Applied 2: Finishing the Newt Scene!

            

Today, Hayley and I completed the last newt scene, which means now we can get onto the other characters which I think is quite nerve-racking as I have become very comfortable with just animating the newt. 

I am very happy with what we have achieved, we have animated around 30-40 seconds which has taken us a few weeks, but this is because we have had a lot of work to do alongside this project as well. Again, we focussed on eyes, mouth and head movement to try and keep the newt acting as natural as possible, using ourselves as the main references. We tried to ease in and out of the actions, as the more we watch what we have done, the more we realise that some of the movements are quite fast, therefore we are learning as we are going along. I tried to tilt the newts head to the side as we says 'merely' and I love how it turned out, adding character to an otherwise boring word.

I have noticed that the camera jumps, illustrating every new day we have started animating, which does irritate me, but we tried really, really hard to not let this happen. We did not move the tripod at all, and when we go back to the room it has been moved which is very hard for us to get back to the right frame. I am going to try and look into stabilisation to try and see if I can fix this problem, but I am not sure it is entirely doable. Hayley and I have also decided we are going to move our set for the next characters (we didn't move it for the newt because we didn't want to lose the camera angle), to a more safe and secure area so that we hopefully, won't have to deal with these problems.

Then, because I was curious, we uploaded our files into After Effects and practiced green screening out the background, just to see if what we had could even work with an image. I used the notes from our green screen induction and was able to edit the video accordingly.

I am quite happy with how it looks with an image for a background, I like it much more than plain blue, which Hayley agrees with. As you can see from the video, there is a change in lighting, which especially shows on the background (left trees area). I did eliminate this from the first scene in the animation, as I used the white and black shaders to remove it, but as there is different lighting further on, this alteration didn't apply to that. To solve this, I am going to cut each scene up in After Effects and edit them separately instead of trying to do all the newt scenes together, as this is not doable to a good standard. Hayley is going to use an image of hers for the background which she took from near where she lives!