Time to Start Animating

I wanted to get the scene with the mermaid swimming out of the way first, because this is the bit that requires the most animation. Ollie had created the surrounding above water scene in which the majority of the animation would take place. I began however by animating in the scene which I had originally built my model, because I found it easier to see if I was on the right track and that way I would just need to drop it into the scene later.

How did it go?

The whole process of creating this motion of of swimming was quite challenging because I kept making the mistake of moving the tail the wrong way in relation to the fin. However after playing around a lot and positioning her correctly in the scene, as well as adding in the key frames to make her move through the water, things were starting to look much better.


What problems did I have?

The animating process was much less stressful than the stage of creating and orienting the controllers, however I did still have to rectify somethings.

• Some of the influence weights I had previously painted weren't quite right in all areas, so I had to go back and black out some of the influences to make the body move better and more realistically. 
• I also had to play around with the graph editor because originally it all happened a bit slowly so everything needed pulling in to fit the time frame.   

Hello, its me! 

The first time we see the mermaid, she is simply coming upwards from under the water, up to her shoulders. This obviously wouldn't take a huge amount of time to animate, however it required a bit of playing around in order to get the timing right. There is some movement in the mouth as she comes up realises what she is looking at, so I did experiment a bit with how much to manipulate the mouth. The first attempt I did showed the mouth dropping open more dramatically, I also did a second which was more subtle, because I wanted to be able to sit with Ollie and see which he thought looked better.

When it came to animating the cameras, we decided that it would be good to have some movement in them, so give it a bit more life, also it made the shots look much more effective.