This week was stressful. I realise now nearing the end of the project that time management was not good this project. I had a lot to do in just this week. The greatest challenge was creating the fight between Blackbeard and Maynard. It was incredibly in depth due to the way in which they had to interact and act off of each other. I believe that the end result is something dynamic and interesting, especially considering the restraints of the style we are using.
I composited everything in the animation. I really enjoy this part of the process as it is so satisfying seeing everything finally come together. Some issues I faced in this were the sheer file sizes of the final segment. Since there was such immense zooms between extreme wide shots and close ups, the file had to be very big in order to preserve quality when zoomed in. This caused the process to take a bit longer than it should have done, but there really wasn't much to be done about it other than using a better computer.
I had some issues rendering the final film in which it would fail at the same point every time. After much dissecting, I discovered that it was the backgrounds characters in the fight scene that was making it crash once they appeared in the composition. Unfortunately I didn't have time to work out the issue and still render in time, so the final film is without the crowd on the ship at the end. This is a shame since I think it really added to the scene, but I will definitely fix this for myself after the hand in. This kind of issue again comes down to time management. If we had been on schedule, I would have had time to fix the issue and keep the characters in. I feel bad because of Andy's hard work in creating the character assets, and Nicole who animated them.
I am really happy with the finished result of our film and I think it really tells the story of blackbeard's death in a very informative way that someone with no prior knowledge would find it interesting and educational.
This week I finally started animating. Andy sent the first of the character rigs, LT Robert Maynard. So I got straight to work on animating him in the office scene.
The method of animation we are using is tweening assets within Adobe Animate. Each limb has been made separate allowing them to be animated individually. I quickly found that the best way to make this style look good is with a lot of follow through and overlapping action, along with very strong easing. Otherwise, it is very easy to fall into these styles of animations looking very robotic. I made sure there was always a delay between each limb moving and the next joint following it.
I think this has made for a really satisfying look, and it is very quick to do. I finished Maynard's first scene in an afternoon. Realising Andy was rather behind on his characters, and with quite a lot to do after he'd done them, I made the decision to take the task of sound design from him.
I went in search of all backgrounds sounds we would need online. Baring in mind that the narration should take focus and so these effects will all be pretty quiet. I started syncing up the sounds I'd gathered but I haven't done any work on properly mixing them yet. I'll do all at a later point.
Nicole sent her big background for the ocracoke section. This is a very wide document to allow for lots of camera movement. The only thing I did with this was add a turbulent displacement effect to the water to make it look like it was waving and rippling. I think this effect was very successful and works well with the aesthetic we are going for.
Once Andy sent the Blackbeard rig, I got straight onto animating his opening title screen. This was more in depth than the subtle Maynard animation and it required a lot of tweaking to get the sword flick and gunshot to a place where I was happy with them. I think I needed to play full tests more in order to get a real sense of time, as the preview window in Animate is sometimes a bit slow in bigger files.
I am happy with how the character animation is coming so far and hopefully starting on these more subtle scenes has prepared me for the fight scene.
I finally finished the animatic in the first half of the week. It took me much longer than I wanted it to, but I'm happy enough with the result. Nothing is drawn well at all, but I believe it communicates the timings and content of our documentary.
I have now been left with quite a quiet patch with not much to do until Andy finishes his character designs. This could have been planned ahead better in my schedule (that we have fallen behind on anyway), to make sure everyone had something to work on at all times.
I did however, do some quick typography inserts for the animation. When each character is introduced, a short fact file will be displayed next to them. I played around with different effects in AfterEffects, looking for something of an inky feel to link with typical pirate imagery of treasure maps and black spots. I ended up using the roughen edges effects along with a mask reveal to create the desired effects and I'm really happy with the result. These can all be easily dropped in on top of the animation once it's done.
This week was stressful. I realise now nearing the end of the project that time management was not good this project. I had a lot to do in just this week. The greatest challenge was creating the fight between Blackbeard and Maynard. It was incredibly in depth due to the way in which they had to interact and act off of each other. I believe that the end result is something dynamic and interesting, especially considering the restraints of the style we are using. 
