Green-screen and Painted Background Animating

Me, Daisy and Harry have started animating now that we are happy with the animation tests. We experimented with oil paints for creating swirl effects and morphing colour patterns. These will be faint overlays, which will help make the room look distorted when the poet character gets trapped in the painter's bedroom and the wall people start to come alive. 

The swirl effect using a pallet knife was incredibly difficult to do, as we had to keep the central point of the swirl in the same place each time. The rectangular nature of the A3 page also meant it was hard to achieve a circular swirl each time. This process was made yet harder when we slowly started to introduce new colours, as we did not want the colours to mix immediately. The loop however is fairly seamless as it plays forward and in reverse, and the swirl effect is fairly clear. 

The exploding colour effect was a much easier pattern to create. It involved colours from the white centre, exploding out to cover the whole screen, before being taken over by another colour. The only real issue was keeping the central point white as it tended to merge with the surrounding colour. The motion is smooth however and the colours are very strong. 

Next we animated the green-screen features of the film. The loop cycle of the hand holding the candle was particularly hard to do because the hand had no grip of the candle and the rig itself was unable to hold the weight of the hand. I got around this problem by tightening the rig's joints and using a wrench to clamp down the base of the rig to the table. This did mean the rig was very springy and hard to move between each scene but was at least able to take the weight of the puppet. Overall, the loop is fairly seamless and gives a good impression of the puppet walking from a first-person perspective. The candle wobbles slightly, however it is not too noticeable. 

Then we animated the poet's hand knocking on the door. The sleeve and arm of the puppet were able to move separate to each other, which was very useful, especially for the follow-through of the poet's sleeve when his fist impacts and abruptly stops at the door but the sleeve carries on moving forward. It meant the arm could be in the exact same position for each shot that the sleeve moved forward, giving more weight and impact to the action. This was my favourite green-screen element to animate and part I'm most pleased with so far. 

We then animated the day and night scenes with the front-on view of the window. We achieved this by positioning the light at different points along a semi-circle arc around the window. I like how the light slightly reflects in the window as it resembles the midday point. 

What Went Well

• The painted overlays look very smooth and will definitely help to make the room look distorted
• The painted overlays compliment one another when reduced in transparency and played at the same time
• The separate sleeve and hand made for the knocking shot creates a very convincing illusion that the poet's hand actually hits against a door, as we could animate the follow through of the sleeve without touching the hand
• The window keeps its nice details in post-production for instance the outer strip of stained-glass, which was coloured with blue ink. This doesn't appear as opaque when green-screened, nor is it completely removed by the green screen

Criticism

• The green-screens weren't lit very well so Daisy had to edited them out along with the rig in post-production
• We'll have to make sure the lighting on the puppets matches up with the lighting of the environment they are in
• The rig we used was very unpredictable for the walking with the candle scene, however we still managed to make a successful loop cycle