Editing

To edit my animation i used imovie i know he said to use (premiere pro) but my files i exported in quicktime where really good quality and all the other file types i exported look really bad compared to MOV files. ( plus couldn't get premiere pro to use quicktime files which is really weird). Im quite familiar with this software as i've used it to make stuff for youtube and other media things before. Once i had imported all the camera shots into imovie i then began the task of editing and cutting scenes together, much like premiere pro i used the cut and scrape tool to edit clip length and sorted them into the appropriate order i wanted them in. once this had been completed i went over the finished edited film just make sure i was happy with it and that nothing was out of place.

Lights, Camera, action...... Render :(

After i had completed all the camera angles, lighting and animation it was time to get rendering each of the camera shots. this took quite some time as i have been doing it on my laptop, and which would have probably taken half the time on the monster macs at uni. i render off each camera angle separately.

- render setup and choose to export in (MOV quicktime) and choose uncompressed because it was the best quality, but took a lot longer to render, was well worth the wait though.

- then i just selected the frames to render e.g. 100 - 250 and kept doing that for each camera scene 13 in total.

After i had all the frames render to my desktop which all in all probably took about 6 hours, it was time to begin the mighty task of editing it and trying to make it make sense. :S

Lighting

I tried a few different types of lighting for this animation but the one that i went with was the simple omni spot. i tried to set it up so that it gave the impression of sunlight, i realise that you can use a skylight to try and imitate natural light but it made the animation look very faded and dull which wasn't particularly nice. i like the way the omni gives a good depth to the scenery and the characters and really finished off the animation nicely. i must admit i don't know why the shadows are sometimes blocky and sometimes smooth but im sure richard will enligthen me lol.

Setting up the Scenes and camera's

After completing all the animation sequences it was time to set the camera views for each shot. i broke the sequence up into 13 different scenes for ease of editing later. i used a target camera because i felt it gave me the most freedom to get the right camera views in each scene. i fort about maybe just using one camera sequence for the whole film which i noticed a lot of people have done, but i fort different angles always make a animation look better and more exciting. Camera angles also help address character mood and expressions a lot better too. most of the camera renders are a few seconds long and involve panning and backing up which was done on the timeline.

- place camera in desired start point

- then hit the auto key button and move the camera to the desired finishing point.

- moving the auto key button to the desired frame to determine the speed and pan of the shot

i repeated this process on all the camera shots till i was 100% happy with how they looked.

Mum crab trying to walk in straight line

This a shot of the mum crab trying to walk in a straight line which is the defining scne in the animation. i did this just using the set key and moving the legs and body for in small amounts. also using the modify morpher to give expressions whilst doing the movement.

Shell Shocked!

Here is a facial expression using the modify morpher when the baby crab watchs his mum trying to walk in a straight line past the star fish. i just did various preset poses in the modify morpher and used them when neccesary.

Animation creation

Here is the first scene (camera angle not representative of actual view in finshed animation) were the two crabs walk along side each other for dialogue. ive just added the omni light to give a bit more depth to the scene and used the set key to animate the legs. i tried using the bone tool but it just didnt work very well for my models so i took the long route. For the facial expressions and mouth movements i used the modify morpher which rich taught to us earlier in the course and it work well for that purpose.