Applied Animation - Week 14

This week consisted of adding small detail adjustments to any character animation I had as well as beginning the assembling of every individual scene. Prior to the Final Crit, me and Luke had constructed a small Power Point presentation where we collated our separate character animations to present to the class along with the 3D simulated style of our backgrounds. Alongside the conclusion of PPP, we did not manage to work as planned on Applied Animation, straying away from the original Gantt chart quite a bit for which we shall make amends as the days progress and the workload slowly evaporates.

UPDATE - 09/05/2017 - FINAL CRIT - We did not take into account the requirement of this stage: collage some final scenes so that the general look of the animation can be absorbed and critique. We had completely gotten sidetracked by the previous presentations conducted by other modules that we failed to comprehend the style of the crit, thus, did not assemble any example scenes over the animatic, although that would have been quite helpful in getting thorough feedback. We got quite substantial constructive criticism on our respective character animation as well as our backgrounds. Initially, I believed that the detailed semi-realistic plasma-like style of our backgrounds would not blend well with our 2D cartoon characters (another reason why we should have assembled some scenes), however, the majority of our peers advocated against it stating that the synthesis of the two styles adds to the both comic and unconventional effect and aesthetic of the animation (something that we later on proved once we started adding the scenes together). In terms of my character, I neglected to mention the stillness of its animation hence I was planning to add all the squash-and-stretch along with the overlapping action through After Effects, thus, was pointed to the minions lack of exaggeration. Furthermore, I took into account the feedback regarding my character's fast motion and his name: he needs not be as fast and it would have been quite more convenient to give him a name for the name "minion" carries a dangerous copyright infringement patent by Universal Pictures - a thought when doing professional work in the future. Once the Final Crit concluded, me and Luca sat down together and devised which scene needs to be collated separately during the following week in After Effects so that the following week will solely consist of us assembling all the scenes together (most of the scenes must be done so together). Nonetheless, from this stage on the train started rolling based on the feedback we got, and so I did the portal scene (without a background so that we may create a template of this together) as well as the initial rotation of the globe. All of these scenes remained as executable After Effects files so that up until we get a mutual agreement for every scene they are not to be exported as TIFF sequences. I started learning Particle World and Particle Effects in order to animate small details, in this case the portal opening along with using CC Spherize for the Earth spinning - made with a world map traced and cartoon-style contoured. As I mentioned previously, time management slipped from our hands a bit, however, it is nothing that we cannot compensate for and learn from, such is the reason we are in college!