Finished burp scene

 Wow this shot took me for a ride...

2/1/20

This was the day that I received the sketch layer for Sandy's walk from Ayesha. We had previous discussions as a group where I gave everyone deadlines and this was a little behind in that schedule as I thought I would need it at least before new year's day to finish in time. 

Despite this, I was able to do the line work for the whole character in a day. I unfortunately just didn't give myself much of a break, which on reflection I should have, because being drained did not help with the process of pushing through with the blogging and the art book. 

Ayesha's lip sync layers were super useful during the line work so I'm happy she took the time to do that rather than having a day or so extra and trying to figure that out myself. It was still a little hard for me, as I couldn't trace the mouths Ayesha had drawn - they were panning across the screen and I decided to animate the mouths on a stationary character so that the mouth stayed in the right place on the face. 

WWW - I was able to add some expressionism to the character by adding a shoulder and hair bounce, as well as the angry eye transition. I also think Sandy's face translated well despite being quite smaller and further in to the background

EBI - Lilith might look a bit too big in size comparison at this stage , so I will see later on if I can resize either character without messing up the background or making Sandy too big that she cuts off screen.  

Linework

3//1/20

The next day, I ended up working through all of the colour and shadows for Lilith. This ended up going quite well but due to the placement of the small couch, lots of the little details and accent colours on Sandy's jacket ended up being hidden. Due to this, I made the collar of her leather jacket the same colour as the accent on the bottom hem. This gave a little colour difference where the viewer could see it. This outfit wasn't developed too much in the concept art and it was only used in this shot so it was a change that could be made without an inconsistency to the person watching.

EBI - The main issue I had adding the colour was that the lips was that the plan was for Sandy to have her mahogany lip stick on in every shot besides the shot in bed without makeup. Her lips were very small in this shot and I had planned for the insides of everyone's mouths to be black - so the lip sync we spent time on was even more difficult to read than before. Out of the 2D shots, Sandy has worn lipstick in the party photograph and had it off in her sleeping shot and in the 3D stop motion - and so I thought from an audience perspective it would make sense if she had her lipstick off around the house. So with this decision in mind, I made the lips a more natural colour to make the lip sync easier to read. I did discuss this with the team and they agreed legibility is best in this sense. 

Colour

5/1/20

Oh boy. The background. Where to begin?

Ayesha had the task of doing the background and whilst drawing over the animatic, she realised that the perspective was off. This is where we had talks as the creative team but I left Ayesha to try to fix it. I inputted by taking a screen shot of the animatic and tested what kind of angles we could do without altering the animation. 

This was both my fault for starting the animation before I had a background line work, but also the other team members for leaving this so long. I had offered to help but Ayesha hadn't had any work of hers visible in the final movie besides the design of the room, as i had taken over drawing the other backgrounds and animating to help her work load - so I can see why she wanted to do this herself. 

My quick attempt to fix the perspective

EBI: The table far corner should have been slower and the sofa should have followed the red line. But this was a rough. I was quite tired and in the middle of helping with the art book, but this is my fault for not noticing. 

Ayesha's photoshop bg

Once I took the final design back off of her, I realised everything still kind of looked like it was floating. So I then took matters in to my own hands and tried to fix the perspective, which I think went very well. The main issue was the floor at the wrong angle and the chair arm tilted upwards in a low angle shot and not a high angle like the rest. 

This is still quite off and does dip in a bit with the couch, but it looks like it works in the final shot just because Lilith is sat on the couch, so the dip looks more natural, I think. I could have completely redrawn the background but i did want for Ayesha to have something in the animations and didn't want to redo as much as possible - so the only thing I redrew was the floor and a small section of the shadow on that. 

WWW - I was very glad I could keep a lot of her style in for her whilst still be able to fix it.

EBI - It was quite hard to make sure nothing curved, and now looking back at the background away from all the frantic working to finish and hand the shot over for editing - I can see it slightly is curved. 

BUT MORE WENT WRONG!

So I decided to save this file with the table and the small sofa on a separate file with a clear background. But when I exported this in to Harmony, it made a white outline around the photo, which it hasn't done with other images without said see through background. So this meant I had to redraw the table and the small couch in harmony, which also meant that the shadow texture would be different. So I removed the shadow and used the background from photoshop and then traced the table and small sofa in harmony and matched the line weights.   

WWW - The masking shadow technique I had used in the moon shot was now very useful because I was able to speed up this shading process a lot and make the edges more cubic like Ayesha's whilst also making it sketchy looking like the rest of mine. 

EBI - This was a huge rush, especially with me and Naomi collectively doing the artbook at the same time. (and also just eating and trying to stay calm) I'm very opposed to other people and I find working in the last few days of a project the hardest because I burn it all out at the start - so I hadn't planned to do a lot nearer the end and just help a bit with creative direction on the book whilst I blogged - so I ended up being slightly overwhelmed designing and writing in the book, and trying to fix this and check over the whole 2D production before I sent it to the editor.

I should have double checked all of the backgrounds before as the 'art director' but I'm glad I could fix it. 

With the new perspective, I did have to move the chair slightly to cover where I had cut off Sandy, and I also had to shrink Lilith, the fire and the book and move them together so that nothing in the animation altered. But I think this solved the issue above where I thought one of Lilith or Sandy needed to be  close in size to keep the depth correct. So it ended up well in the end. 

Final shot