Animatic - Sequence 1 Shot 2

The next shot in this sequence focused in on the little girl and her mother. The idea in this shot was to get across the mother and daughters relationship. I wanted her to be watching the mother and trying to copy her actions to get across that idea of the mother teaching her daughter and being strict with her to mould her into a dignified and elegant victorian woman despite her young age and the daughter trying her best to get it right and learn. In the end though I wanted the little girl to be overcome with her childish nature and wonder when she spots the feather.

The shot consisted of the mother and daughter standing in the street with the camera straight on, looking down the street so my first port of call was to draw the street background as the basis for the shot.

The next step was to draft the two characters for this scene. There will be more background crowd characters for the animatic, the only important characters here are the two main ones, the mother and daughter.

Here are the hand drawn key frames for them:

I then took these frames into Flash and drew over them so I had digital keyframes on the timeline. I then timed them out roughly and exported them as an swf movie:

I then overlaid this onto the background plate to get my first draft of a finished shot:

Once I had reviewed it, I decided that the shot was lacking in interest. it was a straight on shot with little action to fill the time. With this in mind I decided this might be a good time to utilise the 3D background I was going to use and add a turnaround to this to show the little girl and the bird in the same shot from her level and introduce the idea that this girl is now our viewpoint.

This meant I needed to use the street I had built previously for shot 4 and create a new scene from that template and create the 3D turnaround of the street that would be the backdrop for this revised shot.

This was the test street I had built in maya using a test house model and duplicating them to create the street.

I then created a camera that was facing down the street and near enough matched the shot in my storyboard

I then made the camera do a turnaround finishing on this frame that would show the girl staring up at the bird which was perched on the rooftop

After rendering each frame out, I put them all into after effects to be rendered as a movie file, this was my end result:

I then animated the turnaround for the girl and bird in Flash that would be put on top of this. I exported each of these out separately so I had more scope for editing afterwards in aftereffects.

Here is the girl turnaround:

Here is the gull turnaround. Although it isn't a full turnaround, he is only shown at the end of the shot so I didn't have to draw many frames and these wouldn't be changing angle much. I just had to draw enough frames to make it look convincing.

Final Composite:

Once again, when this was reviewed I could see that I was breaking a rule of film which was not to cross the line. On all my shots I had established the girl to be on the frame right and the bird on frame left. In this turnaround the shot ends with the girl on frame left and the bird on frame right which could be visually confusing.

To overcome this, I decided to half the turnaround so it ended using the same rules with the girl on the right and the bird on the left. This way I was able to keep the turnaround as this showed off my 3D street which I wanted to show off and not confuse the viewer.

Here is my revised turnaround animation:

And my revised maya background:

Once these were composited again, I had my final shot: