Animated Narratives – Pre-vis progress

After yesterday, we decided that I would do some alterations to the pre-vis in order to make the little details more clear – Corey did a great job, however he was brought into the group a couple of weeks into the concept, and as he was not involved in the process of making the storyboard and animatic, there were – understandably – some things that were left out.

When I opened the file this morning, the outliner was a bit of a mess and I was unable to work with it:

After attempting to clear this up, I decided just to start from the beginning. I gathered all of the assets in separate Maya files and remade the environment as close to the original as possible:

I grouped everything in the relevant categories, and I froze all of the transformations and deleted their histories. After this, I was able to begin animating. I realised that I wanted to have the background ghosts giving some context to the Ghost’s jobs, and I decided to make up a quick wheelbarrow:

I also altered my Noob ghost a little, extending the white inner body to the arms so that the model looked more cohesive. I also took the noob badge that Corey made in the original pre-vis and added it!

This is the progress I have made on the pre-vis so far:

I changed the scenes a little, first to show the background ghost characters gardening, including one pushing the wheelbarrow and planting the flowers – I’m hoping that this will set the context a little better in the opening. I also put the two main character ghost gardeners with the weeds and, subsequently, the new pretty flowers between them, in hopes it makes more sense that the older gardener is showing off his experience, trying to train him. The younger one looks amazed, and then determined and turns to his dilapidated grave project. I will probably jump in and tweek this slightly, and do more of a zoom on the weeds on the noob’s untouched grave! But I’ll figure that out tomorrow.

There’s a little glitch in the background with the ghost character using the smaller props, due to an error that I had with the play blast. However, I feel that otherwise it’s clearer what’s happening?

Hopefully I’ll be able to get more done tomorrow.

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