PART FOUR: Speical Effects (again)

After the two month's tangent that was the Outside/Inside project, I finally got back on course with my original focus of study, which was special effects animation. As I said before, I had already been roped into doing all of the special effects for Jordyn Bochon's grad film. It required a lot of reading and testing and frustration. The special effects were essentially broken up into three groups:

Note: I have somehow lost almost all of my movie files for my special effects!! Martin, You'll have to look at the CD I gave you while reading this, I suppose...Sorry!)

Bubbles
Bubbles are, for the most part, pretty easy to animate...at least, the ones that I animated, which were all underwater (I can imagine surface bubbles being much harder). I watched Disney movies to see how they dealt with bubbles. Generally, they appear from anything that moves around or disturbs the water, they rise at a constant rate, and you don't have to keep the shape consistant because they are constantly morphing and changing.

I got tired of drawing little circles pretty quick.

Drips
I did a lot of drips, since raining is a big element of Jordyn's film. I did somewhere between 15-20 drip animations. Some things I learned about drips are: They take about 2-3 frames to fall from the ceiling to the floor, depending on the shot; they take about 4-6 frames for the splash to disappate, unless it's a closer shot that requires more detail; and, it really helps if you have a system worked out. I made a system earlier in the semester for planning drips that helped me animate a drip shot in about 20-30 minutes. Essentially, I would jus decide how many drips would be in the cycle, where they would be, and on what frame of the cycle they would start on. I would make a chart and have it next to me at all times, so I always know what stage every drop is at. It made the process go very, very quickly. Drips aren't hard once you know how to do them!

Fire
Unfortunately, even at the late stage of the semester, I still have not animated much fire (later tonight, I will probably do the rest of the fire animation). Fire is hands-down one of the toughest things I've ever animated. It's very random, but there's still some laws to it that you have to follow in order to make it look right. It's mostly keeping track of eddies of air that create pockets of space in the flames, which the fire kind of wraps around. Fire is definately the least-researched area of this project this semester, so unfortunately I don't know if I can go into much more detail...


Anyway, that's it for my experimental blog, I hope it was at least adequate and slightly informative.

Also, Martin, I'm sorry this all got posted so late!!