Animation
Now that we had our animatic sorted out it was time to finalise and clean up the animation in Photoshop. When animating the 2D portions of our film, I had Aaron send me the final 3D scene and I just worked on top of it. I animated on ones for all scenes, this was to maintain visual consistency and fluidity so that the monster, despite how different and otherworldly we wanted it to look, was still immersive to the audience.
Scene 1
For scene 1 we wanted the dog to appear as a shadow monster which goes from intimidating presence to dominating force. To convey this we had the shadow burst up from the ground in a flash of smoke. Following our feedback from last time we canted the camera angle slightly so that the monster takes even more space in the frame now.
Scene 2
For scene 2 I had the swirling shadow get more violent, and had the monster explode into the scene out in a mushroom cloud, this was a last minute change to help reinforce the monsters connotations with war. Then a flash of light appears, illuminating several bed bunkers in the room, before the dog monster appears in full. This scene was reanimated to better fit the description we had initially set for it.
Scene 3
For scene 3 the dog monster slowly approaches the boy before quickly rising up and looming over him. Our feedback for this scene was to make the monster appear more 'in universe'. This was accomplished by adding extra shadows and highlights such as adding a Gaussian blur to the fire to make it glow more intensely.
Scene 4
For scene 4 we cut to the boys POV were the monsters eyes take up the scene before it pulls back and screeches at the camera. I felt that this scene was the one that shows my growth and understanding of 2D animation the most. I completed this scene last. The detail, motion and use of colour are the most refined here, I also utilised motion blur and squash and stretch as well as arcs to make the movement fill as swift and real as possible.
For all these scenes I followed the same general approach. The monsters key movements and positions were blocked out before inbetweening the frames. This gave real weight to the character. However I only key framed for the monsters head. For the rest of the monster, the fur, the smoke and the fire, I worked on these frame by frame, as the looseness of the movement made the scene feel more chaotic and dangerous, and at the same time, more organic.
Modelling the boy
I modelled the characters bust in zbrush just to test out what we could achieve, which we found we liked a lot so we went forward using these models. For the boy I found it was easy to stick to our concept design, giving him soft features and big eyes, curly hair made him look innocent and gentle.
Modelling the man
Modelling the man was somewhat more complicated, showing the ageing features of the man wasn’t hard, but getting him to resemble the young boy was troublesome. I ended up straying more from the character designs here, and I made his eyes more wide and his nose and ears slight more large. This made him more youthful looking, but he also looked more like the boy, so we felt it was a necessary change.
Below was a quick test of what the man could have potentially looked like if we decide to texture him realistically, which I had done in Photoshop.
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