition: Week Five: 12th - 18th March 2018

I finished off the cathedral, initially starting colouring and lighting it. I was really happy with how the lighting was coming together. However, it decided that we should just stick with the simple wireframe look. It was a shame that I didn't get to incorporate the fully lit render into the animation as it was supposed to show the full capabilities of Surface. We have discussed that I would be doing that many times before but now we aren't doing it, it's a shame that I wasted quite a bit of time working on the lighting and rendering. 

Shot 8 required more masking than any other shot. This was because of how he jumped in from outside the greenscreen and we needed that screen space to make the composition feel natural. This wasn't hard to do, it just took time to make sure it was a neat mask without any strange looking edges. I then worked on the anchor point for this shot. This worked very well because I simply made a line with the actual anchor point tracked to his hands, and then made another line following that to act as the visible anchor line. I'm really happy with how that shot turned out.

Some of the last parts I did was adding shadows to each full body shot. This involved drawing a black mask under Liam's feet and just keyframing it's shape to the movement of his feet/body. I then just added a blur and lowered the opacity and I am very pleased with the result. I believe it is subtle enough to just add to those shots but not something you really notice.
I also tracked Chloe's bird animation to Liam's hand and duplicated the flying loop in the next shot to spread into multiple birds. 

To finish off, I added shot 15 onto the screen in shot 16. I did this using AE Mocha to track the screen. While this was fiddly, it created a much smooth result than the inbuilt tracking in AfterEffects could do. Then all that needed doing was importing shot 15 into a pre-comp which contained the tracking data. This method also makes the footage easy to swap out for the short versions.

Overall, I am proud of the final result. I think we did work well together to create the final product dispite some communication issues when not speaking in person. There would be misunderstandings which when we met in person to discuss it, would be easily explained and solved. I believe we are all really pleased with the result.