Week 8
- Alisha Gupta
- May 22, 2022
- 2 min read
This week we began animating by preparing the layout for each of our shots in the three scenes. Before we started I put together a revised Shot List for us to reference, as an editable document so we could keep track of each others progress. This was a bit complicated because I had to divide it based on not just the level of difficulty but also the time frame. I initially edited it in a way we each had a fair amount of doing walk cycles and still frames where there was minimal camera movement or none at all. However, when we reviewed it, I realized I had given an unequal number of seconds, leaving us each with less or more animating to do regardless of whether the shot was simple or complex.
The second time I went back in and adjusted this based on timing leaving us each with a good 30/32 seconds of animation to get done. After this was agreed upon to work with by everyone else in the group we started our Layouts. My first layout was from the second section of the Shot List, and since each shot was either two or four seconds, I ended key framing them as one file and didn’t realize they needed to be all divided as separate shots regardless of their length because the camera was moving far too much.
After I fixed this, which was rather simple as I just had to adjust the timing of each by editing the start and end frames and was left with five separate Layouts that were nearly complete. A change I made to a shot here was a brief 2 second clip of her reaction looking afraid seeing the basement, at the top of her stairs which was immediately followed by a low angle shot of the camera at the base of the stairs, looking at her frame in the doorway and what I found was that when I simply pulled my camera back from her close up to the bottom I was left with a very thrilling sequence where we are placed in the characters point of view and understand where her fear would come from.
Even though they were essentially two separate shots, combining them as one gave more clarity and strengthened what I was trying to achieve as opposed to the camera cutting away suddenly in my Animatic.
I learned I quite enjoyed animating her facial expressions and found it fairly simple because of the one point told to us during a lecture on animation at this time was that if we found ourselves adding in too many key frames, then the shot was wrong and when we play it back we’d realize that less is really more. I kept that in mind throughout this process, doing my best to minimize the number of keyframes.
While animating her face, I would try and find clips online of children making those facial expressions and especially pay attention to the eyes because no matter how emotive her mouth or body was, if the eyes were blank she would look dead and I didn’t want us to be left with a floating corpse.
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