My train was cancelled on Monday due to strikes, and relinking the footage from the image sequences on the google drive to the After Effects projects wasn’t working well at ECA, so I got a train back early Tuesday morning from Newcastle and met Martha and Michael in the editing suites at 11:30 to relink the footage from my hard drive instead, which worked much better.
There were lots of small annoying issues though, like layers being reimported in wrong orders and sequences coming in upside down, which took a long time for me to correct. One of the things that caused most of the issues was that the After Effects projects had been created in 12fps, meaning all the key-framing I had done was in the context of the composition being 12fps as this is the frame rate we thought all the animation would be exported in. It actually all needed to be in 25fps to match the live-action footage, and changing this in all the compositions completely changed the majority of the key-framing, which I had to redo that day in the editing suite. We thought we would be finished at around 3pm, but me and Martha ended up finishing at 10pm as the key-framing issues and changing file formats took a lot longer than expected and when changing jpegs to RAWs the sequences would often come in upside down and at the wrong scale. Choosing effects to put in an adjustment layer over all of the animations was quite a quick process however, and by 10pm we had done everything but exported the projects.
Martha and I met at 10am the next morning at ECA to render the projects, which was a painless experience apart from a few animations coming in upside down again, but this was corrected easily. By 11:30am all the animations had been rendered and were able to be slotted into the rest of the film and passed to sound post-production, which was the end of my role on the film, and Martha gave me a card with some chocolate and a picturehouse voucher to say thank you which was extremely kind 🙂
The file sizes of the final animations are too large to insert here, but here are some key stills from each section:
Stills from the first animation:
Stills from the second animation:
Stills from the third animation:
