This was my very first animatic. I took the rough thumbnails I had drawn and turned them into individual frames. I then took these into after effects and edited them with a rough idea of timing to get a sense of the whole movie for the first time.
One of the most noticeable changes from this animatic is that I cut out the whole end sequence featuring the gardener and her interactions with the bird. I chose instead to simply have the feather reach the bird after the gardener and cut the two into separate, much smaller sequences. This cut was made for time restraints and would have been too ambitious to achieve in the time allowed.
The City Background:
My first task was to create the cityscape for my opening shot. For this animatic I was going to draw a couple of frames of the city in its rotation and then simply merge these together in the animatic to give a sense of us rotating around the city.
I hand drew each of these frames and then using photoshop I multiplied the tone over the top using photoshops brush tools to give a better feel for the film and also establish light.
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| Frame 1 - City from the center and far away establishing shot |
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| Frame 2 - camera zoomed closer and city seen from a rotated angle |
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| Frame 3 - ending frame of city, a street scene showing one of the cities streets |
I then took these into after effects and using the 3D toolset, I arranged a camera that would revolve around these images creating a false 3D effect as shown in the screenshot below:
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| After Effects Shot Layout Viewed From the Top Down |
1) City Scape Images
2) Camera and Camera View
3) Camera Path
4) Bird Comp
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| Top: Hand Drawn Bird Key Frames Bottom: Finished Photoshop Bird Key Frames |
I then composited these in after effects again, using frames 1 & 2 as my wings flapping and repeated these to show flight and wings flapping. I then used frames 3 & 4 as the landing key frames. This composite will be laid over the city background in the final comp.
I then composited these two together and the final step was to add this image of a crowded street I drew.
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| left: original hand drawn image Right: Finished Photoshop Tone Image |
I then downloaded a range of sound effects from http://soundbible.com and began to edit sound effects into the shot. I used a total of 10 sounds in the edit including wind, wings flapping, bird calls and storm noises.
This is my first final draft of Shot 1 with music:
After a review I decided that the ending of the shot with the bird pecking at it's wing was quite boring and ended the shot on an anti climax. I came to the conclusion that having the bird fly off the roof towards the camera would not only give the shot an interesting end but also provide a good reason for the feather to have the momentum and incentive to fly into the street below.
I then composited this bird animation into the end of the Shot and my shot was complete.
