Over the course of my year, I’ve neglected to update my blogs to focus on animation and drawing backgrounds for my scenes. Realising this, I’ve resolved to make a post detailing all the references I used for each of my finished scenes, whenever or not they came from films or from my own head and live action references. I filmed several references of myself doing various actions, such as spinning and twirling before presenting a flower from behind my back, smelling flowers, facepalming dramatically and running behind a wall to shelter from the rain. I used these references to create several scenes from the project me and Cor worked on, and they all came out beautifully. I also took care to add the right amount of anticipation and appeal to each of my scenes, such as first having Brent stare at the ruined painting in horror before roughly facepalming, shaking his head as he does so, and Javier’s tassles and cape twirl form behind him as he spins. An issue that confused me was Javi suddenly switch landing feet as he spun, but then I realised in my reference I quickly change landing legs as I spun, so I added an extra frame for Javi that showed him quickly land on his other leg. This made the movement a lot less janky and flowed better without causing confusion. The scene turned to be one of my finest works of animation since taking it up like with the animation of Notch the Blacephalon fighting a Scream Tail and an Iron Bundle from first year.
Unfortunately, the animation was a scene that was not actually meant for me, and so I could not use it. However, I did enjoy the proecess of making it, and will be using it in my showreel when the time comes.
I animated cameras for when Javi is standing high atop the stairs and when he begins descending , and he is animated charging up his leap down the stairs before descending similarly to the way Howl from Howl’s moving Castle hops from building to building.
For the shot of Javi standing atop the stairs I animated a zoom effect similar to one in Evangelion where Shinji is screaming loudly as the camera zooms away from his eyes to at the angels surrounding him.
The whole of Javier’s performance takes the most inspiration from a sequence in the Pokemon Sun and Moon anime where a Blacephalon performs in front of Ash and his friends before blasting them with a surprise attack. The most inspiration comes from Javier bowing in front of the audience before setting off smoke bombs right beneath him.
For the shot of Brent roughly sitting up as he reacts to Javi’s sudden appearance, I used a generic sit down stand up reference, and added some appeal and anticipation to Brent’s movements as he stands up. I feel I’ve done a very good job with the scene, and even added one of the other audience members to react to his standing up.
The final shots I worked on for the project were relatively simple, but for one particular shot I made a simple blender modelling of the circus arena and two of the seats so that I had an idea of the perspective I wanted to put Brent and another member of the audience in, I believe by using that reference I was able to get the proportions and positioning of the characters perfectly. I also used a light source for the scene so I had an idea of the shadows and how dark areas are created on the chairs, the rim of the arena, and on the floor. Here is the Blender reference and the completed image side by side:
