Animating Scene Four

A big struggle I had with my 30 seconds was that I realised that Hayley and I didn't get our timings right in our animatic and therefore we left all the action to the last 30 seconds without really considering the 'in between' bits. This is not a major problem because between us we could things of lots of fillers to make up the time, but it has taught me for the future that animatics are really important, and this is something I definitely underestimated. So I still had 15 seconds to animated without much direction. Luckily I had so many ideas the more I saw the scene come to life, so it wasn't one of the biggest worries we had to come across.

One of these ideas of mine, was to have the big brother crack his neck and his back just before he goes to throw the ball. This suggests to the audience that he has done this before, along with his athletic/jock attire, and that obviously he will be able to hit a hole in one! I wanted to constantly give the audience hints that he is of course going to win the game over his sister, and this can be done through little actions and movements throughout the build of of the animation, which is my 30 seconds. 

Animating this was very hard as the gaps between frames had to be a lot smaller, to make the movements faster. I also really wanted it to look like he was cracking his bones and not just moving his head and bending backwards, therefore this tested my patience, and how well I could adapt to different paces in movements. But once I had completed it, I was really pleased with how it turned out, and I knew once I put the audio of cracking of bones with it, that there would be more emphasis on the action and it would start to bring some suspense to the little film.

This is the rendered version of the small sequence. I also animated the little sister so that she is surprised by his efforts, as she knows him well. This scene has allowed me to experiment a lot more with trying to animate personalities, which is something I have not done before, but is a lot of enjoyable and satisfying that just animating for example a plain walk cycle. I am giving the big brother qualities and traits such as cockiness, confidence and arrogance, where as I am giving the little sister mischievous, intelligent and humorous qualities so there is always a contrast but is a lot of fun and makes me look forward to completing my 30 seconds!