Candy Island Finished! (and Uni is nearly over too!)

So Candy Island has now been finished and handed in. Huzzah! It's a huge relief to finally get it done, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. It still needs a little tweaking here and there and looking at it now I'm not entirely happy with the backgrounds and overall setting, but there simply wasn't enough time to make those changes - but perhaps in the future I'll get round to improving it! After I completed the backgrounds I went on to animation clean-up and colouring which I enjoyed, as well as making a few animated shots. And I even managed to help out with another group's film, Good Knight Bears, towards the end by doing some compositing.

And yesterday I had a deadline for my project report, which ended up having more words than my dissertation and having over twice as many pages! So again it's a relief to have done that, even though I do actually enjoy writing.

Below are a few examples of the work I did for my film and for Good Knight Bears. I'm not going to publish any videos of either finished film as, certainly for Candy Island, I don't want it on the internet for the time being. And I will be keeping images to a minimum (at low-ish quality) for the time being as well.

Candy Island

I did the backgrounds and animation clean-up/colouring/shading for each of these, as just some examples. (I must note, that all of the village scene backgrounds shown in any previous posts weren't used in the final film. They were my earlier backgrounds I made when I was experimenting with them; and when I wasn't very good).

Compositing test

This is just an example of adding shadows to a shot. It's a really simple process in After Effects but adds so much more to a shot. 

Good Knight Bears

This was similar to how I did the compositing with Candy Island, except because I had to do lighting as well it meant working in a 3D space which took more time. Again it's really easy to do, it's just a case of trying to get the lighting looking right. I really enjoy using After Effects and will definitely learn to get better at it, especially at making special effects as that's something that interests me a lot. So below are just a few examples of scenes I composited.

The last shot in-particular was great fun as it originally starts off really dark but as the door opens the light from the hallway shines into the room lighting it up. So it meant having to animate a light to get brighter the more the door opened.