[Animation] Shot composition

Something I feel I need to improve my work is shot composition. Above is a work in progress shot from the next episode of Oddball. I've tried to make it more interesting than a straight on shot of Redi reading. To do this I've used the rule of thirds to place her on the right hand side and applied some depth of field using one point perspective. I've also slightly rounded the perspective on the horizon line to avoid things being blocky and hard on the eyes.

[University] Royal Armouries Scene 5: The Knight

The final scene in the animation. I decided to make the knight dark grey at the start of the video up until he puts the helmet on, this helped distinguish the silhouette as the Squire passes it up to him. For the horse animation I looked up reference from Muybridge's animal locomotion and then made applicable style adjustments.

[University] Royal Armouries Scene 3: The Furnace

These two shots are from the first scene I fully assembled, the aim was to have the characters carry the focus across the screen, highlighting the key movements by colouring them in white. The background by Jack was originally in colour to get the tones right, so I had to edit this into greyscale. Fortunately the greys were the right shade to emphasise both the black and white characters. The backgrounds were simplified substantially to keep the focus on the movement. To keep the pacing consistent, I decided to use multiple copies of the blacksmith character, rather than have him walk from position to position.

[University] Royal Armouries Scene 2: The Mines

As we draw towards the end of the project, I think now's a suitable time to run over everything I've done for it. Below are all the animated segments I worked on, I created all of the character animation for this video and split it into 2880x720 (the maximum width that Flash would allow) segments for Will to composite in After Effects. For these first two mine scenes however, I left the compositing to Will. The shorter shots mean that the stage could all fit into one panel.

Jack and I had previously planned to texture the backgrounds. To help theme the animation, we decided to stick to a solid vector style which was simpler and easier on the eyes. It also meant that the characters would fit in with the art style a lot better. The overall animation is going to have a tapestry texture overlaying it in the final render, so having these parts textureless also stops it clashing later on.

The colour scheming played an important role in these dark scenes as a lot of the miners blended in with the darkness of the background. Having the focus character in white not only drew attention to him, but made the highest possible contrast against the rest of the scene, highlighting his importance. The files are designed to continue straight into one another, while leaving some room to overlap and line them up. The final stages I need to take for this video are to make the inbetweening animation. I created these characters like videogame characters, in that they have separate "states", such as idle and running. Once the timing is 100% planned, I can inbetween the transitions between these poses.

[Animation] Hybrid style test

I've finally had time to resume a pet project of mine, Crusaders. Today I made this section of the animation, showing a character jumping into the stage and sliding along the ground. The animation style for this was primarily symbol and tween based. Some people would argue that this style of animation is lazy and ineffective, so I've tried to demonstrate how it can be used effectively.

I found the key to making successful tween based animation is to break up the motion as much as possible by adding secondary animation on things like the hair. Even offsetting these by one frame (which is what I did for the hair in some of this clip) stops the movement from all ending at once, and makes things seem a bit less robotic.

Another thing I found is to make extensive use of the smooth in and smooth out features that can be used on classic tweens in Flash. These stop the motion from moving at a constant pace, and again helps to break up the mechanical vibe that some tween based animation can give off.

The final technique is to try and change symbold frequently. Sticking to one angle of a head, for example, makes the shape recognisable and the viewer quickly identifies it as a separate object.

With these three techniques, the rest is similat to regular animation, making use of anticipation (in this case the jump onto screen) the action (the slide) and the reaction (secondary movement on the hair and tail)