503 - Dance scene

1/12/20

 This was one of the shots that was completely my responsibility to animate, as I had made test animations for two dances before we had started discussing the shots properly. 

The Shadow Discussion

One of the main points in the group discussion was to shadow out the background characters to make this easier for me with the amount of line work I would be doing. This also saved me designing more characters as the character designer on this film.

Because the characters were in shadow, I changed the drinking character to another dancer so the action would be clearer in the dark.  Also because of how dark the room is, we decided to axe the person on the couch as we weren't sure how dark we could be making the lighting of the scene. 

Lilith

I redrew my Lilith rock and roll animation from Flipaclip on my phone in to Harmony by rotoscoping it. This went well and looked very smooth, and it was a good way to test out the line weights and styles on my team. We had to look at how the texture changed the style and sometimes how changing the style showed gaps in the colours that I had to go back over afterwards.

We discussed how the rough texture looked the most fitting for the style and quite similar to the brush I used in Autodesk sketchbook to create the character and background designs. However, we didn't like the constant movement and unpredictability of the lines or how it somehow looked like it was moving on it's own, where there wasn't much movement. We also thought that the normal one was too smooth and didn't have the rigid look Charlie wanted. I liked how smooth bumpy ended up being to work with and how good it was to colour with. 

No texture-size 15

Rough texture-size18

Bumpy texture-size16

5/12/20

This was my attempt at changing Lilith's alternative dance in to another character. As I had drawn Lilith's nose a little square in my original attempt, I decided that leaving the visible facial feature was good for this shadow character - as it looks like the snout of a different creature, even if the arms and legs are the same style. 

WWW -

• Shrinking the character was a good call, as the body now looks more in proportion between being hunched over and fully extended - where as the original looks like it should be unnaturally taller. 
• I chose an off black, as I knew we were adding shadow to the shot, and these colours would be the lightest tones.[Edit: this did work in our favour in the final shot]
• [Edit: Making him smaller also helped with the framing - as the backgrounded ended up having a couch blocking most of the back space (and originally there was a character right at the back of the room drinking) so this made it so we could place a small character on the actual couch and keep them in frame. And lucky for us, the dance made sense on a couch, as if they were jumping up and down on it. ]

EBI - 

• The original had a timing issue where some of the frames weren't copied correctly and meant that the lands weren't as heavy - so that was luckily spotted and altered. But it's happened a few times, possibly from accidentally clicking and dragging frames and not noticing. So I need to pay more attention. 
• I tried keeping the feet big to make this character a small troll or something, but I probably could have added large ears or hands or something more noticeable that looks less like it was copied - but this was mostly in a rush for time with the other shots I had to do, and also wanting a small break so as not to overwork between this and COP.