Sword Slide Test Finished!

Problems That Occurred:
I wanted to have the sword go into the shadows under the flag, and wasn't sure how to do this. Mel helped me, and suggested putting a mask there. I changed the colour and size of it, and changed the opacity so the mask blended in more with the background

Then there was the problem of placing a shadow under the sword. I thought about placing a mask under it, but then I realized that I had to key frame it every frame the sword moved. Instead I found a better way of doing this. I added an effect to the sword called "drop shadow" and changed the colour, angle and opacity to perfect it.

After Effects Tutorial by yours truly!

Here's a little vid I did on Livestream, it's me messing about on After Effects. I explain some of the tools I learnt to use in the program. (my friends start talking to me during this, I apologize on their behalf!)

To do list!

Probably a bit difficult to read, but here's a little to do list I did earlier. A lot of this is for submission. I'm getting there!

Compositing - How I have progressed with this area of production

Compositing is a rather alien film making technique to me, but I have wanted to try and learn how to use the program properly. I'm very good at doing technical stuff, but when I first went on After Effects last year, I knew it was something I was capable of doing. However, Since I have been busy doing other stuff like Storyboarding and Animating, I haven't had a lot of time to practice. This has meant that I have to begin relearning everything straight away.

I started looking for some nice examples of compositing in films, and the first film I thought about was Ravensbourne's student film "SPLAY", which can be found here:

http://www.rave.ac.uk/showcase/student-work-showcase/animation-showcase/splay-animation-showcase/

The students that did this film really wanted to focus a lot on subtle animation and compositing. There's some nice bokeh effects used in this to really add some atmosphere to this barren environment. The lighting is well adjusted, so that the characters are the focus. After Effects lighting must have been included after the render passes.

So yeh I'm going to do a little vid of how I use After Effects, and then show it in the next post I do.

Emma, over and out

The Deep - My animated scenes composited!

My scenes are looking pretty neat now! Mel has composited shots 7, 8 and 14. Unfortunately, I've been unable to post them up on here, but you can see them on my submission disc, and on Mel's Blog. Here's Mel's Blog:

http://majorfilm.blogspot.com/

27 AGAIN but with a difference

Lots of improvements and problems I came across trying to finish this.

It took a lot of patience doing the end, which I thought was going to be easy. I had to move the camera individually with the boy as he swam upwards. Very annoying. And then when I went back to finish the polaroid (tricky - required subtler motion) and then checked the whole animation, I lost the simming upwards part! I had to redo it. No idea why. I have a feeling I may have forgotten to save. DAMN IT EMMA

Anyway, I redid it, this time moving the whole kid body rather then individual parts like last time, which caused less complications. I also animated his eyes, eyebrows and head a bit more.

All in all frustrating. I've also had a cold with many headaches which has made this all the more tedious and painful. Finished this quite late, which means I have a lot of other stuff to do that is going to stress me a bit.

Will let you know how everything pans out later.
Am going to do my E+E report now. yay.

Birds finished!

It is finished! HOHOHO

Yeh this is pretty cool looking now. I worked hard to try and get this looking pretty good quality. I had to alter one of the birds a bit because he was looking a bit off. He didn't ease into a flight very well at the end. I had to remove a couple of frames so that it ran smoother.

The colours were chosen so that the birds would stand out in front of the yellowish tower. I also had to simplify the desing a bit, so that it was quicker to finish.

If I were to go back to this, I would probably add a bit more character to them, but as this is a very quick shot and we have a lot of other stuff to do, I'm going to leave it like this for now.