Thursday, 17 May 2018

Applied Animation: Documentary: Week Eight: 7th - 13th May 2018

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.

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