The FINAL WEEK

This week I will spend compositing the shots we have and mashing together this sham of an animation. There's no chance we'll submit the completed thing on time which bums me out but I learned a good lesson on this project.

I'll finish this project up after the deadline. Compositing is okay. It's cool to get back into doing stuff in After Effects because it builds up my skillage in the village and it's nice to be able to composite to a half decent standard.

I'm happy with a lot of my project but I would have liked to refine it more. I made a massive cock up when I exported a scene in 720p and had to pull a few sneaky photoshop tricks to make it look half decent for 1080p, but I learned a valuable lesson.

Posing My Moom

I enjoyed posing my Moom puppet. I learned a little bit about framing a camera in MAYA and I continued to familiarise myself with the buttons. It also reiterated to me that animation involves a lot of acting.

I drew heavily from my reference images and found them extremely useful. Since, I've used reference footage for a lot of my animation to capture the weight and realism.

Getting to act is one of the things I enjoy most about animation. I can definitely see myself becoming a character animator someday hopefully.

I struggled with Lighting Moom. I need more practice with it.

Sound Edit and FIRE Animation

The majority of my week was spent sound editing. I booked out the sound booths to record the president's voice, his aide's voice and the extras and I came up with some creative solutions. I found that slapping my underarm through a jumper produced a good punch sound and crumbling a polystyrene cup in my cardigan made the sound of running on grass. I'm really pleased with my sound edit and I think it gives a lot of life to the project.

I animated the fire for the asteroid and am now struggling to composite the whole thing into a finished shot. Very pleased with the fire, though.

I started by drawing balls for reference and animating around them

Moom Walk Cycle

I struggled with this at first. I'm mostly unfamiliar with using Maya and I found it hard to visualise how everything was going to move when it was keyframed. There seemed to be lots of factors to consider. I started enjoying it more once I used the graph editor which helped me understand the ARCS and the easing in and out.

Moom is really intuitively rigged, though, so I was thankful for that.

I'm pleased with my final walk cycle. It's a tad janky and I definitely need to continue practicing but I think it has good weight and personality. I enjoyed this task.

Back from Chrimbo, Adding More Touches to the Project

Did no work over Christmas. I was working in my big genius brain, dreaming up great ideas, but I can't submit that on a pen drive. Still, I'm confident that my individual workload will be finished by the deadline. I made a crude gantt chart to make sure I'll be okay.

This week I completed the last of the rough animation

I animated a space portal, which was a daunting prospect at first but I ended up having lots of fun.

I'm pleased with it.

I also animated some background elements like birds. To make the scene POP with life.

A Big Explosion

Animated a big explosion this week for the final shot of the film. Honestly I think that if a film doesn't end with a big explosion then it shouldn't exist. That's why Citizen Kane is so rubbish.

I've been worried that tbe backgrounds aren't being drawn fast enough and I'm having trouble communicating with the background attist. I made a simple background gantt chart for which backgrounds should be finished by the end of each week so hopefully that speeds up production.

I'm frustrated because it seems that there is so much more still to do on this project and I'm starting to have trouble managing my time