Creating Animation

The week has finally come that i need to start animation my silhouette animation, i already had a concept so new what i was trying to make it look like. Before i did anything i emailed my old lecture at my college to see if it was possible for me to book out a rostrum for my animation, he said that this would be fine and told me i could pick it up whenever. Once i had picked it up i went to a shop called hobbycraft to buy the card that i would need i got 4 different shades, White, Light Grey, Dark Grey and Black, i wasn't sure if i was going to be using all 4 at that moment but i thought i would be better of being safer than sorry. Once home with the card i drew some quick sketches of what i was trying to achieve, i was originally suppose to be having someone draw these for me as im not the best drawer, but they never showed up so i did them myself.

I then used these sketches to cut out the pieces i would need to create them later as i was going to be bringing them animations together in after effects i only created one limb for both the girl and the spider. for joints i used some split pins that i had bought a while ago with this animation in mind. I the also cut out some other things for the scene including a blade of grass, a mushroom and a flower. i think these came out great.

I then animated all of the different parts i did this on a green piece of card that i have left over from my minor project. I then put the images into a gif creator to just get an idea of how the movements would look once animated. The animations looked great and i looked forward to bringing them together the next day in After effects.

Now that all of the practical work was done i moved onto working in aftereffects the first thing i did was create the scene, i used the grass, flower and mushroom to create a path that the girl could walk down as well as a path the the spider could walk up. The problem i had with this was once i had created this there were over 100images that needed to rendered out before i could see any changes i had done, this wasn't a problem now but it was soon going to to become one. I then moved onto a different composition so that i could create my spider i tested around with the spider as i couldn't work out if i preferred the spider with 6 or 8 legs, but in the end i decided spiders do have 8 legs and the concepts that my director had should me of the metal spiders in the park also had 8 legs.

I then had a problem with the fact that when i had keys out the green on the leg some black still remained in the corner meaning in the animation there are black lines at the bottom. To fix this issue i created a mask over the bottom of the animation then all that was let to do was o reapply the green screen so that i could put the spider into the scene i had created earlier.

Then i moved onto the body to create this i started with the body animation of the dress going back and forth, i then added two legs i made one leg start at the back and one at the front so that she would have dynamic movement this is the same thing i did with the hands however one of the hands was placed behind the body, so even though you dot see it that much it does give the effect of her swinging her arms. At this current moment the animation looks a bit fast, but once it is exported and placed onto the scene i can put a time warp effect onto it to slow it down.

Once both of them where exported i imported them onto the scene i started by animating the spider, i didn't want the spider to start moving straight away so i got a still image of the animation so that the spider could stand there for a few seconds before it began t walk, once the spider was animated i brought in the girl i had been informed by my director that she wanted the animation to end with the girl escaping with a flying mushroom, so i had the girl walk across the screen she then grabs a mushroom and it taken up with it. At this moment i have keyframe issue with mushroom that i need to fix, but i though i would be better of getting the animation done first. I then rendered it so i could see what it looked like and it looked awful the movement of the girl was still two fast for the scene and it also seemed to drag on forever so instead of a minute i shortened it down to 30 seconds, this meant that the girl had a shorter time to get across the scene which fixed all of my issues with her movement it also helped with the spider as it meant i could make him faster two so it didnt look like he was just walking towards her.

60 Seconds

30 Seconds

All that is left for me to do next week is for me to fix the error with the mushroom and then put it in a black and white filter.