Production Diary - Week 8 - Assembly, After Effects & animation

This week I was able to make up for the lack of progress in previous weeks by making a lot of progress on the animated elements in the scene.

First of all I made all my assets,
aside from those that make up the characters, into 3D layers in one composition. This allowed me to isolate the characters in another composition to precompose different parts of their bodies and animate those individually using the puppet pin tool and key framing position and rotation. I could have used tracking to track the movement of one part of the characters body and have another part of the mody follow the movement path of the given body part - this would have automated alot of the animation in the scenes. However I opted to animate each scene manually using key frames for the reason that I wanted the animation of the characters' bodies to somewhat match the expression present in the live action footage of the characters faces.
To save from having to produce more assets for the animation and have the project be more sustainable, I duplicated some of the assets that make up the character for example the flowerpots and the flower petals.
I think the result that you achieve with the puppet pin tool really works well with the aesthetic that I am trying to cultivate with the hand painted assets and live action combination. As the movement

that the puppet tool brings is unnatural looking it adds to the 'uncanny' value that makes the juxtaposition between the childlike playfulness of the medium and the adult approach to the dialogue.

I had the issue of syncing up the audio for the dialogue of the characters up to the footage, this was an issue because I wanted the audio to sometimes cut into the next shot as if one of the characters were talking over the other. The way i solved this was to first seperate the audio from the footage before compositing the footage in aftereffects to be grafted on to the characters' bodies and movements key framed accordingly.

As for the hiss on the audio of the dialogue i opened up the file in adobe audition and took a noise print of a section with no dialogue for the computer to grasp which frequencies needed to be dampened from the audio. With these frequencies removed it will be easier for me to smooth out any remaining noise issues using atmospheric sounds that are relative to the character's surroundings.
In reflection these issues may be avoided entirely in the future if I am to use live action video and audio by using a sound booth which should cancel out any residual noise/ reverberation.