Animating, Rendering, Compositing and Editing - Mantas Karciauskas

Animations:

Characters

Animating three characters with interactions on my own was very challenging, I struggled for the most part to create a very slow paced movements without having everything look slow motion like. Thus already this being a huge task and working on my own I looked for ways to cut down on the Animation; setting up pathways was one of them and looping the three different walk cycle animations. Each individual characters has their own way of walking and I thought that this was vital for the film in order to achieve a dynamic feel.

I wanted the main character to have facial animations, as we were having lots of mid-close up shots due to the monologue being so personal and there is no better way to depict what the character is going through than by the expressions on his face. For the characters facial expressions I used morphs, eyes and eyelids were animated too.


Camera

I also animated all the camera shots and movements of the camera. I found it to be fairly difficult especially with the tracking shots, as characters walked they also had up and down movement, which had to be implemented into the camera animation, as otherwise the focus of the shot would have been lost. Also, I tried to cover up any noticeable errors in the animation by focusing on other aspects if there was to be an error.

Rendering:

When rendering you always want to keep the render times to its lowers without compromising too much of a quality lost. I worked on the render settings and optimizing the scene. Rendering times started at four minutes per frame and I knew that this was too much, so I started messing around with Mental Ray materials, Deleting all the unwanted history, any meshes that will not be in the scene, running render diagnostics for errors and playing around with mental ray settings and decreasing screen resolution to  1440x612 which is 25% lower than 1920x816 which is used for the wide screen. Rendering already cropped out frame meant that some work will need to be carried out in Adobe Premiere.

For the most part the actual rendering took place at University, with I and Ahmed was being present to set up all the computers and monitor the machines in case it was to crash.


Compositing and Editing in Adobe Premiere:

Once everything was rendered, the film was split into eight different sections to make it easier to keep everything organised. After setting up project in Premiere, I then imported all the frames in batches into Premiere, deleted all the unwanted frames in between where the cuts were made, took out some shots and slow down the film by 10%. I then moved onto editing Brightness and Contrast, Shadows, Highlights and Mid tones as well as Saturation and gamma before settling with look and feel of the film which was then forwarded to Ahmed for sound editing before it was sent back to me for final opinion and tweaking/ adding in black borders which I created in Photoshop.