Internship Work #3

 

[time taken: 13 days total]

For this assignment, we were given a set of 3 storyboards for a much larger project, involving a group of kids playing with some butterflies by a lake. We then had to animate a whole sequence based off of the given storyboards. The kid rig used here were modified versions of the famous Norman rig, particularly Gary. The colours of the characters were changed for each kid so that they all felt distinct. (http://www.romanim.com/norman_database.php)

The storyboards in question:

As you can see from the video above, there are 4 scenes in total instead of just the three depicted here. This is because I felt there needed to be a scene with some extra context to show what the kids were doing originally, before they started to play with the butterflies. This helped improve the staging of the scene for the final animation. I also made it so that only one of the kids was seen killing a butterfly. This is because, in the story for said larger project, only one of the kids gets lectured about the larger narrative about nature, while the other kids get left out after this scene. So I felt that kid should be the only one who actually killed the butterflies, for the sake of making the story feel a bit cleaner.

Another problem arose after referencing in all three characters into the same scene. Things in the software would be very slow, and Maya would even crash at points. So I had to come up with a solution to solve this issue. The solution was that I would create multiple individual files each of the kids' animations and all the camera angles for the scenes, make playblast videos of them individually, and edit them altogether in my editing software (Vegas Pro 13). 

As you can see from the timeline of this one shot, I rendered out each of the non-background elements (the kids and the butterflies) with a flat coloured background. Using the Chroma Key effect, I was able to remove this background and place them all appropriately in the scene. With the software, I was even able to do some time-saving tricks. For example, the shadow of the tall figure at the end of the sequence was added in this process, by adding a strong Gaussian Blur effect on a pitch-black Media Generator, reducing its opacity, and placing it in the appropriate spot.

Another instance of something came with the butterflies; I animated the same butterfly moving around in the scene for each one that would appear in a given scene. After I added all the renders in, I changed each of their colours using Vegas' colour correction tools, so that each one would feel distinct from one another.