Documentary Week 9 - Final Critique

This week I made another background and made the decision to leave the last background for now and finalise the backgrounds I already had to start creating animated assets out of them in After Effects, as we didn't have any actual animation to show for the final crit and I knew I'd need time to employ the splatter/stain effect I had learned to recreate from a YouTube tutorial.

The finished backgrounds with all the improvements in place:

I have greatly underestimated backgrounds in general. It probably took just as long animating all the layers (which I created separately as I went along) as it did to draw them. I considered at one point handing over some of the background animations to my team but it felt inappropriate as I knew my layers well and it would probably delay things to ask them to take over.

Every asset was animated to look as naturally drawn as possible, with a mix of a stroke mask effect and a stain/splatter effect.

One of the masks on one of my layers looked like this
(Halli walked in on me making this and wondered what I was doing)

The result of that masking made it look like lines on the boat were being drawn out

I didn't finish animating all the backgrounds but what I did finish I took and compiled everything into a rough animation (minus the transitions and with a placeholder track), including the scenes I got from El and Petra.

This was the progress shown at the final crit:

Feedback from the final crit:

• Need to try and add some more motion in places, it’s too still in parts. Can use puppet too to fix this
• End title should be still at the end. People don’t like the wobble.
• Might need to add white noise to make parts without a voice over less quiet
• Subtitles should be in a regular font that’s easy to read
• Need to work on timings and transitions
• Backgrounds and background animations looking good

I had already intended to put transitions in (I didn't have time to add them at the time), however I was a little surprised people didn't like the wobble because I was actually a fan. Regarding the silence issue, I'll address it if it's still a problem with the actual soundtrack in place when our musician sends it over, which he told me would be soon.