My Achievements

I feel that throughout this module, I have managed to achieve many new skills that I did not have before we began in January. I had no idea how animation worked in 3Ds Max, and had no idea about how making a humanoid character.

The things I am most proud of in this project are being able to see that a model I have designed for the animation would not have been appropriate or would have fit the general theme, and being able to redesign and improve already existing designs to fix the initial concerns that I had.

This was done for example with the old man character, who in my original design was a rather tall and slender man, but did not have a cartoony enough design for him to fit in with the scene or the death character. I was able to find some reference online to how I thought the old man should have looked, and was able to quickly redesign him to fit my own personal style.

This also happened with deaths Scythe. Originally it was just a long, perfectly straight brown pole with the metal head at the top. I decided that this did not look right and went about designing a new scythe as though it had been a part of a trees limb at one point in its life. I was much happier that the scythe now looked more dynamic and organic.
Another thing I was happy with was my use of light in my scenes. I had one large Omni-light that lit the whole stage, and I tweaked its settings to make it seem as if it was bathing the whole forest in moonlight, I then came to a problem where the light not cover the old man's face when he was sitting on the rock, as it was facing away from the lights. I combated this with two other, very low power Omni-lights, which lit his face just enough to show his facial features.

I am also very happy with now I managed to edit my rendered files together using Adobe Premier Pro. Some of my scenes were admittedly a little ropey around the edges, and I was able to clean them up substantially using some clever editing techniques.

I also used Adobe After Effects to add an anomaly effect onto the screen just before death appears, to give the impression of his impending arrival. I feel very good about using this software, as I had not used it ever before and feel that I went up and beyond what was asked of us on the brief to add an extra level of visualisation to my finished product.