NOTHING HAS BEEN EASED YET.
Now that I have music, the square is able to interact with its surroundings to a beat. Nothing to make it seem like it's dancing to the music, but small things like the landing of the turns and when it knocks the second square out of line - I want the animation to reflect what's happening in the music, not have the music define what happens in the animation.
The timings are so much better than they were last week, but nothing's smooth yet. I'm really happy with the way the forms are all introduced, and then some big movements start to happen when the music kicks up a notch. Watching it back I'd like to put in some hard cuts, maybe of more patterns appearing above and below to intensify the business - perhaps this will be something I bring in towards to end as the video builds towards the title card.
I've given the '13 Peoples' text a little more screen time so it's readable (I believe the correct amount of time is enough for it to be read three times) before the environment starts to change around it. I'm happy with the adapted hills, although they should probably be a little bit smoother. I'm beyond happy with my little trees. I wanted to push the road-imagery, and wasn't sure if it was my own eye or the actual animation that made me feel like it wasn't obviously supposed to be a road. Still using my geometric shapes I was able to give more to the visuals without getting too detailed.
Even watching these now, I can clearly tell that applying principles like hesitation and exaggeration will bring these sequences up a fair bit. There's obviously a strong argument for doing this as you create each section, but travelled this far by getting my general timings, I feel it's better to complete the entire title sequence to make sure my overall timing matches up to the music (and the constraints of the brief) before going back to tweak, well, almost everything.
I could be wrong in this approach, but at least I'll be learning not to do it this way in the future.
Slowing down these lines was definitely the right choice. The chilled vibe of the music and overall chill of the sequence so far fits much better. This makes it much easier for the stand-out stroke (affectionately named Charles) to jump out of line and be noticed. I have tried various ways of making Charles do his thing, but with the music having two trumpet blasts after he runs around the line, it gave me the chance to have him burst through the aforementioned chilled vibe to give some excitement and comedy to the sequence.
The entire entrance of the sun needed to be rebuilt from scratch, but for me the worst part was the shaking out of the final three letters. It felt right to give the sun a little more character, so having it rush off screen then have to come back to drop the L, I and E gives a little more of that Morning Show activity that I was aiming for from the start.
tutorial available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4FrWHCgewk
Despite having quite a bit of text in the sequence, I felt it had all been very static so far. I wanted to make the text float quite calmly, and I feel the 'Wiggle' effect can sometimes be very sporadic and it can be difficult to narrow down exactly the movement I want. This YouTube tutorial was about 4 minutes long, and about 1 minute into the direction I was shown the two small settings I needed to get the exact effect I was looking for.
I don't think I love the spinning in 3D space here. It felt like a cool idea, but I've struggled to get the text to remain on one side of the stroke and the more I see the whole shape spin, the less I like it. Also, the longer the big stroke is on the screen, the more off-putting the shape of it is - so I might lessen its screen time.
For my transition into the final sequence I went back to my original inspirations and wanted a very 70s look, maybe with a hint of Saul Bass' geometric lines growing across a space.
I reckon I spent about 40 minutes on this yesterday. I tried to create echos of the letters, added repeaters, watched tutorials on motion trails and even tried editing the path of the shape to leave specifically-shaped strips of colour after each letter.
Then I remembered that it'll be on screen for about seven frames and nobody is pausing it to see if there's a gap of colour between the background and the wee hole in a letter A.
It turns out that this overall gave a fairly rubbish, split version of what I wanted. So I just made a nicer version that covers the whole screen. Essentially, everything from the previous two videos will not be happening in the final product.
This is a far cleaner use of the intersecting lines, it takes away any confusion about what's supposed to happen. The name inside the red stroke definitely isn't staying, but I'll have to go back to my inspirations to find something more exciting to happen!
Here's where I first made letters fall: https://www.instagram.com/p/CpQBjveqC64/
I didn't have to look far! I had forgotten how much fun I had learning about wiggle paths when creating liquids in my showreel, so I quickly through this together, also borrowing an idea from one of my first every animations, having the letters fall into place as though the red stroke (that I'm a little sick of now, it's just too big) has broken them free from the wall.
I didn't want to lose the little yellow triangles from the original plan, I think the additional colour also breaks up this scene a little and helps explain the mad kerning that was in the previous video.
I nearly have all of my assets in place. Many things will change, but this is the version I showed a few friends today, followed by their feedback.
Opening scene: "Are you supporting Palestine?"
Yellow road: "I got that it was a road. I didn't get that there was a hill behind it."
Red sun: "Ooh, I like that sun."
Ending: "You should definitely fix the end."
They also really liked the music.
So, I fixed the end. Then rendered it out with many layers of music, it seems.
This is the last time I'll say it: timing's are all over the place
There were many versions of how to do this text. Despite having everything else planned out, I somehow hadn't visualised the ending. I tried having the words come in in halves (horizontally), or just hard cut in in time with the music, but it all felt very half-hearted. I had the wee skull I'd drawn during the very early stages, and I thought it would be a fun time to introduce a new colour as we draw to the end of the sequence. The white makes the skull stand out more, and shows that surprises abound in the film that's about to start.
Also, I've set aside my rotoscoping dreams for now, but I am considering masking out footage of a Caribbean beach to zoom into for the end of the sequence/ beginning of the film.
My biggest issue for the past few days has been the hills at the end of the yellow road. I was very chuffed to be able to take them out entirely and go back to an idea from my very first sketches - a sun. It was (relatively) simple to transform this into the U in the text, and then spend hours trying to decide what to do with the sun's rays.
EVERYTHING HAS BEEN EASED NOW.
This video was entitled 'Captain Sunbeam - Complete'. We all knew it wasn't, but some design tropes must be adhered to.
These were my notes from watching the 'Complete' video. It was incredible how much time I took to rework the colour changes for the opening, and then on dealing with the hill in the road scene. Beyond that, the rest of my list didn't take too long to sort out.
Then, there were many easings to be improved, lots of small issues needing resolved, lots of trees to be repositioned - just those endless little fixes that you only spot on each fresh rendering of a file.
I had one final Complete video to watch, and not only did I have less notes, but they were all easier fixes.
