RIP Berry Scene Animation

Considering there were only eight people in total working on this short six minute animated film, we all had to wear a lot of hats while working on it. For me, my two main jobs were animation and production coordination. As such, I was in charge of animating several different scenes from the film, including this one, which we called"RIP_BRY". 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our scenes were reworked a lot from beginning to end of production, so while this storyboard section shares a lot of similarities with the final scene, it is not exactly the same. The names of our scenes were also much different, as we spent some time towards the beginning of the production preparing and readjusting the scene and shot names. "CATATCK_CA4" is very long and unruly, and is difficult to say or reference on the fly, while its final name, "RIP_BRY" is simple, easy to understand and reference, and makes sense. 

Both the storyboard and the shot list were made and adjusted in tandem. During the time in which we were working on this particular version of the storyboard animatic, I had my first version of my shot list in production. I ended up making a second, more in depth shot list later on down the line instead of continuing to use this one, but at the time of the storyboard process, the sheet below is what our shot list looked like. 

 

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As you can see, the scene name changed one or two more times before reaching its final name. The sections were also harder to tell apart, and it wasn't easy to know if the step listed was actually the step that was completed or if it was the previous step that was completed. It was for these reasons, plus a couple of others, that I ended up creating and reworking a new shot list. But for the blocking stage, this is the shot list we were using. 

Of course, after the storyboard was sufficiently edited and decided on, we moved on to the blocking stage. While I was one of the people doing scene blocking, with our 3D models, I actually was not in charge of blocking this particular scene, only fully animating it. That being said, the blocking stage mostly consisted of moving the T-posed, unrigged characters around in vaguely the way they were supposed to look in the final animation. It wasn't particularly hard or precise work. But it was necessary to check the look and the spacing of the characters and plot. 

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​It was at this point that I really took over on this scene and started working on the animation itself. Our rigs were being developed actively as animation and texturing began, and as such, I had some rigs sooner than I had others. General Berry, the square yarnball with a mustache, was the first rig I got access to, that worked properly and well, so I naturally started with him. Lucky for me, most of this entire scene is just Berry, so I didn't have to worry too much about not finishing most of my scene because of any rig issues that could arise. 

Berry's rig was the most complete and least buggy of them all at this stage in the process, but that isn't to say there weren't some drawbacks or issues with it at all. Every rig has its issues. Berry's arms and mustache specifically liked to clip or drag weird when moved around, so after getting the general motions down, I worked on getting these issues to go away via close attention to my animation.

Since I was waiting for the rigs of the other characters to be completed while I worked on the animation for Berry in this part, the scene had varying levels of animation completion, and looked a bit odd, between a fully animated Berry, the simply animated other two yarnballs, and the still unrigged cat. The cat gave our rigger, Rianne, the most trouble out of all of our rigs, and we didn't have a good, working rig until very far into the process of animation. It was the last thing I animated in any of my shots. 

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Over the next several months, I worked on the animation for whatever I had access to in this scene. The process that ended up working for me was completing several passes of animation on Berry, each one getting progressively more detailed, until I was satisfied with the result, and then moving on to the next rig available, which happened to be the round yellow yarn ball, Seed. Then I repeated the process I used with Berry, until I was satisfied with Seed as well. Brocade was the last yarn ball I worked on, as he had several different versions that needed to be rigged, so took the longest out of all the yarn balls. ​The process was repeated once again with Brocade. 

While I was working on my animation passes for Seed, it became very clear that our shot list needed some major reworking, so this was the point in the project at which I redid our shot list to make more sense. The sections and scenes are easier to differentiate and pick out, and the different stages of each shot are clearly marked, labeled, and listed so we could tell how far along each shot was. Additional functions were added to auto populate numbers so we could see at a glance what needed to get done and how much was being done by each person. 

 

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As I said earlier, the cat was the last thing to be animated. I set aside about a week to two weeks of time towards the end of this project to just animate the cat in the scenes I was in charge of, which included RIP_BRY. The cat's rig was still quite rough, and I wasn't sure if my animations would be decent enough for the groomers of the cat's fur to get the look they were going for. Luckily, our cat is black, so it hides some of the more intense stretching and warping that occasionally resulted. But I did my best to mitigate that as much as possible. Some creative maneuvering outside of camera view was required, especially for the scenes where the cat is looming over Brocade and Seed. ​

But once the cat was finally animated, head and face and all, I was done with this shot!! There was nothing else I could do to get this shot to its finished quality, as I was not one of the people doing lighting, texturing, or post production, but I passed it off and then began assisting with other animated shots. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​