#magic fx

That feeling when you finally beat the boss

From rough to finish

I wanted to write about this scene because I think it’s interesting to see how sometimes the final version can be totally different from the animatic.

1. Here is the animatic for this scene, as you can see the drawings and the timing are a little ambiguous. Sometimes the animatic is super clear and you only have to cleanup and inbetween, sometimes is up to the animator to propose a timing and a design.

2. This was the rough I suggested to the director, as you can see it’s still very rough but shows already how I want the movement to be and the timing.

3. Here are the notes from the director: “the initial FX are a little too busy. so between frames 17 - 25 want to avoid covering whole screen with FX such as the teal FX are too big here . Don't change FX on characters though. Want it to feel like Jaina is shooting down the cone of cold FX from above them and not from the point of view of the camera.” 

4. I did the changes, and here is the scene with final comp.

That is it! hope you find this useful, if you want to check out the whole thing the video is here 

FX animation process

I thought it might be interesting to talk about this shot I helped with some FX animation.

1. I receive the animatic and the character animation and I get the main idea of what the director wants for the shot. The first thing I do is to place the background, the OL and UL smokes, these are really important to give the tridimensional feeling of space.

2. Once I am happy with the camera move, I draw the main keys, the smoke animation is pretty straight forward so I just need to make it disappear as the character travels through it, the only thing I need to pay attention is to not make all disappear at the same time and to keep the general timing of the character animator.

3. To add the light rays I just need straight lines coming from the source of light, what really helps selling the shot though are the highlights on the character, they are all animated on 1′s and because I am doing my own cleanup I chose to animate cycles of two images so the highlights vibrate and then move them on top of the character with symbols in Animate.

That is it! hope you find this useful, if you want to check out the whole thing the video is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jInzG9Ukrk