Getcha' Head in the Game

Things have happened.

First off, I got a draft version of the audio. Unfortunately you won’t be able to hear it in the latest animatic because I was given it as a .mov over top the previous animatic with the voice over, and I don’t want to confuse you - I’m confused enough.

Scenes are actually getting done and for the first time in a long while I’m starting to get excited about the animation.

The graduation scene is basically fully animated. The only bits of animation that are still needed is the life animation of those on stage (still need to make all those people) and the transition from the Wish Flowers to the beginning of the graduation scene in general.

So one of the things I started doing is lighting.

Yeah, I didn’t plan on doing it until the second-to-last week, but I needed to get some done for the hallway scene to know if the dimensional After Effects lights would work or if I would have to get fancy with some blending layers.

Thankfully the lights work well……kind of. The bright light from outside wouldn’t work as a dimensional light (it kept showing up inside the hall even when the door was shut.) So I ended up having to do some 2D ‘lights’ anyway.

The dilemma came when things where starting to look done and I realized I was getting banding again.

This is an issue I’ve had multiple times in the past, occasionally with just using gradients, but most always when 3D lights have been added in. Teachers have noticed it but never offered suggestions on how to get rid of it.

So I asked google.

For this fairly common issue only 3 options exist to help - and several commented that it still didn’t fix the issue completely. Me I went with number 3 since #1 would change the style of my animation and #2 only applies to gradients and not lights.

Basically its all about the bit-depth.

Turns out the default is 8-bit files, and to get rid of banding you need to be at least 16 if not 32. I’ve tried out all and here is my comparison.

8-bit

16-bit

32-bit

Okay, not sure how well you can see it - but I promise there is a difference. If your picture is clear then you’ll see that the first one has noticeable banding on the wall both left and right of the characters. (This is 8-bit) The second one, 16-bit, no longer has the banding behind the figures, and the other side is much better but still there a bit. However, when looking at the 32-bit image there isn’t too much of a change to really warrant the extra depth and render time.

So for now I’ll go with 16-bit unless some scenes still show lots of banding still. Trick will be remembering to change the setting on all the other scene files before rendering…… And I’m only going to change it before the final renders because I did it for this little scene and it took 20 minutes for just over 6 seconds.

Yeah, I should test the look all together, but I’ll work with only looking at test stills because I’m not going to sit there for 40 minutes to render something that I’m going to change.

The last thing that had to get animated, that hadn’t really been touched at all, was the obstacle course. Simple right? Just one scene.

Only I sat down to work on it and nothing.

Zip.

…..okay, not quite.

I got done the basics for the 3/4 person walk and the profile person walk — 2 things that are actually needed in other scenes as well.

I finished those, went to start laying out the different shots, and just started getting so frustrated by the different elements. Where the things I tried in the Hallway scene ended up working, nothing was really lining up here.

And I can NOT cut this scene. Its very important in his story and why he fails.

So I decided to just take a step back from it. I’ll finish it next week but I really just need to figure out the logistics of the elements for the scene. Instead I went back to the first shot and tried fixing the background compositions. just by adding some trees it looks sooooo much better. I ran out of time to get more in there but its coming along.

……I don’t have a still of this so you’ll have to just look at the animatic…….

Right. About the animatic….

I got the first draft of the music over the weekend so you can here that in there too. There are some transition issues and gaps, but for a first pass of music that is workable. Thoughts?

So lots got done, and there is still lots to do.

Three weeks. I can do this.