PART THREE: Faux 3D

One month later, we're back on the update schedule...




My intention with doing the indoor shot was to have a pan similar to the outside pan, with cross-dissolving watercolor backgrounds. This time I wanted the pan to go a bit slower, and have the colors and sound give off a very warm feeling. It took me a long while to finally design the interior, a lot longer than I thought it would. I had to referenced 'The Art of Howl's Moving Castle' a lot, but it finally got done, and I had a fairly cluttered old cabin. In my original idea, I was going to have an old man in a rocking chair sitting by the window, but I decided to hold off on animating him until I had the background figured out.

When it came time to color the background, I had a lot of trouble deciding exactly how to do it. Even though I had used plenty of watercolor on the earlier backgrounds, I had been using a very omni-directional/ambience light source (outside on a cloudy day) and I now had to deal with a very direct lightsource (a fireplace). Eventually, I decided that maybe I should try to figure out some other course of action...

During one of my meetings with Martin, he gave me the idea of playing with perspective. It was something I had been thinking about since last semester, when I was researching panning backgrounds with shifting angles. I always had trouble trying to get the camera to look like it was moving through 3D space when it was actually moving in 2D space. I deduced that the only way to do it well was to build a kind of pseudo-3D by constructing the faces of each object in the room individually, then putting them together in After Effects and scaling them as the camera shifted, giving the illusion that they were moving in 3D space. It's kind of hard to explain in words, so here's my first test:

First (short) 3d Test

Not perfect, but it's getting somewhere. I dubbed it a sucess and moved on to the rest of the room. Every object was drawn on its own, and the big objects were split into several pieces so they could be stretched and skewed into perspective. Here's a couple of examples of what the actual drawings looked like:













All of my sketches were constructed to create this:

The final version of the inside shot (for now.)

There are still a lot of problems, mainly in the way the objects actually shift in perspective; some shift too fast, some shift in the wrong direction. I realized that because I had not initially designed the shot with this kind of treatment in mind, it was not really suited to demonstrating this pseudo-3d perspective effect very well.

By the time I had reached this point, it was getting late in the game and I did not have time to work on it any further. So, this shot has stayed the way it is. However, this section of the project has got me thinking of possibilities of representing perspective in animation in different ways.

Here is the final version that I gave to Martin!

I added some audio that I thought suited the mood. It's a song by Final Fantasy (the artist, not the video game) called "Many Lives for 49MP".

Tim to move on to the directed project!