Food Module: Final Animatic

Using the completed and refined storyboards I had created, I began to design and plan the timing for the new animatic, using the Cake Man voice recording as a basis. The previous animatic that I had cut down to 2 minutes and 5 seconds worked well with the main scenes for the timing however the ending of the animatic needed to be longer in the new version through the addition of dialogue that the voice actor had added to the recording.  The main cause for this problem was the Ice Cream Man recording in which played straight after the Cake Man had finished talking. I felt that adding an extra five seconds to the end of the new animatic worked well as it allowed the frames more time on scene compared to zooming through each frame to fit within the duration of the previous animatic.

I wanted to add slight movement within the animatic, in which I used key frames of the transform animation and the puppet tool. For the key animation I mainly moved the position of the frame to follow the movement of the action or to pan across a frame to show the direction of the camera. I felt that this worked well for the audience to gain a better understanding of the final animation, along with the action and camera movement. The use of the puppet tool allowed me to show the movement within the scene where the Cake Man struggles to get out of the tree. I was able to move the leg in the scene by dragging on the puppet pin and recorded it by holding down the Ctrl button. This worked well as the audience were able to see the main action that was in the scene. To able to create this movement I found it easier to import the photoshop file to be able to manipulate only the layer which had the detail of the leg, this stopped the possibility of the background moving whilst animating the leg.

I had a few problems with the animatic through how the image files I wanted to import ran an error through After Effects, it kept giving me a message describing that it could not parse the file. I discovered that the reason for this message was that the files were in CMYK not in RGB which is the format that it needed to be, to work with After Effects. In order to change the mode for each of the images, I recorded an action of changing the mode to RGB and ran an automate - batch. This allowed photoshop to change the files I had chosen to RGB without me having to open each file myself and save each individual one again in the right colour mode. Using this process saved me time and allowed me to continue with creating the animatic straight away.