Once we had rendered our individual shots, we would upload them to our Google Drive, which was where I would download them as a ZIP file and get ready to import them into Sony Vegas Pro 16 for editing. Before this time, we had also created a folder in our Google Drive dedicated to different sound effects that could be used, ranging from futuristic beeps and whooshing sounds for the Alien’s equipment, to the ambience of an early morning savannah field used during the last few shots, to the slowed down vocals of a real life giraffe used to scare the Alien in the forest.
We had long decided on the Super Mario Galaxy track ‘Gateway Galaxy’ to be the main music of the animation, with it’s magical sounding melody and playfully innocent tone. For certain shots, I would extend their first or last frame to help make the fade transitions less abrupt, and I would sometimes speed up certain elements of shots to adjust the pacing accordingly.
For the credits sequence, we had planned to include small sketches of the Alien and the Giraffe, so I had use the Crop/Pan tool to keyframe their movements with the credits themselves. To implement Alisa’s 2D butterfly animation, I went into the properties of the layer, went to the media tab and down to alpha channel, and changed the setting to ‘premultiplied’ to make the background transparent.
The final step of post-production was to implement the HUD design for the Alien’s helmet during the POV shots. For this, Dayna made the loading circle animation, Matthew added a glass-like blur to the shots, Alisa made the digital text animation, and I imported and edited it all together once again in Sony Vegas. I got the final result from using the Pan/Crop tool keyframes to move the target circles, changing the compositing mode of the layers to ‘add’ to make the HUD effects light up, and adding a small blur to shave off the harsh edges of the shape.
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Reflecting back on the whole experience, it’s a lot to take in. As one of my first experiences in creating a group animation, it was both supremely informative and very fun to work on. The pre-production phase might’ve been my favourite part, creating concept art, sketches and animatics for the project was particularly enjoyable for me. The fact that we gathered so many references for our Miro board meant that we were gaining a strong grasp of how to source images that would inspire many elements of our final product.
The production phase was my least favourite honestly. While researching and creating the backgrounds was a great time, and the logo was fun to create, I didn’t contribute much in the way of modelling or animation, mainly because I had expressed my lack of interest in that part of the process, to which they suggested other elements of the production I could work on. I am at least very grateful for my teammates and how we were able to openly communicate and plan around our interests and strengths.
The post-production phase was much more enjoyable for me than the production phase. I used a couple of different features in my editing program that I had never had a chance to use up to this point, which was honestly pretty exciting for me once I saw how the final product was turning out. Both the visual and auditory elements of the editing were super fun for me to do, as my previous years of experience have led me to internalise the general processes needed for it.
Overall, I am extremely happy with how the final product turned out, it’s almost crazy to think that 5 first year university students could make something of this quality! It was an all encompassing positive experience that taught me so many things about 3D animation over the last 4 or so months!