Above is an image which gives a good idea of the different stages involved when creating a sequential animation. These ideology's are adopted from thousands of company's all around the world because they work.
Seeming as our group is working on a project on a much smaller scale, we will be focusing on only a few things for our animation hand in, and they are the following.
Story
This is the stage where me and my group compose story's and try to come up with a convincing idea that will really grab the target audiences attention. Questions we might ask ourselves would be.
What is the overall mood going to be?
Will it be mellow or upbeat?
Will it be a slow action scene or a fast paced chase scene?
All of these questions are important in the role of the pre-production phase where we come up with the initial idea and try to produce something that looks interesting.
We decided to go with an action scene.
Character's
Once we had the story roughly blocked out, we had to figure out how many characters where would be and who would be the lead protagonists. Through these characters we would stage the show and the story would be related and expressed through them, so this stage is very important at trying to find a basis on which to build the animation on.
We decided we wanted a SWAT character (that could be duplicated around) a Detective and an unidentified man who would be the prime suspect of this chase scene.
Art Direction
This stage was also important, it is what lead us to figure out what kind of direction we wanted to go with, be it abstract, cartoony or realistic, by asking each other questions and bouncing off each other we came to our decisions.
We decided that we wanted to do a chase scene what would be adrenaline packed and showed a high level of realism.
Storyboard & Compromise
Once we mapped out our ideas, we now had to create a visual representation of what our story would look like, we all made different storyboards then came together as a group, we decided that we would try to mix our ideas together.
This is my Storyboard.
Animatic
Once we had the storyboard ideas, we decided that we would all do our four separate animations sticking to one character each for simplicity and efficiency. It we were all animating on each character, the clips would look inconsistent with each other.
I decided to do the following animations:-
Idle_Breathe_01
Idle_Breathe_Extended_02
Idle_Crouch_Bridge
Kick_Door_01
Run_Cycle_01
Lighting
This is a very important stage, it can capture the essence of whatever emotions you are trying to portray, and it can make or break an animation completely if you use lighting incorrectly.
To create dramatic effect me and my group decided to use bright lighting and dark lighting to show juxtaposition of feelings and emotions. Most of the animation is inside so we wanted it to have a dark feel, without making the scene look visually dark.
To achieve this we experimented a lot with spot lights, and I built the environments which allowed for us to experiment with things such as ambient occlusion textures to get an all white effect, in the end we didn't go with that idea exactly but we did use it in the initial running scene.
Rendering
When we were rendering we wanted to make sure that everything came out quite bright with a dark feel to it, we managed to create a very convincing scene and we are very happy with the results.
We rendered our scene in full HD 1024 resolution, with ray tracing and we also used mental ray instead of Maya's own software renderer. This meant that we were able to create better batch renders and we could fully control lighting, shadows and gradient lighting effects, including motion blur and luminosity.
Composition
This is where we take the renders and throw them into some sort of software package, most people with no experience of software use windows movie maker which is terrible software, i decided to stitch my animation together using after effects, which I found very beneficial and i learnt lots of quirky new tricks.
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