Animating the Painter's Room

This was the final room that needed animating. The tears and cuts through the walls were created by running a screw driver through the paper-cache walls frame by frame. These look realistic however to improve them, we could have painted the back of the newspaper, which shows slightly when falling off the walls.

The shot where the painting fell of the wall and bled into the floorboards was a live-action shot, involving ink being poured into the back of the canvas, and allowed to leave through holes, where it then fell into a puddle on an invisible layer on cling film. We weren't sure how the ink would act however it turned out the way we hoped it would.

The ending scene with the candle drop was achieved by placing the candle on a piece of wire that was fed through the floorboards, to help keep it in mid-air. These had to be painted out in post-production however to remove the wire and create the illusion. 

The hands of the 'wall people' coming out of the chimney was the final long scene. We got the gist of them  from the practice scene we did a few weeks earlier so they were not as complicated to animate the second time around. We accidentally moved the first hand a bit too far to the right of the chimney however to recover it, we animated it settling back into a more central position, and the error now looks intentional as if he is feeling around. The fragile fingers towards the end also started snapping and were harder to keep in place, however this too is not noticeable in the final footage. 

What Went Well

• The distortion of the room was something I was worried that we weren't going to be able to achieve, however the scenes we have managed to create look very believable and I'm pleased with them
• The hands of the wall people have a lot of life and character to them
• The practice tests of some of the harder shots made animating the real thing a lot easier
• We completed the animation before the Christmas break so there won't be any issues completing it in time

Criticism

• The wall paper could have been painted on both sides, as some newspaper shows in some of the scenes
• We were uncertain how the ink would act for the live action shot as we couldn't plan for it or do a test shot
• We tried to get the picture frame to crack however it just ended up shattering everywhere so we didn't end up using that shot
• The 'wall people' hands would have been too fragile for any more than one scene of animating with without snapping