This is my final animation for the I Kill Giants spot for a fictional motion comic. In my previous post I talked about my reasoning behind the project so for this one I thought I would just pick a few scenes from the animation and talk about them and the overall animation.
Overall the animation process went well, I worked in a bit pretty much every night in some fashion. You can see my progress for each day on my 365 project, it pretty much took over for the past week or so. The animation in the beginning up until the action scenes stayed pretty much the same from my original storyboard. I didn’t have any big issues working on those scenes. I did have to take out the artifacts, moiré patterns, which came when I scanned some of the images. It wasn’t big issue on these images but on later ones is was very noticeable.
The I Kill Giants scene that begin the action scenes stayed true to my storyboard/animatic. I added some sfx for the word bubble that might seem somewhat out of place but they match up with the ones that I have at the end. The giant in a row gave me a bit of trouble, the way I envisioned it didn’t translate as well in after effects. So instead of showing each giants full body I opted to just show their heads/upper body. I put a sky from another part of the comic as the back ground so it wasn’t just plain white. Having the motion blur on I think makes it look pretty cool although you can’t really see any detail about any of the giants.
The scene after this with cool perspective looking up at the monster is probably on of my favorite scenes. It was pretty much setup for the way I wanted to animate it and of course it had to roar after you zoom in. The sfx is actually from boss from duke nukem video game. [Random side note: Duke Nukem Forever, the infamous vaporware game for the last decade or so is actually coming. Check out the trailer for some typical duke nukem vulgar awesome action.]
The next scene that gave me some issues was when the hammer comes out of the purse. This 3 part sequence I felt might be kind of quick, but then again I did want this whole part to be quick. The glow out of the purse was another issue with the mask flickering but with the blur it seems to cover it up. I hope I’m not trying to depend on that too much.
The last part I want to talk about is the stillish action pose part where Barbra is holding the hammer. My idea for it was to make it look really cool and somewhat 3D like even though it’s just a 2D plane. Originally I thought of doing some camera projection but I decided to just stay in after effects. I went with have a camera pan around the image plane and had the main part of the hammer on a higher z depth. The made is seemed like it had some dept to it but move way too much. So I just did some key framing to reduce the movement a bit. I think the background gave me the biggest issue as far as what to use. I wound up using a background from another part that was the sky storm.
So above is what I ended up with this was a cool project to work on and I figured out and learned a bunch as always.
Sound effects from:
Background Music from freeplaymusic.com
