Animatic and animation

After all preparations, watching the play rehearsals and then splitting the play into small pieces to get the right time for all our scenes we started working on the animatic.

The first difficult thing for me was to get the correct time. It was a theatre play so the time was never the same, it varied in seconds, maybe even in few minutes. I was not sure how to get it right, I needed to think about backgrounds which will be more than repeating gifs but it would be fine if part of it was missing. My scenes were Scene 10 and Scene 12. I made visuals of backgrounds and I loved Kristina's design of the Gardener so I went with it. 

For the first scene, I decided to animate a cycle of waves and clouds with the hoopoe bird which Kristina designed. 

When it came to the sea design, I was playing with pastel shades of blue, turquoise and pink/purple for the sky. At first, I wanted the sky to be lavender but it was not contrasting enough so I used light pink instead. I also thought it would show better the fact that it was a different planet, not Earth. 

I was not sure how to make the movement of waves but after different attempts of moving all layers and changing colours, I came out with a simple but effective movement which wouldn't distract the audience.

The final scene looks different when it comes to the hoopoe bird because he is floating on the water instead of flying around. I decided to change the colours of the sea halfway the video to show it is becoming polluted with the seaweed which we can see closer to my second scene.

The second scene was more complicated because I needed to make an animation of the Gardener and Plentimaw fish. It was more difficult when it came to animation and timing as well. 

My animatic was only a rough sketchy video to see how it will be moving in real time.

For the real animation, I had to research a lot videos about animating in Adobe After Effects. I found out I can't do it all in Photoshop because it would take such a long time for a simple animation, so I was trying to find something online about a software I had never used before. 

The best I found was a video made by Ross Plaskow (link here). He explained how to make the character move and I used it for animating the Gardener. I made a couple of cycles in photoshop - him, floating on his boat and him picking up seaweed (the sea pollution). 

For Plentymaw fish, seaweed and waves in the second scene, I needed to learn how to use puppet warp in adobe after effects. I found a video made by Vox Lab (link here) which explained the basics and I was able to try it and figure out how I wanted to use it. 

I think I can be happy with how the animation turned out. It is fluid and it works pretty well. It is definitely better than the first scene, but according to the script, there was not much to animate in Scene 10. That is why I was happy that I've got to do the Scene 12 as well, to challenge myself more, to try something new and to be able to use my old and new skills to make an animation.

I'm glad we were able to work on a live project as a group, because we all got this new experience, although I do not think it was the same as a real job would be. My biggest issue was the organisation, no one really knew what we were supposed to do. But after all, we figured it out and helped each other, so it definitely taught us teamwork, which I believe is important for animators in the industry.