The original brief outlined in a meeting of fellow Animators at work was to create a four second animation based on the theme "hunted".
Okay, so I bent/broke the rules a little. My piece is eight seconds long however I felt it had to be eight seconds long. I've really enjoyed putting this one together. As always, I am learning much about many aspects of animation and rendering. Including a little more of how much I have yet to learn!
During the course of making the animation I found a series of jpeg backgrounds from Disneys "The Sorcerers Apprentice". These strongly inspired the backgrounds that you see in the final animation. I love the subtle noise, the texture from the paint, the minimalist shapes and volumes, the dramatic and moody lighting that suggests magic and mystery. I've tried to bring some of that into my final render. For comparison you can find a link to the Disney backgrounds at the bottom of this post.
Using vertex lighting I created a colour pass and rendered it using a Hardware renderer. I then split the scene into several layers, created an ambient occlusion render and combined it all together in post.
Here is the final animation looped a few times:
and if you're interested, here is how it progressed through a series of quick videos of progress stitched together towards the final animation:
I'm quite pleased with how its turned out, the project has served it's purpose which was to improve my animation skills and teach me something about creating an appealing render.
Looking to the future I feel I should develop finesse with colour temperature, composition, atmospheric perspective and texture in the timing of animation. I feel I also should look at further developing my skills with poses and weight.
I've shown it to a few fellow animators and they've given me some constructive feedback to work on. Poor guys, they must be sick of me asking for feedback by now!
Thanks to everyone that gave me feedback and advice on it!
Special thanks must go to Al Barber, Darren Watford, Richard Blackley, Stephen Sloper and Aron Durkin.
It's time for a new project now. I've found a picture by Eyvind Earle that I want to model and bring to life in a short animation. Its not going to be anything fancy, i've just got a real itch to have a go at it. Here's the pic:
As promised, here's the link to the animation backgrounds from The Sorcerers Apprentice:
The Sorcerers Apprentice animation Backgrounds
If you haven't seen it already, take a look through that site at the wealth of animation backgrounds there. They are fantastic.
till next time!
