(Disclaimer: For some reasons we weren’t able to figure out my the body rig of the Main character always skipped a frame forward or backwards depending on which way the scene was playing and that translated to the play blasts as well. Meaning that the final renders will look slightly different and the body will work in time with the rest of the scene and characters)
Animators: Me and Cathair
When I first started trying to animate there was some bug that caused the ball to stretch uncontrollably every time I set a key, this effectively made it impossible for me to make any sort of decent animation without spending days of going through trail and error, making a scene and rendering out to see the result and make note of what needs to be changed since both scrubbing the timeline and play blasts were also affected by this visual bug. While this bug was happening I asked Cathair if he experienced the same thing but he didn’t so I thought up of some sort of solution, Cathair can block out and spline the main movement of the animation, after which he can send it off to me to do facial moments and clean-up, so that’s what I spent most of my time doing for the animation side.
Scene 1:
For this scene I took Cathair’s original animation and added in some confused eyebrow expressions and made his pop up a bit more snappy with the ease in, I did this in order to help sell his curiosity’s to the sound coming from the cell beside him not only that but I did it to help eliminate some of the floatyness found in the first cut, in addition to this I also added a camera to the scene in order to help get an idea of the shot composition is going to look like once the cameras get finalised.
Scene_1 Playblast Scene_1 Pre-Clean
Scene 2:
I gave a similar treatment to the second scene as I did to the first, giving the guard a faster ease out in order to help emphasise the shock of seeing an inmate bursting through a cell door in addition to that I also added some expressions by animating the eyebrows of the guard to follow his body upwards as he gets shocked and settling back down with the rest of the body after the initial hit. This scene is also where we see our main character for the first time, when animating him I wanted to try and help convey him having a squishy body so I made sure have his eyes follow behind his jumps.
Scene_2 Playblast Scene_2 Pre-Clean
Scene 3:
For scene three I just cleaned up the jump a bit, making it consistent as he hops down the hall, in addition to that I also had his eyes follow behind the squash a bit to help emphasise the character squishy and cartoonish nature, not only that but with his eyebrows I made sure to have his eye brows follow along with his jumps, when he jumps up the eyebrows follow with but as he starts to fall the eyebrows lag behind a bit and finally he lands the eyebrows squish down. In addition to all of this I also set up a camera to follow along with the MC as he’s making his way down the corridor, in the beginning I was only playing around with the camera to try and figure out how we’d go about following the MC’s movements, however after play blasting the shot I really liked the movement I was getting with the camera, it made the scene seem much more dynamic and action packed overall.
Scene_3 Playblast Scene_3 Pre-Clean
Scene 4:
The fourth scene part I did was just a simple clean-up, fixing the timing and squash and stretch as well as doing the eye and eyebrow movements in line with the ones I had done previously.
Scene_4 Playblast Scene_4 Pre-Clean
Scene 6:
The 6th scene was the longest of them all so more work had to be done to this one compared to the rest, first shot of the scene was of the MC jumping through some doors and heading out into the courtyard. When going through the animation I felt that the initial jump into the scene was really fast so I tried to do my best to slow it down by making the translate x curve much less extreme, this messed up the landing a bit as the model would just slam down to the ground of nowhere, to fix this I turn the landing into an arc making it seem like the ball had been bouncing instead of being thrown down at an angle. In addition to that I also felt that the squash and stretch as a little overdone after he lands feeling closer to a water balloon hitting the ground, it didn’t really match up to the characters consistency when he was bouncing before.
Scene_6 P1 Playblast Scene_6 P1 Pre-Clean
The second part I worked on was the character bouncing towards the Riot control guards and jumping up to land on their shields. For this part much wasn’t changed, just the usual eye and eyebrow movement however I also felt that when the Riot control guard lifts his shield he does it very sluggishly so I decided to go back and decrease the spacing a bit in order to speed up his animation of lifting the shield.
Scene_6 P2 Playblast Scene_6 P2 Pre-Clean
The last part I worked with on this was the shield jump, out of everything this was the one I worked on the most, overall these was very little squash and stretch in the and the contact between the MC and Riot shield was only a single frame and would make it hard for the viewer to make out what had happened, so one of the very first things I did was work out the timing, I knew I wanted the MC to stick onto the shield and squash down in order to help convey the feeling that he’s preparing for his grand leap over the wall, in addtion to the timing I had him squash slowly too, giving anticipation to his jump. To help try and sell this jump even further I had the riot shield react to the MC landing and jumping off of it, as the MC lands the Shield drops down a bit as the guard takes the brunt of the MC’s weight as his lands, the shield also kicks back as our MC pushes off of it to get the height he needs to get over the wall.
Scene_6 P3 Playblast Scene_6 P3 Pre-Clean
