Dancing Dead (Full)
As the title says, this is the full animation, in order of scenes it goes Ben, Ant, Me and Emma. I think the greyscale helped a lot as we all have completely different styles of drawing so this managed to make them all fit in with each other and without it I don’t think it would have worked anywhere near as well as I think it does. So here it is and enjoy!
This is the part of the song I animated, all of this was animated in after effects so I was amazed how it came out, I feel it came out well so enjoy! (Also a word of warning, the part of the song I was given was quite loud so make sure the volume is quite low).
Overall as a team, I think we worked quite well, I can’t think too many people at this stage of the course can say they had the perfect team but if they do then well done to them. At the end of the day, our team came out with in my opinion, a good animation, one that worked. I think thanks to the greyscale our separate animations were able to fit in with each other and transition well from one another. We managed to keep quite good contact with each other, usually it was text based updates but we managed to arrange to meet up on skype a couple of times to discuss where we each at, what needed to be done and what each of us could do to improve our piece. I would have to say towards the end the communication began to slide a little but not enough to derail the whole project so thankfully there were no disasters. So to sum up I enjoyed my team I worked with, I’ve known them from the foundation diploma and so knew before hand what their style of drawing was, how they go about their work and that they were all reliable so I enjoyed the project a lot more as I felt I didn’t need to worry too much about the others and I was right.
Throughout this whole project I have only used one software and that was Adobe After Effects. My reasons for using this are that I feel very confident using toon boom and I felt because I had used it already in Dan’s projects I felt I should leave it out for this. I haven’t used Maya either because we’re also using this in Dan’s projects and for me it’s a nightmare to use. So we were being taught how to use after effects in Mike’s project and I was terrible at using it so I thought I’d challenge myself and learn to use this in a lot more depth. I think it’s paid off as I feel extremely confident using after effects, I’ve learnt so many new processes and techniques in it, my favourite being the puppet tool. Also I was able to implement some techniques I knew before into this like time re-mapping for lip-syncing and also taught myself outside of classes new techniques such as enabling lights to cast shadows. Overall I’m glad I just stuck to after effects because before this I wouldn’t have gone near the program but now if I was given the option to use it I would as it is such a quick program and now an enjoyable one to use.
For the lip-syncing I put all the mouths into a separate composition, each one a frame long placed after each other. Once this was done I put this in to the main composition and used time remapping on the composition so I could then select which mouth I wanted instead of having to have them all on separate layers and then having to do a lot of opacity changes.
Each dancer was animated in separate composition which was then dragged in to the main composition. Once this was done I used the puppet tool again on some of the compositions to manipulate their entry, for example, when the first body enters the shot I had it swinging in so I used the puppet tool to make the whole body bend as it swung in.
The puppet tool wasn’t used as much for the janitor, I seemed to only use it for his arms throughout the whole animation. It was used a lot for all the dancers.
This was the layout of the morgue in after effects. I also put the janitor’s balcony above the room but it was cut out of the views available in after effects.
This is the finished storyboard for my segment. Just to point out, the solid arrows are for the body movement and the broken arrows are the lights.
This is really the bulk of the work I did in my sketchbook for my segment of the song. Quite a few bits weren’t used as this was all done before we decided to cut the song down so in doing so I had to change my original idea and take out a few things. The stuff that wasn’t used was the morgue exterior, some of the dead people designs and the “larger” body design.
