Applied 2: Finishing Animating the Sheep

Today we finished animating the sheep which was a scary thought because that means we only have post production left! As always we planned all of our mouth shapes out by going through the audio and doubling up on frames but choosing particular mouth poses wisely. 

I started animating this scene this time, and I really wanted to move the sheep head as she says 'because', as the way she says it, I envision her inclining her head towards the interviewer, as if they are asking her to elaborate on what she is saying (as there are so many pauses). I think this went quite nicely, however the eye movements are a bit too sporadic. Hayley wanted to have the half eyes as she says it to emphasise this head movement even further, which I like, but I do wish that we hadn't moved the pupils at all to be even more effective. For a future reference looking back at this whole process, I think we don't need to move the eyes half as much as we have in this module. Though it feels like a slow process, and sometimes often feels stagnant, when the images are put together, they go by so quickly, so the eyes movements sometimes suffer. 

Also I really wanted to keep the pause at the end into the animation, but still capture the character thinking/moving so we can establish her even more, and so the whole animation isn't choppy and instead, flows nicely. I really like how this turned out, and I wish we had done this a bit more. The only worry that I have is the flickr in the animation. Whilst animating, we did not change the lights at all, but somehow this kept changing in Dragon frame which was really frustrating and hasn't happened to any of our other scenes either? Hopefully this can also be sorted in post. 

This is all of our scenes which I slotted into the animatic. Sometimes when we rendered them out of Premiere they have lines between each movement which is something I have come across before when I had to made a short film in college, so I know it is fixable, however it gives us a rough idea of what our animation looks like so far! I am so happy with it, as really, it is our final 'production' part, and next we will move on to stabilising and green screening! I think it flows quite nicely, and looking back, I am glad that we changed our audio as I cannot imagine animating to ten different voices with ten different characters in such a short time frame and being able to make it look cohesive! For a first time animating via stop motion, I am so proud of myself!