Post Production

When I was animating and watching the playblasts of the animation, I felt the timings where good, the actions and movements where not slow or fast...they seemed just about right. Until I started speeding them up in Premiere...

I started editing my movie, and I started this without finishing the animation first, but rather did it along animating, because sometimes whenever I was stuck with something in the animation, I realized that it was better to stop doing it, and start thinking about it instead. So I used the time to focus on something else, and I started playing with speed. 

I found out that if I added a 30% increase in my actions they looked much more intense and believable. This was when I realized that I was animating too slow. Things lacked power and determination, so towards the beginning of scene 3, I was animating everything much faster. And the last shots required a lot less increase in speed. This is probably a very bad way to change the speed, but considering time consumed if I went to 3DS Max and started removing key frames and adjusting this and that, versus the time it took to cut frames out or separate them from the shots to increase the speed of the clip just in some parts, the later was more efficient. 

With this I am not saying that any of these options is just the same. However, considering we have to manage the time we have to complete the project, I think finding faster solutions that produce almost the same effect is learning, and being efficient.

And I edited and edited, and edited so much that my last shot as an example, which was a whole at first, was split in seven different pieces, with different speeds.

In the end, adding speed brought a lot to the action, gave it much more power and more accurately delivered my emotions and reactions.

After this I reduced a bit of the exposure and edited the shadow intensity in of the movie in After Effects and started adding sounds.

At first I had the silly idea of choosing a music that would fit the movie style, and then edit it to follow the action, but this soon proved to be the worst way to give sound to the movie. I think that if you choose a music in a stage previous to the animation stage, let´s say, storyboard, and you plan your shots and animation with the music in mind, is much much easier to just use one music and have the movie follow the beat. But of course, we are doing this to learn and I learned the hard way. 

So, with the help and following the advice of my friend Rui, who is a sound technician, we added some sound effects and some music or background noise here and there. And it turned out to be the more efficient way of having music supporting the action.

I will post the final movie soon, stay tuned! :)