Week 12's day off task was focused on producing the 1 minute animatic for the storytelling module. This first required inking my first animatic panels to make it look more professional. I was feeling rather nervous as this would be the first refined animatic using moving images and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to complete it by today. Never the less I was determined. First however I needed an idea about how to present my animatic. I knew I wouldn't have time to do detailed colouring so I resorted to black and white, but this was a new field for me so I looked up animatic on YouTube and found a leaked animatic of the Equestria Girls YouTube series and after watching it I felt inspired.
I observed it was in black and white but had some colour in to represent distance close to the camera, so I decided to follow a similar principle. I began inking my animatic scenes one by one and I was thankful I kept the file from the storyboard pro introduction that had my scenes in. In each scene I traced the original image by lowering the opacity so that I could see the lines clearly and filled in the characters/ backgrounds with white colour swatches and using the magic wand tool selected the pencil lines on the character to remove the surrounding white colours. In terms of environments it started white but then progressed into adding some greys for shadowing on the walls of Joseph's shoe maker space or the inside of the opera house.
Some frames such as Joseph making shoes, him coming out to meet his uncle the carriage at the start and middle of the story, the skyline of Paris and him peaking out of the curtain seeing Elise dancing I saved as Photoshop Documents. The reason being is so I could animate them in After effects. In animatics whilst not fully animated it did show some movement in the characters in two frames. I decided to do the same on elements involving the characters head moving or his ear perking up. I discovered a new way of creating scene settings in my backgrounds. In the sunset ending I discovered
if I lowered the opacity on the background layer and have below it a layer of orange it would create the influence of a setting sun. This I felt was rather effective and wondered why I didn't think of this earlier in my own illustration work.
For the opera scene I decided to use my concept art of the building as I found in my reference/inspiration footage the animators tend to use coloured backgrounds in the animatics but had the opacity lowered slightly so it still retained the animatic style.
My scenes were inked so it was time to bring the piece together, but first I needed to animate the Photoshop document scenes. The opening scene and the scene where Joseph sees Elise required the use of multiplane animation, so using my knowledge of Rostrum/3D multiplane animation I began animating them. I wasn't sure how to make these long enough to fit into a second/ minute so any After Effects animations I did were limited to a work space of 10 - 15 seconds and if too long or short I could edit it in Premier.
I had sadly forgotten some elements of 3D Rostrum but I soon was able to get into the swing of it, when it came to nesting compositions. However the more annoying thing was when I imported my Photoshop documents the layers were in the wrong order and needed to be rearranged. I rendered these as H.264 files using the media encoder as that setting had disappeared from After Effects after recent updates. For elements such as the characters and cartridges moving in the shots it was a difficult task, given they needed to be timed well in order to fit into a minute. In each shot there was a hold point before the movements could be carried out.
This was for when I introduced them into Premier I could cut them down to the points that I wanted. One scene that was most difficult was when Joseph was jumping off the carriage as he arrives at the opera. I thought it would be a simple matter of key framing the position option simultaneously and then key frame him jumping from the carriage. However it wasn't that simple, as I tried to animate Joseph it animated the carriage too. So the only option was to animate the carriage first and then Joseph, which was difficult as it needed to work in synch before the jump. Though I was able to pull it off, when introduced to the animatic it was too fast and so using the speed and duration feature it was slowed down slightly.
One scene I was proud of was Joseph hammering the shoe he was making. Previously I had attempted to do movements within my illustrations for use in my motion comics, but it didn't seem to deliver the desired result.
However when I tried on the animatic it seemed to work very well, this would be because I had to synch the rotation and position key frames together so that they would play along side each other and it created a smooth action of movement. I was amazed.
As time passed, I began to bring the animatic together, and with the recent discovery of the work area limiter in Premier I could work to the time of one minute. To aid me further I looked at the first animatic test to give me a reference of the timings between each scene by counting alongside it.
However it was hard given the introduction of the extra scenes, but I decided to work around it and cut out what I didn't need. Though as I learned from the video essay it was hard to work in a short concise time frame and it went a bit quick as I played it back when I edited the scenes. However I was able to meet the time frame though it did go over a few seconds. All that was missing was the music. Whilst collecting music for the video essay I stumbled across a song called first love and when I played it the rhythm seemed to suit the theme of my story. This was imported into Premier, but when playing it back I couldn't help but wonder if some elements of the song didn't fit certain areas. for example the ending tempo seemed to work in rythem of Elise dancing on the stage and the ending scene.
I remembered from listening to scores from movie trailers such as The Avengers or Spider-Man Homecoming they didn't use the whole song just edited certain notes into it. So I decided to do the same, and using the blade tool I cut down the song and introduced the edits to those scenes and it worked very well. By 8:00 pm I introduced the time code using the adjustment layer and the animatic was rendered and complete, finishing another video based task for the modules.
Looking back on todays achievement I am rather proud of my final animatic. I felt that I had put what I'd learned about rostrum animation to good use and that its an animation style that I may wish to experiment with further next year or in the summer. This was a sign that I was learning and that I could apply this to motion comics that I may plan to do in the future. If I could do this over again I would've added the clips as they came on the timeline and then limit what I could down to 1 minute so that I would have a basic idea of what I could get rid of and what I had to sacrifice. In conclusion I am very pleased with my animatic and look forward to working more with Rostrum animation and animatics next year.
For the opera scene I decided to use my concept art of the building as I found in my reference/inspiration footage the animators tend to use coloured backgrounds in the animatics but had the opacity lowered slightly so it still retained the animatic style.
This was for when I introduced them into Premier I could cut them down to the points that I wanted. One scene that was most difficult was when Joseph was jumping off the carriage as he arrives at the opera. I thought it would be a simple matter of key framing the position option simultaneously and then key frame him jumping from the carriage. However it wasn't that simple, as I tried to animate Joseph it animated the carriage too. So the only option was to animate the carriage first and then Joseph, which was difficult as it needed to work in synch before the jump. Though I was able to pull it off, when introduced to the animatic it was too fast and so using the speed and duration feature it was slowed down slightly.
One scene I was proud of was Joseph hammering the shoe he was making. Previously I had attempted to do movements within my illustrations for use in my motion comics, but it didn't seem to deliver the desired result.
As time passed, I began to bring the animatic together, and with the recent discovery of the work area limiter in Premier I could work to the time of one minute. To aid me further I looked at the first animatic test to give me a reference of the timings between each scene by counting alongside it.
However it was hard given the introduction of the extra scenes, but I decided to work around it and cut out what I didn't need. Though as I learned from the video essay it was hard to work in a short concise time frame and it went a bit quick as I played it back when I edited the scenes. However I was able to meet the time frame though it did go over a few seconds. All that was missing was the music. Whilst collecting music for the video essay I stumbled across a song called first love and when I played it the rhythm seemed to suit the theme of my story. This was imported into Premier, but when playing it back I couldn't help but wonder if some elements of the song didn't fit certain areas. for example the ending tempo seemed to work in rythem of Elise dancing on the stage and the ending scene.
I remembered from listening to scores from movie trailers such as The Avengers or Spider-Man Homecoming they didn't use the whole song just edited certain notes into it. So I decided to do the same, and using the blade tool I cut down the song and introduced the edits to those scenes and it worked very well. By 8:00 pm I introduced the time code using the adjustment layer and the animatic was rendered and complete, finishing another video based task for the modules.
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