SPnU Cleanups

Sleep Paralysis and You

I've been primarily focusing on cleaning up my scenes for Sleep Paralysis and You. I have admittedly fallen behind on my deadlines for this project and possibly spread myself too thin over my other projects, but I'm pleased with the steady progress I've made so far.

This scene is almost finished and just needs the last last zoom out section to be animated. Otherwise the hand movement is looking better compared to what it was originally:

I'm still in the process of cleaning up my more complex demon movement scenes, which are coming along alright so far:

I thought this scene was mostly finished with the exception of the cracks but Prathik said Kilo's head looked unnatural when it was composited into the main file and needs some subtle hair boil which I will add if I have time:

I'm actually really happy with how this scene turned out. I ended up adding tweens to Penny's hair movement so that it moves smoother and it looks really good to me. The tears are also a vast improvement to what they were before. In terms of what can be done better, if I have time, I'll increase the sizes of the eye shines so they overlap with the eye whites (which will show better in compositing):

For this last scene, I colour picked Halli's background from the scene following this to make up the stretcher and grass background which I think worked well. 

I think the movement of everything works well, my feedback was to decrease the amount of pan and zoom so that it's a bit more subtle and less jarring, and to also add a flash of white to the transition, which I did in After Effects:

The pan and zoom definitely looks a lot better now.

I have barely made any progress on the 5_GettingInBed scene, having been focusing on my more complex scenes till now. I've let Prathik know that I'm struggling with the deadlines and might need to delegate that specific scene to someone else. He said he doesn't have time at the moment to do it himself but will have a better idea later, so until then I'll try to finish all of my scenes as best as I can.

Scene 5 - Getting in Bed
The rough has been a little more refined but Kilo will need to be sized up before tie downs and cleanup

Other Projects

Jenny reviewed my roughs and asked me if I could redo them with a 2 pixel brush as she hadn't noticed the thickness before (I used the default 5 pixel brush) and I had showed her the first rough before she made a reference sheet specifying 2 pixel thickness on the roughs. I told her I didn't have time to redo them but we found a compromise by me applying an effect in TVPaint that erodes the linework and brings it down to 2 pixels although there is some loss of quality. I also converted everything to psd files to make it easier for the cleanup artist to work off them.

For Heart of Stone, I still have one cleanup to do which I've made a start on and will attempt to finish after I've gotten more of my SPnU cleanups done.

HoS and Dance Animation Project Update - finishing off roughs

I've taken a short hiatus from Sleep Paralysis and You to catch up on my parts for the projects I'm helping out with.

Heart of Stone

When I roughed out Medusa walking across the pan scene, it became clear early on that she had too much background to walk across and some of her movements needed to be altered for the timing - she was originally going to look around at "now now don't run, don't hide" but it had to be pushed earlier to the instrumental part for her to reach the other side of the background in time. It still worked well thankfully, and Halli is aware that the background will need to be shorter now.

The feedback for the Medusa Dip scene was that the snakes needed to move slower at the end when spotting the man. The snake lengths were also a bit too short, so I redid the snakes and feel they look much better now. I also did a background test and though the man fit in fine with some tweaking, Medusa's size was disproportionately small compared to the front statue even after panning her to the correct position. Halli is aware of this and will tweak the size of the statue and position of the statue's hand before Hannah cleans up the scene.

I also tweaked the final zoom segment so the snakes tweened more and added a couple of frames to loop while Medusa is zooming out.

What worked well:

• Tweening the snakes in both scenes and slowing down their movements to appear more snake-like
• The altered timing of the movements for the pan scene despite not being in the intended position still work well with the soundtrack
• The panning test generally worked despite the shortened background
• Adding a little overshoot in the leg when it goes up in the Medusa Dip scene

What could be improved:

• Consistency with the snake thickness could be better in the Medusa Dip scene
• The snakes could potentially have more movement in the panning scene

My roughs for this project are now done, all that's left is for me to clean up one of Prathik's roughs and my role for this project will be finished.

Dance Animation

One of the things Jenny wanted was a visual representation of stars at the beginning of the animation, so I thought it would look good if they trailed light after being plucked from the sky and returned to the sky after the dancer fell:

I also tweaked the effect I did previously so there was more build up and a bit more detail with particles fading away and I feel it looks a lot better now. I put a note over one of the frames that will need to be extended otherwise the timing is a little too fast for the effect to work.

There was a scene where Jenny asked to make it look like the dancer disappears dramatically, giving Thanos from Avengers Infinity Wars as an example. At some point I realised I wasn't sure which frame to start from when animating on twos so I just animated on ones to let the cleanup animator decide which frame to use. As a result I think it actually looks too fast but when I doubled up the frames, the timing worked better so this is something I'll bring up with Jenny to see if the music would still match with the end frames doubled up. The segment on ones look like this:

I had a surprising amount of difficulty with the wing segment, I ended up with three different versions of wings and showed them to Jenny, who agreed with me that the the third option looked the best while the other two were "too pointy".

I continued with the third option and added some feathers that disappear. The original timing of the video had to be tweaked for it to work so I marked out which frames had to be held for different times as well as a couple of frames that would manually need tweening.

What worked well:

• Altering timing and tweening of frames to fit the effects better in the disappearing and wings effects
• Using reference to get the wing shape and anatomy right

What could be improved:

• The frames where the dancer disappears completely could last longer but this might affect the syncing of the music more than it needs to be
• A segment of the frames from the dramatic disappearance scene will be timed better if the frames are doubled up

The next step will be to check over the roughs with Jenny to see if anything needs correcting, otherwise my role in this project is complete.