Animations, Rendering, Compositing and Editing in Adobe premier - 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.

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 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, I