Post Production Part 3 - Editing in After Effects

Once the majority of the scenes were rendered, I began to put them into After Effects to get a better idea of how it would run as a whole piece. I was really pleasantly surprised with how it looked, we had definitely achieved the sunny, calm atmosphere that we wanted.
All together, there were 14 scenes to be placed into After Effects.



One of the things that Ollie and I did notice, was that there was a greyish strip of colour between the skyline and the water, which we assumed was something to do with the placing of the Indirect Lighting that we applied in Maya. However, after some discussion, we decided that it actually worked quite well, because it looked a bit like land on the horizon. So in this case it was a bit of a "happy accident"




Fixing and Editing

When all of the scenes were together and I played the whole thing back without any credits, I noticed that we were 14 frames short of a minuet. I realised that this was because, earlier in the animation stage, I received a scene off Ollie that he had animated, it was the scene where we see the robot suddenly appear underwater.
The movement of this scene didn't begin until the 20th frame in, so I only rendered it out from there. The problem in doing this was that I didn't think ahead to the fact that this would take away some of our animation time. The way I resolved this was to take the first scene which pans over the ocean, and simply extend that for another 14 frames. This worked for more than one reason:

• It brought a little focus in on the robot
• It would also allow more time for the audio to develop over those few seconds
• It resulted in the time length of the animation to be just right. 

I think this mistake that was made was due to a lac of communication from both myself and Ollie, however I managed to resolve this without it effecting the quality of the animation, and without loosing too much post production time.


There were some things that needed adding to some of the scenes, such as the importing of the speech bubbles. Ollie and I decided that he would do this part, because he had created them.