Fields & Frames #5: Animation + Editing Techniques

 Because I know my time management skills have not been particularly strong within this project, I have decided to do as many little snippets as I can of animation slips from the storyboard. This will be a part of my production pack as it will be an example of what I am planning to do. 

I will be doing the animation on Photoshop, through a 'timeline'. I plan to mess around with keyframing to see if that would make the morphing effect more seamless or not. I won't have a background when exporting because I plan to layer the illustrative animation over the marbled background so I will need it to be clear. 

After I export the animation, I plan to put them together using Premiere Pro. 

Animating:

Photoshop: working at 10 fps as each frame is 0.1 sec. 

   

- For the animation, I used the opacity option to create an onion skin effect so I could see the previous frame and draw from that to the next frame to ensure that the transitions are as smooth as they could be

- I decided not to keyframe the animation as I wasn't keen on the in-between layers as the opacity was too low compared to the rest so it looked inconsistent. If I changed the opacity it would just mean that many frames would be replicated so I decided not to use this.  I also liked the movement of the water without the keyframing more. 

- When exporting I made sure to not make the background visible because I want to layer the animation over the marbled background. 

- The only issue I have with animating on photoshop is that every time you make a new layer, you have to go back and select all the frames and make the new layer invisible. 

- I did find it hard to change the angle from an over headshot to a medium shot at head height through my illustrations. I was able to get Ellie to let me take photos and use her as a reference to draw them:

Exporting: file > export > save for web (legacy) > change the 'preset' to 'GIF 128 dithered'

Premiere Pro:  The GIF file from photoshop can only be opened in premier 

In Premiere Pro, when editing the background to the animation, I found that I needed to edit the marbled video and take out some of the frames for the section where the angle changes from overhead to a mid-shot at the head height of the character. I was able to do this because when I captured the marbling in Dragonframe I doubled up each shot because I knew this would give me more leeway when editing. However, the only issue I faced with this is that it means the background is sped p by double the speed during the transition of angles. Despite this, I do think it works perfectly as the character moves perfectly in line with the marbled background and ends up perfectly aligned which I prefer to it going normal speed and being completely off time with the background.

Exporting: Using media encoder 

The animated outcome for one of the scenes: