Documentary Animation: Week 14: Remaining Water, Colouring and Compositing

Water Animation

I am wrapping up painting the water animation this week. I did the remaining waters that I missed out and the beach wave mask. 

shore water

calm water

I found a better method of painting the beach wave using mask. It saves up a lot of paper and time. I can squeeze in 4 short waves into the paper, while longer ones only takes half of the horizontal A4 page. Using the same blue water background animation while applying mask to it makes the transition of the first scenes smooth. However, I need to do a better job in cleaning up the mask in Photoshop before exporting it as a PNG sequence. This time Tom helped me out by thoroughly clean up on the image sequence using Lasso.  In the future, I have to take note that the Colour Range selection tool is not effective in cleaning up textured papers because the textures' shadow is darker than the colour of the actual paper, leaving some of the grains behind.

 

mask for beach waves

Colouring and Compositing

We aimed to finish up colouring this week, and we managed to do it! I painted most of the things that have not got a fixed colour palette, such as the furniture scene and the salmon fish, because of my role to determine which colour to use during the pre-production stage. I also asked for my group's opinion about the colours that I am using before I started painting the rest of the frames. The choice of colours are informed by Tom's storyboard and the character colour sheet that Rosie has made, which makes the decision-making more straightforward for me.

Final Crit

In the final crit this week, we presented what we have got for our animation so far. We are pleased with people's response to the animation although we have several tweaks to do. For the background, Dan raised a good point about adding things that can make the station more obvious. My team had a discussion about it, and we decided that adding a vintage red lights is probably the best solution because the pole is higher than the building, and therefore it can be visible even when the flood has risen up to the roof.

We also have gotten feedback about the rowing animation because the Hero's expression does not show that he is struggling. There is definitely a limitation to the Hero character design because he does not have eyebrows. I did not take into account making an expression sheet, which leads to this problem. Rosie did a good job in solving this problem by drawing the eyes horizontally and making them closer together as he leans back. To add to the suspense, I also played with colour through making the Hero's face redder when he leans back.