Extended Practice: No Headlights Animation Production 2

The next scene I chose to animate was one that is not in my storyboard, but one that I had been thinking about doing for a long time when animating the previous two. For a more interesting shot, I thought about animating in the car side mirror, instead of head on or a POV shot. It was either this or the rearview mirror, but I began with this one and ended up really liking the result.

It was actually quite challenging to create this scene because I had two elements moving at different times. What I ended up doing was animating what was in the mirror first, and then importing that into a new scene with the background animated, and then drawing a path around the mirror so that it cut any excess components that overlapped onto the background. This sounds overly complicated, but it worked for me and I am proud of the result! The scene is supposed to show that there is no one behind him (yet) and that he has no lights on which is extremely important to alert other road users of his presence on the road.

I then added a little but more of a motion to the sequence to illustrate that the car is moving at a speed. I think it compliments the marks on the road, and makes the audience feel like they are in the car too.

Now i wanted to try something new again! I wanted to animate the car driving quite fast round a corner but be able to loop it so that it is continuous. I couldn't think of a way to do this in After Effects where the angle wouldn't be straight head on, so I actually created this in Photoshop as an image sequence and then imported it into After Effects for the final touches. I really enjoyed the change of program, and Annabeth had said to maybe try and use Photoshop and After Effects, which has been successful so far. I did find that this was a bit slow however, so I did add more frames and speed it up.

Which you can see here. This took me SO long to do because the lines in the beginning were just so wobbly and when put with the rest of my work for this project, I knew they would stand out because everything else is smooth and done in After Effects. But after tweaking and tweaking, I think I got to a good enough point where it looks like it would fit in with the rest of the aesthetic.

I then began to play around with the rest of the scene. I kept the background quite simple, but added in some lamps which move along with the road to accentuate the driving speed. However, I felt like there were way too many which made it look a little bit cramped and overdone.

Here is the scene with some lamps taken out which slows the speed down slightly. I also added in the car weaving a little bit which is quite natural to do when you are driving straight for a while. I am really pleased with this scene, my only concern so far is that it is too bright for a night time animation, so I will wait until everything else is animated and then see how it looks as a whole. I will also most defintely get a second opinion as I know I tend to overthink things when animating for long periods at a time.