This week, I continued putting all the animation together in Adobe After Effects, focusing specifically on the final animated section of the girls discussing how they will remain friends after one of them moves to a different school. The other two animations were nearly complete, so I decided it would be best to get the final one to a decent level and make final tweaks to them all collectively at the end as this would be less stressful than polishing the first two with the knowledge that the final one was yet to be started.
At the start of the week, I sent Martha the basic composition of the final animation to get her input.
Here’s what it looked like at that stage:
We decided to change the letters in the volcano stream as the animation of them all jumbled up behind the volcano cutout made them indistinguishable – we decided on a slower stream and perhaps singular letters coming down instead of the animation. Martha also wanted a different boat movement and pointed me in the direction of a scene from Lotte Reineger’s ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’, so I started to change that to be slower and having the boat tracking the movement of the waves more. I also made the puppet of Lauren on the rock at the end a bit bigger. I needed to wait for Michael to return from Glasgow to obtain the scene of the two girls being pulled apart to insert at the start of the animation, as I didn’t have this on my drive at that point.
We decided to have a teams call at 9am on Tuesday 2nd April to discuss progress and have a general check-in. We decided here that Michael would put together the first animation on After Effects as the actual animating was all done and that, as all the image sequences and overlay images were on a shared google drive, I would send the After Effect project files for the second and third animations over to Martha at ECA on Wednesday so that the image sequences could be converted to RAW files and they could be exported there instead of on my laptop at home, which would not have been able to handle it. We also decided that when I was back on Monday 8th we would all meet up and tweak the animations together, as well as decide on effects to give it the most ‘shadow-puppet’ look.
By Wednesday I had adjusted the boat movement to be slower and more rhythmic like Martha had asked, but I was still struggling with the letters coming down the volcano as I was trying to digitally animate them separately, which wasn’t working. The first scene of the girls being pulled apart had also not been uploaded to the drive yet, so this was missing from the composition. We had another teams call and Martha asked for the boat movement to be slightly slower and less bouncy, so I got to work on that. I exported the current versions of the second and third animations and put them on the google drive for Martha and Ella to use as placeholders whilst editing.
Adjusted boat movement:
That afternoon Martha informed me Michael was ill and no longer able to put the first animation together, so the image sequences for that were uploaded to the google drive and the job was passed onto me. This set us back a bit as I now had to work on the boat and letters movement for the third animation and also put together the whole first animation, so we agreed on the weekend for me to send a version of them all before I got back on Monday.
