I finished blocking the “shush” at the end, and got ready to start polishing everyone. At this point I was feeling pretty confident in my animation already and was excited to polish it up.
I worked 100 frames at a time. My method was to go into the graph editor and delete keyframes that were unnecessary, jolty, or confusing- in that they interfered with the key pose. I also adjusted the curves to make sure that the now-simplified keyframes paused on each gesture.
This gesture was my weakest. In this segment Janine says, “for another half an hour” with great malice. I felt that my original version somehow looked unrealistic, like maybe her abs were incredibly strong, and that her body wasn’t moving correctly, as well as the gesture simply not expressing enough emotion. I spent several hours on my polish and was happy with its smoothing as well as the way I had changed the pose a little bit. I’ve centered her spine quite a lot and made sure to allow her feet to adjust to the weight shifting, as well as given her a more dynamic hand gesture. This segment has gone from one of my least favorite parts of my animation to what I feel is one of my strongest.
And here’s the end of the animation. I was already pretty happy with her expressive body movement in the block and felt that it was already rather smooth, so I struggled in polishing with smoothing out her movement while also keeping the emotionally erratic nature of her gestures.
As I didn’t pay enough attention to the feet in my last polish, I made sure that they would be extensively studied this time around. I made sure that her shoes never dip beneath the floor nor rest above it, and caught a lot of mistakes this way.
Here is the full polish, as well as a comparison of the block vs the polish.
The only thing I could find left to fix, more apparent to me now with the texture hidden, was that her body turns a bit too aggressively at the end, like it’s snapping.
Once again I was very careful not to remove the dynamic expressiveness in this motion while smoothing. Next I moved on to polishing the extras. Despite the fact that all of them only had a couple frames of animation, I intended to go through and make sure nothing stood out to me as blatantly incorrect.
Here’s Lou- fixed some hair flip timing to feel a little bit more like it obeyed the laws of physics, and adjusted her left arm to move a little bit more realistically with her spine. I also gave her more facial animation than she originally had.
Franklin was mostly just a case of making sure his hips and legs moved with his body. However, he reminded me to go back and make sure that Janine’s wine glass was moving correctly, as I’d changed her arm position.
Sure enough, it wasn’t, which i fixed in the same way as before: parent constraining the wrist control to the glass, keying movement every 2-3 frames, then deleting the parent constraint when glass is let go of. Then I move the glass to its final position offscreen as if thrown and make sure to add rotation as the base is heavier than the top.
Satisfied, I moved on.
I’m proud of the David polish, and believe that the finger and toe movements really bring this one home.
With Bonnie, most of her polish involved touching up the timing on her hair. I also gave her some more left arm motion and finger animation.
Here is the first test render. I couldn’t find any mistakes off the bat except for the head jolting weirdly at the word “study”, so I deleted the unnecessary keyframes and re-rendered. Oftentimes I am unable to really notice something until I look at the project rendered, and that’s where the render farm really comes in handy when working on finishing touches. I also decided that the camera doesn’t need to take that long to pan around, so I let it move a little quicker. I originally thought if it was too fast it would give viewers whiplash, but I actually think faster may be better as there is less time to absorb visual cues in the background and try to analyze them. I had toyed with the idea of putting something alarming in the corner there, but as I’ve said before, I’m already unsure if the blood is too much.
I was feeling pretty proud of this, and unable to find any glaring mistakes myself, but I was unsure. So I reached out for feedback on (I know) the internet. I got very poor reception and an overwhelming response that a 14 second animation is way out of my skill level and that all of it is jittery, causing the viewer only to focus on the joltiness of the movement and distracting from the actual narrative. This caused me to spend 3 days away from the project in abject frustration, as I can’t seem to see these issues myself, making me question my ability to animate well at all. But I’ll return to the project shortly, and work as hard as I can at making it the best it can be.