Animation and how we fit in.

Myself and Depa had the responsibilities of animating the piece. We started far too late in the production which i was annoyed about, but we couldn't do anything to help it, other than pre planning a little better. Once we had missed the Rave Live deadline, we had a week to start and finish animation, we knew that due to this short amount of time we had to cut out certain aspects of our animation.
Originally our animation included several cuts, with close ups of flying along with the biplane at very cantered angles, we come to an executive decision that these needed to be cut in order to finish out piece.
We also wanted to include some animation on our character Jack, with the flaps of this hat flying around with the wind, and with him walking off screen at the end of the scene. We also intended to rig the parachute so that it could fold up in a natural way, once it had landed on the ground, however this also had to be cut.
We got on with the animation with our pushed time limit, and it all went very smoothly, we were able to complete it in a couple of days. We had 3 scenes in total to animate, i took responsibility for the first scene, and the scene where the plane falls out the sky, which were the two shorter scenes. Depa took responsibility for the middle scene where the plane is flying through the sky, and the camera pans 180 degrees around the plane, and then the bird comes flying into the plane with it spinning out of control.
Looking back at the animation we did, i can safely say that in my opinion it looks very rushed, i feel we didn't give ourselves enough time to complete it, and the animation in some places looks very rusty and rushed, and in some places too slowly paced, and in some places, too fast paced, for example the part where the bird flies into the plane, i feel we could have dragged over a longer period of time.
If i was to do this project differently, i would have definitely given us at least 2 weeks to animated the piece, this would have allowed us to include those pieces we had to leave out, and would have given the whole project a more professional feel.


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These screen shots are of me animating my chosen scenes, we decided to animate the plane first, because if we imported a character and animated them together it would lag the computer a huge amount making animation nearly impossible. We had some problems with this however. We were not able to parent the plane to the character so that it stayed in the cock pit, so in turn we had to animate the character separately, which makes it look very awkward, with the character seeming to bounce out of his seat unnaturally, however i couldn't do much to change this at such a late stage in the project.


We needed to find an angle that looked good for the plane to fly into the plane. Originally we were going to have him fly in form the side profile, from the storyboard, however now that we added the 180degree pan, we decided to have him flying in from the top left of scene, tipping the plane off into a spiral. I fell doing this gave the piece a much more realistic and professional feel.



How we fit in...
Throughout our project, we all had our own roles we had to stick to, we decided from the beginning that we would all produce our own separate storyboards, so that we could come up with the best idea put together. we then broke down each individual job role. I wanted to focus on UV and texturing this term, as well as a little bit of modeling. Depa stated her desires to produce some character modeling as that is a gap she had in her portfolio, so me and josh agreed to let her focus on the character model. Josh took responsibility of the sound, and modeling of the windmill, as well as producing the ground terrain and sky dome for the piece. We all recognized that we had our individual roles, however we all helped each other out when needed also. Once we were in post production, i agreed that i would render and compile our scenes and add effects to get the finished movie.
The animation pipeline is very important in a project like this. We all recognise we have our own responsibilities and we also all know where we fit in amongst each others job roles. For example, Me and Depa created storyboards as this was our part of production, and Josh did not produce one, however this was no problem at all as he knew where our project was heading by looking at our storyboards, and interpreting the information we had decided on to inform his own decisions about things such as the type of windmill he modeled. I think all in all we worked very well in this pipeline, and we were always in contact and had a great knowledge of what each one of us was doing.