ANIMATING

The rig was now ready and whilst having a few issues such as wrist twisting up if you moved the rig too eccentrically it worked really well. I was looking forward to animating seeing as I hadn't done any since my first year. I really enjoy animating but I don't think it is my strongest skill and there are other things that I enjoy more. The shots that I had to animate were the beginning were our character is playing guitar badly and the shot were the character flips the switch on the amp from 'off' to 'crunch'. Another piece of animation that I am responsible for is finding an animated or moving background to put behind the character when he is doing his guitar solo.

Animating took me a fair amount of time but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I learnt a lot about animating and especially learnt a lot about the graph editor and its importance. I had to practice out my scene a few times myself to get the key poses right in my head. Matt had also recorded some reference footage of himself playing the sound that we were using. This was extremely helpful as I am not musician, I do not know anything about guitar's so the reference footage showed me where abouts the hand would be if the character was actually playing the notes from sound. It also showed me how regularly you would need to strum the guitar in order to play this piece of music. Below are some images of the two shots that I animated.

Above is an image of the first shot that I animated. It is the scene where the character is playing badly.

Above is an image of the shot of the amp.

Above is an image of the shot that I animated where the character flips the switch from 'off' to 'crunch'.

Above is an image of the animated background that I created in AfterEffects. This is the background for the shot where the main character is doing a guitar solo.

Overall I am very happy with how my animation turned out. Its not perfect and there is plenty of room for improvement however I think it works really well with the style of the promo. I am also very happy with the animated background that I created in AfterEffects, I think that it fits perfectly with the scene. I only really knew basics in AfterEffects but now I have developed some more knowledge by looking a tutorials and experimenting. I have learnt some new skills that I can definitely carry forward onto another project. Everything is now starting to come to together and am very happy with how things are turning out so far.