Category: 4.1 Project 1 (George – Previs)

Final Animation

Showreel

During the last week, I spent most of my time rendering and editing the animation. To save time, there was no movement or change in any of the shots. So, I made the scenes and characters separately. For the scenes, I rendered a single frame. For the characters, I used a black mask to separate them from the background, which made compositing them in After Effects easier.

For the opening sequence, I also made a simple animation in After Effects that looks like a title written in blood on a tombstone: “The Little Ghost’s Troubles.” This interesting visual element set the tone and got people’s attention right away.

I also used Premiere Pro to add music and sound effects to the video. During a scene where the blue ghost thinks back on his worries, I used Premiere Pro to add a transition effect. This effect takes the viewer smoothly into the blue ghost’s memory, making the story and visual flow better.

In Week 20, I added the final touches to my Facial Animation, enhancing the smoothness of the entire animation. Specifically, I made some adjustments to the placement of the body’s center of gravity, bringing my animation closer to the bodily movements in the original video reference. I am aware that there is still much room for improvement. Taking on this facial expression animation was a great challenge for me, as I had very little experience with animating characters’ faces, and mostly dealt with body animations prior to this.

During the nineteenth week, I was mostly concerned with making character animation. My goal was to get the last four shots for the character animations done. These four shots were different from the others because they required more emotional acting, which made them even harder.

I used Motion Paths to make the ship’s flight path look like it was animated. Using this method, the animation was made quickly and without any problems. Using this method made sure that the ship moved smoothly and quickly.

In week 19, the requirement was to convert the animation graphic curves to spline curves, so all of the animations would be presented in spline mode. During this process, I identified some issues and challenges in my character animation. After converting the curves to spline mode, the transitions between poses were not seamless, and there was often a jitter in characters in keyframes that were close to each other, meaning the range of motion between these two keyframes was either too large or too small, making the action imprecise, which frustrated me. Based on George’s feedback on the blocking plus and my action references, I made some adjustments. I also added some necessary in-between frames to aid in the smoothness of my animation, enhancing the overall completeness of the animation.

During the eighteenth week, animating the characters was my main focus. First, I set up the main camera angles for the scene and made sure that the character’s movements were in sync with each camera’s view. This attention to detail was important for making poses and compositions that looked good. Since I didn’t have much time, my goal for the week was to take at least four of the eight planned camera shots. It was very important to reach this goal on time.

Character animation is one of the hardest parts of my project because it requires me to show how creatures move and act, which I haven’t done much research on before. But I took on this challenge with determination and a desire to give the characters life. I wanted the animations to give the characters personality and depth, so they would stand out on the screen.

In week 18, I added more details to the primary keyframes, including facial keyframes. I adjusted the pacing of the entire animation; some actions are fast, while others require easing, and I solidified these aspects at this stage, which was very helpful for adding more details later. Additionally, some action poses were not aesthetically pleasing, so I made adjustments to make them more visually appealing. At this stage, I realized that facial animation is more challenging to create than body animation because it involves many more subtle details and theories. When you open your mouth, it’s not just the mouth that’s involved, but the muscles of the entire face, which undoubtedly makes facial expression animation harder to control, even though I completed the entire blocking plus production.

In the 17th week, I started making a model of the ship for my second scene. This ship is made to look like a cartoon, so I focused on making it look cute and playful by giving it rounded edges and cute details. I also spent time making things like a stack of books and a sailor’s hat that were needed for the scene.

Since the project deadline was coming up, I took the chance to add textures to the ship and books, which made them look more colourful and interesting. I also did some simple rigging to make sure the objects are ready to be animated.

In the 17th week, based on George’s feedback, I made some modifications to the original animation reference, replacing the initial action of pointing with the finger with the character charging forward aggressively and roaring at two snowmen. Once the character reference was set, I began working on my main keyframes, which are the most important element in character animation. Whether the character’s pose is appealing will affect the overall presentation of the animation.

During the 16th week, I started the important task of rigging characters. The character was created in last semester before, when we were making Previs, because I wanted to use this character as a supporting character in my graduation design animation. So, I started early on to make an effort to build up the character.

This week, my main goal was to set up the character’s rigging carefully and well, so that the animation process would go smoothly and without problems. This character is different from most others because it shows a unique and different creature. Because of this, the most difficult part was rigging the character’s mouth, which had to move in a very specific way. After giving it a lot of thought, I decided to use skeletal rigging instead of blendshapes because it gave me more control and flexibility over the character’s mouth area, allowing for more nuanced expressions.

here are some character rendering, rigging tests