To avoid continuity errors, Rhys created a scene in Maya with all our objects (the sky dome, the log, the tree, etc) and sent it to us to use as a base. That way the objects wouldn’t switch between positions in the final video.

I was responsible for all the close-up shots of the assassin from the storyboard. I decided to do all of these shots one after the other rather than rendering them separately to save time, I would cut them into separate clips later.

I had three main expressions to do – determined (sneaking up on the victim), scared (afraid the victim will see him), and baffled (the victim is picked up by a bird). I used my controls to animate with and initially set keyframes every 5 frames or so. I went back and added detail as necessary. I also animated the camera to move as the assassin crawled down the branch, that way his face would always be in the frame and not too zoomed out. It also added some more movement to the shots.

For the “baffled” reaction, I tried animating it like the storyboard where the assassin “shrugs” with his eyestalks, but it looked very unnatural and didn’t get the emotion across clearly. I tried a few different options, but I ended up going for a typical cartoonish reaction – a quick double-blink and a curious glance from side to side, followed by a smile using my blendshapes. I had some trouble with the bink animation as the eyelids couldn’t cover the whole eyeball, when they closed the back of the eyeball was exposed. I was able to work around this by moving my camera so the back of the eye would not be visible.

Originally we had planned for Rhys to render all of our animation files since he has the best computer, but he realised that this would take far too much time. Since I was now rendering my own animation, I set up the lighting and added the textures. Rhys sent screenshots of how many lights to create and what settings to apply to them, so that the lighting would be consistent between all the shots. For the textures, I downloaded everyone’s maps from our group OneDrive then applied all the necessary maps to each object (base colour, normal, etc). I used the Arnold render view to check that the lighting and textures all worked properly.

Talking to Lucy, I realised I had partially animated one of her shots by mistake. Later on, this turned out to be a good thing as Lucy’s computer broke while trying to render the animation. I was able to import and texture another asset (the feather) and animate the rest of that shot. There was still a shot missing due to this technical issue, but Lucy had already made a playblast of it that we could use as a replacement.

I followed a tutorial on how to render a Maya animation, and decided to export it as an EXR sequence since it’s a common way of exporting 3D animation in the industry.

Rendering my shot took a long time. I use a pretty good laptop, but rendering the video took around 8 hours. To make sure my laptop didn’t crash or break during this, I stayed awake to keep an eye on it. Eventually the render was finished, and I imported my exr image sequence into After Effects to create my video.