Introduction:
For my final blog post, I’ll be talking about the final post-production tasks I had to complete, which included adding effects, replacing scenes with After Effects compositions, colour correction, and syncing the audio to my animation. Lastly, I’ll be evaluating this project overall.
This Week’s Task:
te my animation, I spent all my remaining time on post-production tasks, beginning with compositing all my rendered scenes together.
Compositing All Scenes Together In Premiere Pro:
I began by creating and setting up my Premiere Pro project, importing all my scenes and sorting them out into Folders, helping me to locate my scenes.
Editing Individual Scenes:
For a couple of scenes, i noticed they ended too quickly, ruining the flow of the animation. To fix this I inserted frame hold segments at the end of the scene so that the last frames hold for a couple of frames longer.
Colour Correction:
As mentioned before in my previous post, I needed to colour correct many of the scenes due to the software issue I had when trying to render my scenes via remote access. The scenes that needed colour correction were rendered in Maya 2018 instead of Maya 2022. I managed to fix the colours using the Lumetri Colour settings in Premiere Pro. The common problem I noticed was that all of these scenes that appeared too dark needed their exposure increased.
I couldn’t use this method for all of my scenes, unfortunately. For the scenes that involved my character, I still wanted to maintain the colour shown on my character’s face, but brighten up the background because the environment wasn’t visible.
Therefore, I went on Youtube and browsed for a tutorial video that could teach me how to brighten up the background without affecting the subject. Fortunately for me, I was able to find one.
To do this effect, I first had to create an adjustment layer and place it on top of the scene I want to edit.
Next, I had to create a mask over my character’s face, making sure I feathered it quite a lot so it fades in nicely and we won’t be able to see the mask’s outline. I also had to tick the “Inverted” box so that the effect applies to the background, instead of the character’s face. Lastly, I pressed the “Play” button so that the mask tracks the character’s face throughout all frames.
Once I finished tracking my scene, I went back into the Lumetri Colour settings and adjusted the colours, increasing the exposure.
As you can see in the screenshot below, the effect seemed to work perfectly.
Post-Production Edits:
After colour correcting all of the scenes that needed it, I went and created the very end scene of my animation, which consisted of a black background and white text. I thought a simple transition where scene 36 slowly dissolves into a black background was necessary as it goes well with the dark mood.
I thought I’d end the animation with a message to the audience, as my intention for this animation was to make people aware of mental health and how it ruins individuals’ lives.
After I had finished all post-production visual tasks, it was time for me to gather all the audio and SFX. I got all my audio from Youtube as they provide a lot of royalty-free sound effects. To download these MP3s, I found a Youtube converter website that allowed me to download these videos by copying and pasting their URL.
Browsing For SFX:
Once I downloaded all audio assets, I imported them into Premiere Pro and sorted them out into their folders.
Syncing Audio SFX To Animation:
My last task was to sync the audio to the animation which didn’t take long at all. I began by adding in the sound effects first, followed by the ambiance audio. For a few scenes, I had to add keyframes to the audio clip, as I needed to increase/decrease the sound depending on whats going on in the scene. For instance, if my character is walking closer to the camera, the volume of the footsteps would increase.
Final Animation:
Evaluation:
My Overall Thoughts:
Overall, I’m more than pleased with the results of this animation as this was an assignment I was quite intimated by at first because I’ve never created a 3D animation project before. Halfway through the journey, I realised that my eyes were bigger than my belly, and that I chose a narrative that was a bit too much for me. However, I managed to pull through and complete all essential tasks.
Another reason why I’m proud of this animation was that, during the animation stage, my Epilepsy condition would occur a lot more often, which caused me to take more regular breaks, and on some occasions, caused me to stop working for the day. With that said, I managed to tackle this problem by forming a steady workflow that worked for me.
What Did I Do Well?
For someone who’s fairly new to character animation, I think I did really well animating 36 different scenes in a short period of time. Furthermore, I’m no expert when it comes to modelling environments too, and to have modelled five different environments for one animation? I think I had done really well in that department. Even though I had to repeat certain steps multiple times because I have so many scenes, most tasks because very easy to complete as it was like muscle memory to me now. this mainly referred to texturing, lighting, and rendering tasks.
What Don’t I Like?
One thing I didn’t like was how a few of my renders turned out. In many of the scenes, there was too much noise and fireflies roaming about which ruined the look. Furthermore, in a few scenes, the colour seemed a bit off compared to other scenes based within the same environment. However, this was mainly due to errors I experienced when attempting to render my animation via remote access.
How Could I Improve This:
I could improve my rendering quality by conducting more research on how to render more efficiently. There are plenty of videos on Youtube that teaches you what render settings are best. Besides from Youtube, I could always ask my fellow course colleagues or lecturers for advice and suggestions.
Another improvement I would make to my animation would be based on the feedback I receive from friends and colleagues. As I plan to share this animation with people, asking them to provide feedback. Depending on what they say, I’ll take everything into account and improve my animation from there.
What Would I Do If I Had Additional Time:
If I had additional time, I would clean up my character animations as I had to rush them due to the deadline getting closer and closer. I would also like to of had the time to re-render a few more scenes, making sure there are no off-looking frames, nor any inconsistent colours. On top of this, I would have liked to import more characters into my scenes, adding my life to the animation.
What Are My Plans:
I definitely plan to re-visit this animation after finishing this course as I have unfinished business with it. I can see this animation has a lot of potentials as it’s based on a strong and popular subject.