Finished! YAY

I have finally finished my animation and it looks great, so happy with it. :D https://vimeo.com/128576739

Finalising in after effects

I have decided to add zooms and camera shakes in relation to the music in after effects using a wiggle control, I thought this adds a nice dynamic feel to the animation and makes it feel more real.

Animating the Fly

I am animating the fly by importing the specific shots that involve the fly as video files into photo shop creating a new blank video layer and drawing over the top of my video frame by frame in relation to the movements of my puppet, these two layers where then attached in after effects, so that I could apply movments and zooms to the camera without having to animate both the fly layer and the puppet layer.

Syncing the Animation

I have gone onto realize that due to all my images being essentially stacked ontop of eachother that small counting errors towards the start of the animation can seriously affect the rest, I have now gone over all of my x sheet and re synced all of the frames.

Shooting the Animation

Due to certain circumstances in my life I haven't been able to start shooting as early as I had hoped, leaving me hardly enough time to be fully animate the piece. I officialy started shooting 2 months before my deadline at the start of the easter half term, I had to come in every single day for at least 5 hours of the half term and the two weeks after to get the full 1000 frames of my animation fully captured, this was a very intence time for me shooting around 50 frames a day averaging around 6 minutes per photo, towards the end when I seriously needed to have it done I did one 8 hour day where I shot 300 frames averaging around 2 minutes per photo, I really wish I hadn't done this as it does show up in the animation, the joint between jaw and face slowly looks worse and worse, oh well.
Actually shooting the animation was fairly easy and extremely fun. It was also extremely rewarding to see it slowly coming to life I am at a point now where I have the RAW animation as one final image sequence synced to the soundtrack, I now need to add in zooms fades and the illustrated fly over the top for the deadline.

Finished Xsheet

Finally finished the Xsheet, and its time to start animating. I have been taking test shots setting up my camera setting up the lights in the stop motion room in university, in there I have a light rig with studio lights but these are extremely hot and after hours animating in there it can start to melt the plastercene so I also have the air condition on.

Designing the Set

These are some photos from my set that I designed, as the story is based in a bedroom I created a door, a wardrobe and a bed from foam board and added material that bested bed sheets. I also made some hand painted posters, that show where my influences for this video came from.

Writing The Xhseet

It would be nearly impossible to produce my animation to the technical level in which I want it to be animated in without writing an Xsheet. An xsheet or dope sheet is an instructions guide for my self to animate, it is a kind of map where you can write 5 different instructions onto a 12th of a second in relation to the exact noise that is made at that specific frame in the animation. I wrote this by scrubbing across my soundtrack in ToonBoom. My xsheet is the fundamental root for me to start my animation from. I cant start animating until it is totally finished, at the moment I have scrubbed over the entire dialogue and recorded it on the sheet, I then have to act all of this out and add in the movement, eyes and camera cuts.
here is a test of the part of ther xsheet you see above looped https://vimeo.com/128576507

Writing the Storyboard/Animatic

 

As my story generally consists of an eye level shot of a bust through out my animation, storyboarding for this project ended up being 20 drawings of the same head in different positions not really helping me produce my animation, I have decided to create myself an 'animatic' consisting of key frames that are still images of my puppet in the relevant positions this is a much better root for me to write my xhseet from and to develop timing and acting out of puppet in relation to my soundtrack. Seeing the images in time with the soundtrack helped entirely.
https://vimeo.com/128576131