Over the last few weeks, I have managed to make maximal use of these
holidays and finish animating the first scene entirely. That equates to
about 3 minutes of the film already complete! Of course, I took time off
during Christmas and New Year to spend with family.

To explain what I did (and what I will probably do for the rest of the
scenes), was mainly use the Pose-To-Pose method for animating. Before
animating, I would load in the animatic to get an idea of the timing and to
also sync the animation with the music.

• First, I blocked in my main poses. For walks and runs, I just re-used loopable walk/run cycles I created earlier.
• Then, I would position and stage the characters to be seen clearly from the camera's point of view.
• Once I was happy with that, I would time the poses to look somewhat natural. I should have used video reference here, at the least video footage of me acting out the scenes to get a better and more realistic idea of timing and poses. I'll need to do this in the remaining scenes.
• At this point I should have a nice looking animation, and I would then go into the dopesheet and add in the usual moving-holds, messing the keys about to break that robotic feeling.

One of the tough challenges in this scene was crowds. I'll detail this in a
later post, but I mainly found populating the lecture hall scene with many
students to take a heavy toll on my PC and became very difficult to work
with. I ended up using just 15 characters in the scene, the maximum my PC
can handle. The final scene will need a stadium full of people, and I will
need to do my research and find a way to populate these kinds of scenes.

Overall though, the scenes have come out well and should be fun and
enjoyable to watch when finally rendered. The problem with 'Theevan' and
'Tripping' was that it took a while before the story started to get somewhat
interesting. I've done my best to make the first few minutes as clear as
possible to the audience. What has mainly helped was having the animatic
there. This helped speed up my animation workflow heaps without having to
second guess alot which I didn't realise in my earlier projects.

Right now, I'm waiting on the renders to finish. I'll post a few renders up soon...