Good morning everyone, fairly productive week so far, just figured I'd update you on the progress of things. The good news is we're almost ready to begin animating! I've almost got all the crows we need to start ready; I still need to tweak a few, but fortunately seeing as the majority of the crow's scenes are the ones I'm animating I can easily continue to work on them over Easter. The big priority for us at the moment are the scarecrow puppets and finishing off the backgrounds.
Andy has said that he'd like for all groups to have completed 20 seconds of animation by the end of this week. This is quite a tricky one; we're working with puppets, so it's going to be difficult for us to get 20 seconds of character animation until they're complete! I think, though, that we should just make a start animating using whatever we've got. Even if the majority is just zooms and pans on the backgrounds - we could then just drop the characters on top and animate them when complete. It would be good to get those scenes out of the way early so we can focus 100% on the character animation, which is of course the most important part in all this.
Having said that, like I said I've got a lot of crows done - I can probably start animating the crow's walk cycle (when she's looking for the scarecrow) this weekend. Jazzy and I met up yesterday to discuss the running cycle for the crow's "freak out and run away" scene, and I think I can probably have that completed in time for the weekend if Jazzy wanted to have a go at that.
Jae has also sent us all a copy of the puppet for the second scene (brilliant timing!) which you'll find in your UCA inboxes, so again, there's something Jazzy can make a start with!
As you may have seen yesterday Sam already animated one of his scenes - the aftermath of the crash. He did a brilliant job with it and it's so amazing to see it in full colour - all that's missing is the torn up hang glider from the background, which we can easily add by editing the PSD file when we've decided on the colour scheme. :]
I'm going to have the timetable for the individual scenes drawn up by Monday so we can all see what we're doing and how long we have. The other thing I've been doing is compiling a big project folder for the final animation to help keep us organised. It will have individual folders (clearly labelled) for each component of the animation (puppets, backgrounds, etc) and also contain the individual After Effects files for each scene from the animatic, so you'll be able to check your timings and see exactly how each shot was put together. Hopefully this will give you a headstart when it comes to animating your puppets. It will also enable us to keep everything in one place, so when we transfer files to each other we know that everything will work exactly as it should.
I'll also type up a little "help" file that shows you the exact composition and export settings we need to use as well as explain where everything is within the folder.
We've got very loose plans to begin sound recording this weekend. When we meet on Monday, bring in anything you've managed to animate so far and I'll drop it all on top of the animatic so we can see how everything's working!
Happy trails!
Alex
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