Skull Bounce Test

          For this scene I needed the skull to bounce away from the skeleton, shot from a straight-forward angle. The method I attempted utilized a crane-like rig that held the skull from behind:

While I have had rigs before, this was my first attempt at something so apparent in the shot. The crane was made out of wooden dowels, old k'nex pieces, and painted black to try and hide amongst the black mountains and fence in the shot. I would have just used a wire, but I wanted to be able to control the rotation of the skull. To make it a smoother process I went ahead and clipped off the head before the animating began, so for the first moment the skull is actually just resting on the body. The rig required a hefty amount of post production to get rid of. I'm no Michelangelo with after effects, but I think it turned out alright:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

The majority of the work was taking bits of the sky & ground from other in-between-fence segments and transposing them over the parts with the rig that were showing frame by frame. That is part of the reason why there is a short pause in the beginning of the animation, so that I would have a tiny loop of static footage to use for masking it out that would still have a natural shifting grain to it. Add the color correction, bit of digital rain, and slight camera motion, and KAZAAM hopefully the finished shot for the final edit. 

Thanks for checking out the blog, and I hope this was interesting! 

In-Progress Stills

      A couple of new stills from the animation I've been working on. Officially started animating today, the lighting is working out really well, as I am still learning how to set up a believable - yet interesting - night scene. The backdrop is working better than I thought, I think this will be something to further explore. I'm all for practical effects, where applicable. 

     Next up is the skeleton popping out of the ground, I'm going to have to gather all my animation chops for this one as I haven't yet used model with so many joints. On a side-note my computer is holding together ok for this process. I am still having to delete a lot of things to make room for this, but I think it's definitely worth it.

Pre-animation Graveyard

Some quick shots of the majority of the pieces I'll be bringing into the studio tomorrow to set up/possibly start animating. (try and ignore the awful lighting :P)