Extended Practice: Texting & Driving Scenes 1 & 2

To create the first scene of my Texting and Driving Animation, I began with animating the protagonist getting into his car. From this scene, the audience should see that the same character is being used throughout and perhaps already foreshadow what may happen during this next advert.

To animate this scene, I began with rigging the character as usual because I wanted his limbs to bend. I began with key-framing the legs as this seemed to work last time with the walk cycle, and then began to parent the rest of his body and animate them. This was a bit of a struggle to do because I wasn't sure of the pacing, so I recorded myself getting into my car and this was so helpful at understanding timings.

Once I had added more movement to his torso and rigged his arms and animated those, I needed to get him to come from outside of the car, not the inside. Since I never have just one component, everything is broken into different .png layers, I thought it would be easy for me to achieve, but because there were so many layers, it was confusing to get him to either be in front of the door or behind it. And as you can see above, I could not get it to work.

However, after experimenting in After Effects, I ended up being able to get the scene to look much much better. In the end I made the body of the protagonist a 3D layer, which meant that when the door rotated on it's z axis, it went behind him so I didn't need to worry anymore! I really like this scene now and I think it looks more realistic than any other attempt that I have tried so far.

Once the protagonist is in the car, the scene cuts to his phone buzzing as he gets a text message. This is to introduce the topic of the animation, texting and driving. This scene was enjoyable to animate because not only did I want to recreate and over exaggerate a phone buzzing, but I wanted to try and emulate dust particles and a ray of light moving within the scene also. To do this, I created several .pngs in Photoshop using different brushes to get shapes that were less defined and more abstract. Then I imported them into Photoshop and changed their opacity again as they were still too opaque, and I animated them moving to the right. I like the outcome of them as they are very subtle but still add a little detail to an otherwise basic scene!