I was sooo excited to get back into roughing out extra, and I am quite pleased with this shot!
I am ashamed to say but this is the first shot I feel like I actually animated it properly. As in I did keys, and in-betweens and everything. I know, I know I should have been doing this all along, but better late than never? Right? Im going with yes. I do feel that this whole shot works better than most (all) of my other shots due to this.
I did some looking for reference of people rummaging through cassette tapes, but honestly they don't exist. I did how ever learn a lot about cassette tapes, for example there is only one cassette tape factory left.
The scariest of all my shots, and the most time consuming. I didn't take into account how big of a scene this shot really was, three characters all moving at similar timings, for 7 seconds. It was a lot harder to do than I had anticipated.
I started by figuring out how I should animated the shot, as its a panning shot with a moving background. And as I am rather rusty when it comes to animating, I wasn't sure if I should animated onto the already moving background, the answer no. I discussed with my tutors what I should do, as in should, I animated on the still background or the moving, they said definitely still, as animating on a moving one could cause the character to slide across the scene. So I started roughing out the timings of each of the characters.
I also added the pan in using after effects, and I was pretty proud of this, and honestly really enjoyed working it out.
My next hurdle was the roughs, as this meant figuring out a lot more of the movements, which was very scary and quite challenging, this I did not enjoy as much, as It was a lot of trial and error, I roped in Helen to do some reference for me, which was a challenge in its self as our university doesn't have a bed to climb over, so we had to make do with the bathroom sink.
This was really helpful, as I was really struggling getting Anthony's movement right, and this cleared things up for me. Here are the roughs I finally was happy with.
I had a bit of struggle with the boy in the front, but decided to figure that out in my next set of roughs.
I did still struggle with the boy in the front, (Charlie) as he grew and was clunky. But I decided again that I could fix this in clean up. By this point a week had gone by, so I really wanted to get cracking. I also had a chat with my team about Anthony and the camera, as in the shot prior to this he was holding a camera, and I didn't know what to do with it, as if he was climbing onto the bed, where would the camera go? I originally had him carrying it with him, but it was clanky, the camera disappeared sometimes, it was just awkward. So I put it to the group, and we decided that we would alter the shot before so that Anthony throws the camera aside and I just draw in a camera on the floor.
Line Art, this took an extraordinarily long amount of time, and I put that down to it being three individual characters all moving at the same time. And the fact that I did them all on there own separate layers, to making sure every movement was consistent. This took maybe a week and a half to do in the end, longer than I wanted, but It was done and I was still pretty ahead of schedule anyway so I wasn't overly worried.
I then moved on to colouring them in, quickly due to TV paint, but not as quick as it could have been as there was a lot I had to go into and colour by hand.
Here is each of them individually so you can see each movement clearly.
I then realised I forgot to add in the camera on the floor, so I quickly went in and added the two things.
Overall this shot took around 3 weeks to do, and I do think it could be better, and If I have the time, I may go in and change somethings about it, but in the mean time, its done, and I have other work that desperately needs my attention.
