Animated Documentary: Editing and Backgrounds

Before I can start editing the scenes together I had to fix a couple of problems with the background because Malachi did animate them but I had to reanimate most of the backgrounds that he gave me so that the backgrounds would fit in well with the animations. Also I had to reanimate the leaves blowing in the wind because they were stiff and not bending so they looked kind of robotic and none fluid. This took some time because animating the background made my laptop run slower due to the size Malachi made the photoshop files (he made them 3 times the size of 1920-1080p). 

The first thing I did was the leaves because they were the most important and noticeable part to the backgrounds. I animated the leaves using the puppet tool so that they can bend with a smooth motion path and look more realistic to the wind. This was an annoying process because I had to animate the puppet pins on every single leave separately just so that I could get a random look of the leaves blowing in the wind.     

After animating the leaves I then had to animate even more leaves because the leaves on the branch were doing the same thing and just being really stiff. So I had to again animate the leave using the same tool as before, I also had to move the branch itself further down in the scene because it was too close to the top and the orangutans wouldn't fit on screen if I left the branch where it was in the first place. I also had to slow down the clouds as well because they were moving across the screen to fast and they weren't in time with the rest of the animation.

Now that the leaves are all sorted out I then had to fix the tree, this meant that I had to place effects onto the tree like the turbulent displacement and rough edges effects, but I did also have to fix the clouds again because they were moving across the screen to fast so I just slowed them down. As well as doing all this I also had to change the length of each background scene because Malachi had made then too short so I had to elongate them to fit the animations.

All in all I had to change quite a bit of Malachis' work which I didn't really want to do but I had to so that the animation would look decent and not unprofessional. Don't get me wrong he's done a good job but there where bit that needed tweaking and changing so that is wouldn't look odd in the final outcome of the animation. Not only have I done this but I'll also be putting together the final edit of the full animation with Mollys' work but I'm still waiting on her to complete it first before I can get started on it.