Final Stages

Once all the key drawings, extremes and in-betweens were drawn and scanned, I proceeded to colour them in and animate them using After Effects. I used the drawings over again for movement, if I had decided to draw every single frame of the clip individually, it would have taken more time, so I used a bit of cutout style to finish certain scenes. 

The only part of the animation clip that was completely CGI (computer generated imagery) was the eyes of the characters. I had created almost photorealistic eyes in the past for other projects and I simply decided to use them. Since I did few key drawings and the characters won't have much movement, I learned you can give a character more emotion by simply using their eyes. We all know that our eyes can help show different emotions and also tell us that we are thinking about what is being said so I attempted to use the same technique for these two characters.

The last shot of the clip done in After Effects. Each shot in the entire clip was composed of sophisticated sequences of several 3D converted layers of the images. I wanted to make it three dimensional by shading and texturing the background in Photoshop and applied the Bevel and Emboss mode in After Effects to the characters so you can see that light is reflecting off their bodies and other parts have shadow. Also, the background is slightly blurred to give the shot more of a depth of field, as well as using a 3D camera mode.

This image shows the final sequence being edited together. The longest shot in this clip is roughly 17 seconds, an image of it shown at the top right. 

Not only did I use After Effects to animate the characters, I had to use Premiere Pro to piece the lip sync shots together. I used several images over again for each lip sound so it looked like the character was actually speaking. Then I had to render and convert them into separate movie files to be altered in After Effect. Had to put them against a green screen background so I could the Chroma Key Effect to piece the layers more easily.

To note, there were a few technical difficulties throughout the production, including a bug that caused the picture to change in tone of colour when rendering but I managed to fix this by choosing the correct format to convert the movie file.

You can now view the finished movie in this link below. Enjoy it, I hope you will.

Two Men in a Bar: Character Animation Assessment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyd2f-skrVE