Painting Tests
After working and finishing most of the pre-production, it was essential for us to do some painting test before we actually started animating as we needed to make sure exactly what and how we were going to paint and animate everything as the time we had did not allow us for any mistakes to happen in production.
Firstly, as I wasn't as confident about using oil paints, I decided to paint one of the backgrounds in my sketchbook. I used the same method in my sketchbook that I would have used for the glass where I used a lightbox and the printed out background that helped me to paint on to paper. After doing so, I definitely became more confident with the paints, however, doing this test made me realise that I need to figure out the right colours to use as the one I chose in my sketchbook weren't really working. As I didn't have any reference for the colours from the 3D background I went along with the colours I felt that would be appropriate but I wasn't happy with the final result at all. Doing this test, made me realise how important it was as I was able to go back to my 3D models and add some colour to them in order to differentiate the objects from themselves but also to guide me through when doing the actual backgrounds on glass. I was also able to then sit down with the rest of the team and we all worked on the different colour palettes that we were going to use for each scene. This again, really helped as I now had two references I could work from in order to achieve the result that I was hoping for.
We then all got together to do some painting tests on glass. We picked quite an easier shot to do in order to save us some time but also hope that if the test went well we could then use it in the final animation. Sophie and Carol were both working on the character animation of the feet walking shot, whereas I was working on the background. One of the problems we came across was the consistency of the character design when two animators are working on the same scene. In order to resolve this, we needed to make sure that either one animator works on one scene whilst the other does another, or that communication between the animators should be quite strong in order to reduce the inconsistency of characters and animation.
In the painting test, we started the shot without the background for the first few frames as it took me a long time for me to complete it compared to Sophie and Carol character animations. This meant that I needed to make sure that I was keeping on track with the backgrounds I was going to do for each shot and have them ready for the foreground layer. For that particular shot, we also decided to do the shadow if the feet on the background layer as we felt it would blend a lot better compared to the foreground layer. However, that meant that for some shots there will be background animation as well which made the process a little harder and more time consuming so we need to make sure that we have the least background animation as possible.
Lastly, the other issue we encountered was dealing with the lighting of the shot as well as reflections from the camera and the plastic multiplane. We tried out different ways of reducing that, by turning the lights on and off also using the copy stand lights as well as different gels but it was still quite hard to completely get rid of it. We talked about how this could be something we can try and fix in post-production but wouldn't entirely rely on it. Since we were working on glass it was quite hard to get rid of most reflections especially when the light source was coming from the sides as we were unable to light it from the top. One of the solutions we came across was painting some of the plastic multiplane sections black as that helped to remove the reflection. This also made us realise that probably using a black multiplane rather than a clear one would have definitely benefited us. I was also very disappointed that the lighting that we were using also often changed the saturation and brightness of the background and even though we try to manage that with the use of gels it still wasn't completely ideal. However, it was something that we could try and fix in post-production so it wasn't a massive problem.
Firstly, as I wasn't as confident about using oil paints, I decided to paint one of the backgrounds in my sketchbook. I used the same method in my sketchbook that I would have used for the glass where I used a lightbox and the printed out background that helped me to paint on to paper. After doing so, I definitely became more confident with the paints, however, doing this test made me realise that I need to figure out the right colours to use as the one I chose in my sketchbook weren't really working. As I didn't have any reference for the colours from the 3D background I went along with the colours I felt that would be appropriate but I wasn't happy with the final result at all. Doing this test, made me realise how important it was as I was able to go back to my 3D models and add some colour to them in order to differentiate the objects from themselves but also to guide me through when doing the actual backgrounds on glass. I was also able to then sit down with the rest of the team and we all worked on the different colour palettes that we were going to use for each scene. This again, really helped as I now had two references I could work from in order to achieve the result that I was hoping for.We then all got together to do some painting tests on glass. We picked quite an easier shot to do in order to save us some time but also hope that if the test went well we could then use it in the final animation. Sophie and Carol were both working on the character animation of the feet walking shot, whereas I was working on the background. One of the problems we came across was the consistency of the character design when two animators are working on the same scene. In order to resolve this, we needed to make sure that either one animator works on one scene whilst the other does another, or that communication between the animators should be quite strong in order to reduce the inconsistency of characters and animation.
In the painting test, we started the shot without the background for the first few frames as it took me a long time for me to complete it compared to Sophie and Carol character animations. This meant that I needed to make sure that I was keeping on track with the backgrounds I was going to do for each shot and have them ready for the foreground layer. For that particular shot, we also decided to do the shadow if the feet on the background layer as we felt it would blend a lot better compared to the foreground layer. However, that meant that for some shots there will be background animation as well which made the process a little harder and more time consuming so we need to make sure that we have the least background animation as possible.Lastly, the other issue we encountered was dealing with the lighting of the shot as well as reflections from the camera and the plastic multiplane. We tried out different ways of reducing that, by turning the lights on and off also using the copy stand lights as well as different gels but it was still quite hard to completely get rid of it. We talked about how this could be something we can try and fix in post-production but wouldn't entirely rely on it. Since we were working on glass it was quite hard to get rid of most reflections especially when the light source was coming from the sides as we were unable to light it from the top. One of the solutions we came across was painting some of the plastic multiplane sections black as that helped to remove the reflection. This also made us realise that probably using a black multiplane rather than a clear one would have definitely benefited us. I was also very disappointed that the lighting that we were using also often changed the saturation and brightness of the background and even though we try to manage that with the use of gels it still wasn't completely ideal. However, it was something that we could try and fix in post-production so it wasn't a massive problem.