Progress 3 - March 14th 2016
At this point I’ve reached a full 15 seconds, but as I’ve said before, I plan to eventually turn this into a full 30-40 second animated short for my personal portfolio, social media pages and showreel. This segment, however, I am quite happy with, and may consider submitting when the time comes around and I have received feedback on it in tutorials.
Since my last progress update, I have extended the animation, introducing Hammer The Orc in shot and really starting to build on the humour. When Hallsy walks closer towards the orc, he hears him grunt, and stops in his tracks. When he opens his eyes and sees the menacing giant before him, he looks up and smiles in a frozen moment of fright.
A number of motion tweens are used throughout this sequence, which can be seem in the flash timeline in blue, giving that impression of motion parallax, as well as creating some effective comedic timing (such as where he stops and looks behind him, then looks at the camera)
The next shot was difficult to draw because of it’s playful perspective, I ended up literally sketching on top of the frame I used in the animatic - I really wanted to exaggerate the height difference, and give the illusion that the audience is looking up at the orc and cowering at his might.
All that was needed to bring this section to life was a blink in the eyes, at this point I used another motion tween in the background layer to darken the sky in a moment of pathetic fallacy - enhancing the feeling of threat and expressing the emotions not only in his appearance, but in the environment itself
I had a darkened background drawn out for this exact moment, but didn’t end up using it as it wasn’t needed after I realized I could simply darken the background in production - I also removed the clouds
When we cut back to Hallsy, the same feeling of dread and threat is visible, as we look down upon our hero from the eyes of the antagonist Orc. Hallsy’s comedic expression of dismay is now completely visible, and it almost looks as though he has sunken into his armour, cowering in fear. At this point the Orc is going to breathe down on Hallsy through his nose, causing Hallsy’s helmet “Plume/Galea”, sideburns and soon his hair curl too to get blown behind him in another comedic moment of physical contrast between the Orcish giant and underdog Knight...
Several repeated frames are used here which ease in and ease out with the gust of the Orc’s breath. Hallsy blinks but his actual expression remains largely still, as though he can’t take his eyes off of this threatening monster and is frozen solid for the moment in a spot of pure discomposure.
I plan to add sound by recording in the sound studio with some friends after the Easter Break, this will hopefully include some Foley as well as sound effects to really flesh out the character’s emotions at the key points - doing this will also make some sequences make a lot more sense to the audience (like when Hallsy looks behind him after hearing a ‘rustling’).