3rd Day of Animating

3rd DAY OF AFTER EFFECTS After deciding to add a new scene into the mix I was ready to get started as I had just been preparing and finding imagery for the whole of the morning.

Instead of him popping up from the bottom I just introduced the guy where he will be on screen fully as the song is to quick at this point to introduce people one by one so I think this has worked much better than I had planned. You can see bellow this is where my layers are first scene in the red box and there is no position key frames there yet.

This is where the name swings in on the ‘x’ axis just like I had done previously. Seen as thought the music is really intense at the time I added two simple lines to fly across the screen at a high speed and fade out so its not dominating the shot. I did this just to add a little more excitement due to the nature of the song.

The man then shifts to the right as does his name, the zombies follow from the left side also. This is done to the beat of the song and they remain still until the next beat.

The camera then zooms in to the zombies over the shoulder of the man. Bellow is a top view of this shot.

Very quickly the building comes in from the right pushing the zombies out of the frame. Everything is black as the building enters but the movement of the zombies is to quick to notice this change. I have do this as I have introduce a spot light over my layers. I intended to just add some shadow and was having a bit of an experiment. When I was playing cone angle it turned everything black. I had planned to have this as a story scene so I decided to use this like lightning.

Two names swing in from the side of the building while everything is black still . I think the names swinging in at this angle looks really attractive and everything black is a nice subtle change of the feel of the animation.

As I am doing a storm effect I used the effect particle world, played around with the settings and placed it behind the building. Its only subtle but adds a nice effect to the scene and works very well as rain.

I bring the light cone up and down with the tempo of the song for a couple of frames to give the impression of it flickering. I am really happy that I found this effect and plan to use it again later on in the sequence.

The camera pans down and a zombie crowd appear at the bottom moving side to side.

The movement for this scene is done with a null object which my which my camera is parented to.

This mean all I have to do is move the null object and the camera follows. It is much smoother and easier to use. So I plan to do much more of this. I found this technique out by watch a tutorial on video copilot.

Using a mask I make the screen go blank as I intended to. It last only about 3 frames in total and everything previously disappears from shot as the mask fades away.

I then introduce my turret gun from the bottom and it pops into place with the song beat.

I introduce layers of zombies on each song beat. There is 3 layers overall. Not a great deal to write about in this section as its a very simple on to finish my day on as my head is becoming mush.

Start to zoom in past the gun and into a zombie instead of the background which I intended. This is because I used a huge amount of zombies and the background space is limited.

Finish on a black screen making it nice and easy for me to introduce my next scene.

Over all I am extremely happy with todays efforts as I usually average about 10 seconds a day but I managed to crack out about 12 and I am really happy with how they have come out. I am most pleased about the scene with the buildings in and using the light and the particle world effect really adds to my animation.