Today I began animating another scene for the Drink Driving animation. For this scene, my aim was to have the car drive toward the audience as a new perspective, and also for them to see how bad the character's driving is from the alcohol!
I began with practicing this move in After Effects first, to see if what I had in my mind, was actually possible. I created the car as a .png and made it a 3D layer, this was I could experiment with depth of field as well as zooming in and out. In this first test, I was able to get the car to come towards the camera, but I thought that it wasn't centred enough, and it seems to drive off the bottom of the screen, so this was something I altered.
I also wanted to have my main character driving behind the wheel, with his arms moving rapidly to show that he has not much control over the wheel or his reactions. I did this separately in a new composition, as I felt like I would have more control this way and avoid mistakes, as opposed to animating him when the car is zooming in and out. I didn't need to rig his body this time as it is only such a short scene (2 seconds maximum) and I only animated his hands and head! I added some eye movements in there also for extra detail.
However, because I animated him in a separate composition, I tried and tried to export the scene as an image sequence in .png format so that I didn't have to have a background, I could just copy and paste him into the other scene. However, I wasn't able to get the transparent background to work, so I imported the rendered animation anyway and created a 'mask' around the windscreen and this worked perfectly!
I then added him to the moving car and I really like the effect! I think it is much more interesting than just sideways on, and it has made me feel like I really am progressing with composition planning. Since this went well, I will be exploring new angles and dynamics further on in this module, so that I am able to create a more exciting animation!
Then, because the animation is about 'drink driving', I needed to portray this through the driver driving sporadicly. I decided to move the car side to side just like the movement of the steering wheel, but not too much or else it would look too forced. I like the flow of the car and the speed, as it is fast enough to tell that the driver is drunk, but not so fast that you can't see what is happening (for example the animation being all blurry).
Even though I really liked the animation beforehand, I still wanted something extra to make it stand out. From my artbook, I remembered that I had added some lights to the car, a very important part of driver safety, therefore to make the scene look less bare, I decided to incorporate some here as well as some moving clouds. However, now that I have bright lights, I need to remember to include them in ALL of the scenes, or else it won't look like I put much thought into the animation at all.
In the .gif above, I added the lights in Photoshop frame by frame, but as you can see it is rather choppy and they jump around a lot. I decided to try and have a go again in After Effects to see if I could get the lights to look more static and less jumpy.
And here is my final result! I really like the outcome of this scene. It is only 2 or 3 seconds long but it took me all day! I liked adding bits here and there to add on top of the animation, to make it stand out and look more detailed. I hope I can get the rest of the scenes to look as good too! In combination with sound, I think it will be even better!
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