make your own animated movie- animation pass 2

Hi everyone, welcome to my blog I’m going to show you how to make your own animated movie, both technical and non-technical challenges that you are going to face during the animated movie making process. I’m charting this through making my own animated movie called Digitopia.

I completed the second pass of my animated movie late last week. I’ll quickly run through the changes

1:24 – I cut the shot looking back at Libra and held the shot of the console with the ‘Insert Coin to Continue’ placeholder. Not worth taking it much further until I do a bit more exploration on the GUI, for now I know that I want to hold there and not keep ping pong’ing back to Libra before every cut.

3:09 – reaction shot of the mammoth tempered down. I felt in the previous version there was too much movement, this time I wanted to keep the mammoth fairly close to the final pose he/she/it would be in.

3:27 – In previous versions I had had the Libra character look back to the entrance way and contemplate making a run for it. It seemed too obtuse but I still wanted to show that there was a way out.

I had initially thought that I would like to frame the entrance way in the last shot (the ECU of Libra’s eyes) but the composition looked too clumsy to fit the eyes and the entrance way in. I stumbled across the idea (okay I accidentally hit the wrong key and ended up a few shots early) to introduce the entrance way, which is now an escape way (there will be some kind of volumetric lighting coming out of it) for two shots and then on the final shot focus in on her eyes as her way of rejecting the salvation offered.

pass 2 for your viewing pleasure…

… there are still minor animation tweaks to do, actually there are major wholesale animation changes to do. I decided that I’m going to move on and lock the edit for a number of reasons

i) I hope to get this finished at some point

ii) I spoke to some Pixar animators even they say some of their shots can be improved – I can’t see how it’s pretty awesome – but there is an old maxim (well one I’m making up as of now) ‘you never really finish a shot, you just run out of time’

iii) I want to keep the momentum moving forward, I could keep refining the animation for another two years and still not be there. I’ve seen too many people get bogged in details and lose the overall feeling of the project.

iv) I need to start hire a sound designer and GUI artist – this week’s plan is to write up a brief for both of them and make contact. For this I need a locked edit.

v) I want to start working on the lighting now – I have to remember I’m not trying to get a job as an animator, I want this project funded, I need to show a movie that works – and that relies on a story that holds the test of time. At some point no matter how much time I spend on the animation, lighting, effects they’ll all look outdated – it’s the story that will sell the project (or at least I hope it will 🙂

Be sure to have a look around the site for more great real life animation and filmmaking articles

Thanks

Farhan

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