This is my final animation. I have named it Battery Life because it is about the life of a battery and the battery life of the battery gets drained. I have refined it as much as possible for he final hand in. The story is now understandable and the twist ending came out very well.
There was problems with the export out of Premiere however because the gradients of the lighting and reflections was so smooth that it could not render it out. I tried different formats and codecs but all came out with the same rough shading.
I have taken these three renders from the final scenes of my animation. They show the lightning effects that I have used and the inside of the power station. I was happy with how the final sequence came out and the lightning really worked well for what I wanted o do with it.
I have used two songs and a lot of different sound effects in my animation. The twos songs are:
-Vevo - When in Need
-Yuan Chan - Excalibur
These songs are both under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Share Alike license which allows me to use and modify them and use them in my work as shown above.
Most of my sound effects came from websites that use creative commons licenses as can be seen in the image above. The websites I used are:
-soundbible.com
-freesound.org
-partnersinrhyme.com
Above are some development images from the tail end of my animation. They show experimenting with lightning and the brightness of it as well as development of the charging dock and some scenes of the character coming to and entering the power station.
The rough animation stage of my story is now complete. From here I will begin to refine the animation by smoothing out some of the scenes that don’t look quite right and then refining my textures and lights.
List of thing to refine:
Scene 1. Slight lean to the left needs fixing.
Scene 2. Light intensity to high after switch on.
Scene 3. Arms out of sync with legs.
Scene 4. Add slide to position and open eyes when waking.
Scene 5. Dim lighting.
Scene 6. Move camera slightly forward.
Scene 7. Move camera slightly left.
Scene 8. Lighting.
Scene 9. Add doors to power station.
Scene 10. Eyes to stop at look left.
Scene 11. Dim lights.
Scene 12. Dim lights.
Scene 13. Add Doors.
Scene 14. Refine Doors.
Scene 15. Fix Floor.
Scene 16. None.
Scene 17. Light at bottom left fix, add detail of machines and dead batteries.
Scene 18. None.
Scene 19. Dim Lights, lower feet.
Scene 20. Dim Lights.
Scene 21. Add frantic body movement as if trapped.
Scene 22. Animate Eyes to dying look.
Scene 23. None.
Scene 24. Shaking Body and Eyes closed.
Scene 25. Rolling and flipping.
Scene 26. None.
On all scenes:
1. Set reflectivity of character texture to 0.2 on all scenes.
Deciding on Ending Twist
The first and original ending was going to be a successful attempt to turn on the power for the city. This was a happy predictable ending to the story so I have decided to add a twist from the list below:
1. The character climbs into the device and is instantly shcoked violently and flung across the room with an ending shot of him lying toasted on the floor. (Sad Ending)
2. The second idea is to have everything around the country basically collapse to the ground due to the large power overload which leaves my character standing on top of the platform with everything flatten to the ground around him. (Comedic Ending)
3. The next ending is giving the impression of a happy ending as the city starts to power up, then the lights flick back off and the character is lying on the ground with sparks flickering around him. (Twist Ending)
I have decided to go with a mash up between numbers 1 and 3. The character will get shocked violently and then there will be a scene showing the lights outside the power station glowing intensely. Then the camera will skip back inside the power station to a clip of the character getting thrown across the room to his death and the end of the story.
Test of animation on the 28-05.
I have added another 27 seconds to my previous playblast. The character now walks down the street and arrives at the power station. From here I need to finish the remainder of the animation and then go back through all my scenes and refine the cameras, lighting, animation and textures.
Although my character will most likely not do these two poses in my animation I just wanted to check that my rig was able to handle more extreme poses. It was very easy to animate both of these poses with my rig and I am very happy with it.
Playblasts test on 23-05-2012.
I have created a short 50 second playblast to test the animation of my character and the composition of some of my camera shots. So far I am happy with it but there is still a lot of animating to go and refining to do.
I have uploaded three renders, one from the scene where my character hides in a corner and two of the city environment I am currently working on.
I have created street lights and have been working on the power display. I am not going to worry about adding a lot of detail or perfect textures until all my animation is laid out because I may get carried away with details and not get the animation done in time for rendering.
