Pre Viz

So here is the pre visualization or previz of the animation. It took a little longer for me to finish things than I world have liked because paid work takes precedence over personal work, but I was still able to get quite a bit of work done in between my assignments.

Creating the previz is helpful because it more closely represents the finished product than the animatic does. The camera movement and general pacing and overall timing of the previz will be used in the final.

I wanted to try to make the camera movements and actions exciting, but still keeping certain limits on its movements. To do this, I looked at examples that I found online of different action spots and I took the elements that I liked the most and incorporated them into my animation.

As you can see, the characters in this animation are blocky and stiff representations of what is to come later. This has many benefits. It allows you to concentrate on the overall action without getting bogged down in the detail. Later, I can replace these blocky representations with fully animated and refined characters. Also using the blocky characters lets me quickly change position and timing if I feel that something will work better a different way. I have not committed to a look so I’m free to experiment a bit.

Creating the players was straight forward. I started with a box and pushed and pulled parts of the box 

until I got the finished shape of one of the players. To get the other player, I just took the same shape and put on a different head. At this stage, they don’t need to look perfect. 

Once I had my players made, I placed them in the scene and I animated them and the cameras based on the animatic and storyboard.

You may notice that some elements have been changed from the animatic. That’s because in the animatic, you can draw things in a way that would not work well when you finally made everything 3D so elements had to change camera angles had to change and whole scenes had to be cut or added to help things flow properly.

Now that this step is completed, the next things I need to tackle are the character designs. In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting drawings of what I think these characters should look like. There are about six to eight unique characters that I need to figure out.

More to come.