This project was developed as part of a motion graphic design course led by Brendan Harper, with the objective of exploring core 3D animation principles. The assignment challenged us to craft a short 3D narrative while applying advanced camera techniques, lighting setups, and character animation. Emphasis was placed on creating a visually engaging story, demonstrating technical control of animation tools, and showcasing competent compositing to bring all elements together in a cohesive final piece.
This Animation depicts a nervous character on stage infront of an audience, the camera then pans outwards to show how small somethings can be in relation to others and reminding us that sometimes we need to take a step back.
This storyline would give me plenty of oppotunities to implement character animation, 3D Camera movement and compositing. Below, I've shown examples of different stages of the animation process and how I approached them.
For the openeing scene of the animation I chose a close up shot of the characters face, I created positional keyframes for various facial features and added subtle movements to emphasise the emotions that the character is expressing. I also easy eased the key frames and added motion blur to create visual interest and a overall smoother and more appealing animation.
To create a sense of distance and seperation between the main character and audience I replicated a Dolly zoom, rather than moving the camera towards the character and zoomining out simultaneously, I simplified the animation by moving a 3D main character layer towards the camera while moving a seperate 3D audience layer away from the camera.
During the animation the camera changes from a horizontal trajectory to a vertical one, to make this transition I created two planes and connected them at a 90 degree angle. I then rotated the planes to give the effect that the camera has changed direction.
I created the long zoom out in the finishing shot by firstly collecting various images of an area, each progressively more zoomed out than the last. I then converted the images to vectors using Adobe Illustrator and composited them on top of one another to create one large image. I could then manipulate the scale and position along with the camera to create the zoom effect.
