This week, I had a one to one feedback tutorial with Sarah where we talked about my progress so far with by blog and animatic. I finished putting my animatic together for this session using Premier Pro. Sarah gave me some very useful advice on my animatic, both how to make it better, and how to animate different shots when it came to doing my animation. As for my animatic, the only thing I had to change was the timing of the zombie pushing the headmistress down the stairs as it was too slow. To create more of a shock factor for the viewer, I had to speed up the crashing down slightly. My animation also turned out to be quite long at 15 seconds, so I took out a couple of frames to take out a camera angle change, making it around 2 seconds shorter.
Animatic Draft 2 (after crash down change):
Animatic Draft 3:
Sarah was happy with how my blog was progressing. I was told to add reference pictures when I was talking about inspirations for characters and to talk more about principals when animating. I have since went back and added these areas to my posts and am happy with the work I have done for every post.
I was also told to do limited animation for the last shot of my animation, where Fern casts the spell against the zombies. There are many people in this shot and if it was too detailed, it would take too long to animate and would be too busy on the screen for the viewer.
This week’s lecture was on animating 2D effects, such as smoke, water, and explosions. I found learning about explosions and flats the most helpful as it gave me tips and ideas on how to end my animation with the spell. I learned to use only around 5 frames for the spell and to have some anticipation before it occurs. I plan on using white star shapes for the spell and have them fill the screen to then transition from white to black. I began the animating process this week by drawing the outline of Fern on Photoshop for shot 1. As I am now used to drawing her, it did not take me long to get her features correct. I am going to export this image to Krita where I will begin animating next week.