Week 4

The last week was by far the most intense because I had an overwhelming amount to finish on both the 2D and 3D animatics. The 2D one was nearly complete with the exception of the last two pages of grayscale to finish up. The constant repetition made me work faster and for the panels that needed to be repeated I simply used the ones I’d already kept ready instead of making duplicates.

still of the incoming wave towering above the Statue of Liberty

I got through all 15 in a day for page 4 which was an action driven sequence heavy with motion. The last page thankfully was the shortest with only a total of 9 that I wrapped up just in time to put them into my timeline and complete editing.

For the animatic I was not initially going to add any sound at all but because of the nature of my scene chosen it felt the main source that would really bring these panels to life was through sound that would amplify the meaning behind each one all the more. This last decision was not the most well though tout because it took a few good hours and well into the night to narrow down the audio I needed to stitch into the timeline at the exact moment.

still of the helicopter flying past the camera before the tidal wave

I was able to quickly write down a list of the sounds I felt were important and create a folder of sound effects that included static, heavy breathing, footsteps, a nuclear explosion, a tsunami high alert radar, news reporters, bulldozers and an army marching. In addition to this for a few cut scenes such as the man in the office suite I added in classical music as mentioned in the script and for the ending and beginning a soundtrack to lead the viewer through this journey that is The Abyss.

final sequence of handheld camera pointed at stranger as he tears up

Blender

During the course of the weekend I worked on completing the 3D animatic here by tackling Shot 3, 4 and 5. I found Shot 3 to be fairly simple and straightforward, quite literally as the ship in this sequence flies in a straight line before a series of cloud like formations. I found positioning the ships and camera easy until I went into camera view and noticed that my clouds weren’t visible at all. Which is where the aggressive rotations began. I went ahead and pulled them forward along the Y axis and that made no difference. I then brought them higher on my Z axis which wonderfully made no difference either. Which is when I scaled them up and that not surprisingly made no difference. At this point I’d begun to accept he probably wanted to fly along arid land.

Since Shot 4 was an issue that could only be resolved on site I worked on Shot 5 in the meantime which was similar to the landscape in Shot 3 with the camera staying in fairly the same position. I did however face the same issue with the cloud formations not being visible. Shot 4 was another tricky challenge that thankfully I didn’t face alone because nearly everyone had an issue with the Assets appended in here where the rig didn’t work even upon deleting Mando and adding him back in. After he was fixed, I quickly completed it and did my best to match his movements to the clip of the scene and might have exaggerated his sharp turn to the right a bit much where his shoulder pad pops up slightly higher but it was nothing major.

Shot 6 which was the last one, I feel by far was my best. It’s a sequence where all three ships zip past the camera one after the other, along the clouds and off camera. The speed, I found was smooth and the only issue I faced with this one was that my last ship instead of flying past the camera as its predecessor decided to perform an exorcism instead from the way it cartwheeled off camera. I realized quickly it was because of its default position which I had to fix by deleting it and duplicating it from the first one and placing keyframes for it to keep it off the camera view, while the first one flew by so it didn’t creep into the frame and flew in when it was supposed to.

the issue with the render coming as the video and not the animation

After all my shots were ready to be rendered I had to naturally encounter one last hurdle which is where my viewport was rendering the video in the video layout tab instead of my animation. I didn’t quite understand why as my active camera view selected was the animation but for some reason it kept choosing the video to render. The next day in class I was fortunately able to fix it by deleting the video and rendering it so I added in my sound through Premier Pro on it externally. For the outcome I made two as we were encouraged to experiment with different kinds of lighting that showed we understood how to use them. This way a few sequences turned out more colourful and vibrant and the other set more consistent with a uniform theme.