With all my rigs set up, it was time to start animating. I gathered references from Youtube such as bulls walking and running, studying their movement in syncsketch by drawing over their body with a marker in simple stick figures of their bones and joints to help me understand all the poses and what body parts influence what, where does all the weight shift to and where is it mainly carried, basically anything to help me animate these creatures in thr most realistic way possible. I used videos of wolves running beside a car and a skittish wolf in a sanctuary running and shying away from a camera in order to get the proper exaggerated movements of a canines run, walk and stop, and for the poses at the end I looked up images of animals in action as well as figure drawings of animals in dynamic poses to help me frame and come up with interesting movement throughout my poses in my animation.
I mainly worked pose by pose when animating, making small adjustments where necessary to make the movements flow better and make them seem more realistic, but also still interesting to look at. I think my favourite pieces of animation in this short were the wolf trotting along as it feels nice and free and bouncy, and the bulls movement whenever it goes to check on the small star, the ear flicks and head dips and tilts make it feel more alive and genuinely have a personality rather than being an animated model on a screen. Speaking of personality, since the star is really limited in movement because the rig i tried to make for it didnt really do much other than deform it, I tried to rotate it or use the squash and stretch method to make it feel more alive like whenever its running, it turns to the direction its running and has a little bouncing movement as well as moving ever so slightly up and down to appear as if its effortless floating through space. To convey emotions such as fear before the meteroite hits it, I used the squash and stretch techniques to make it look as if it were quivering before taking a second to peek up then regain its posture again fully after it deemed it safe to do so.
Since 3D animation feels eerie and jarring when its standing completely still, even the seemingly static shots have tiny bits of movement added such as the wolfs leg very slowly and subtly moving backwards or its head moving a little to simulate breathing, or the bull flicking its tail when its standing watching the small star speed away while the wolf is sniffing the ground and shifting its weight slightly. These also make the characters feel like they have individual personalities and that they dont all just exist because they have a goal in the animation.
I got feedback from my tutor to save each shot individually as whenever I was doing them initially, I was just importing all the models into one scene via Maya files and moving them around as needed. This however, really badly messed up the keyframes as I would forget what was where and move them around accidentally and end up with models flying across the screen when theyre uneeded, or completely disappearing whenever they were supposed to be animated on screen. This meant I had to go in and reanimate and fix wuite a lot of things which made it stressfully close to the deadline while still only being on the animating stage resulting in me needing to cut some things later on in production such as fire effects on the meteor or making the words in the animation seem like they were being written by hand, which is quite unfortunate but it had to be done to meet the deadline.
Rendering took around a week as I had to render with 3 lights and then do two passes of each render to get the colour and the outline as previously mentioned in another blog post. This gave me time to start putting some things together in After Effects as the first 2 shots rendered pretty quickly and allowed me to start working on the post production of VFX such as the star dust running across the screen, the movement of the nebula and cameras, and the writing for the title. As each shot rendered I took them individually into After Effects and added star dust and camera movement as needed. I tried to add particles to the running of the constellations but it just felt a bit cheesy so i decided to leave it out and let the camera movement speak for itself. I followed a tutorial for the star dust particles to get used to the particle system, then followed another tutorial for the explosion of the star turning into the bear whoch required me to get a free trial of Trap Code for After Effects. I made around 3 saves of each shot as I went along, trying to keep consistency in the background environment between shots and getting timing right with the particle effects and such so it looked like they were alive and fitting in this universe of the animation.
I exported each After Effects file through media encoder and saved them as mp4 files in the original formatting of media encoder before taking all the shots and putting them together with a little finishing touches in Premier Pro.
Unfortunately this project really isn’t up to my usual standards and I’m a bit disappointed with it as I struggled quite a bit with things I didnt know how to do before asking for help, and finding motivation a lot of the time was quite hard to do since I was working individually and just felt a bit stuck with creativity and as time ticked on I was becoming more stressed to the point I couldn’t work as efficiently. If I did this again, I’d like to try find at leadt one other person to work with so we could share the work load and focus on our preferred areas of knowledge and to give me another person to bounce ideas off of and ask and offer feedback. If I had more time I would’ve like to make my own bear model and add stars to the models like originally planned so they actually look like constellations, and maybe add soundeffects and possibly even voice actors to better get across the communication between the animals and the star.
All in all I’m glad to have a finished project even if the end result is not how I wanted it to be, because I also learned a lot of new techniques and tools and tips along the way such as how to use the particle system in After Effects, downloading trapcode for after effects and learning to use that to make a particle explosion, and getting better acquainted with camera in both Maya and After Effects to create illusions of movement and the part with the telescope lens zooming out from space to the book was an interesting way to use the camera and textures as well.