This is so rewarding and a great project to learn and grow from. This sequence is the product of about 2 months of work, including storyboards, animatic, color boards, animation, compositing. It is a short clip from the film (also has the most going on during this sequence too). Here are some of the steps along the way that it took to get here!

Woo! These storyboards were some of my favorite to create. I had discussed ideas and had a good amount of time to cultivate elements of what I wanted this video to look like. Then during an event called “Inktober” I blasted through on a wave of inspiration to storyboard the entire video with only 1 frame being scrapped from the project. 50 storyboards for a 4 minute animation.

Here is a quick look at some of the progress from there.

First, experimenting with a few scenes to find the final cleanup style

 

This was a lot of work in itself! Some things I discovered: Backgrounds were going to be more important than I first assumed. Even though he is walking through a big empty mostly black space, there needs to be something in the background to give depth and grounding. So I have a few backgrounds now to work with, especially when he gets close to the glowing pod. And there will be lots of particles and smoke vfx.

Next, I moved on to completing a whole sequence. Here you can see the animatic. Followed by some individual frame renders and a background (foreground?) for an upcoming scene. Findings here: The budget for this project is very small, so I am looking to cut time and effort without cutting quality as much as possible. One thing I found was that having the animation remain on a low frame rate looked great with the final compositing and camera movement. I am going to be able to use most of the animation from the animatic as rough animation and clean up straight from there. Time saver!

Once again, here is the sequence in progress, rendered from After Effects: