Thoughts on ‘Chasm’

‘Chasm’ was an animation project I spent about three months developing. The overall project was to plan out a more longer animation compared to my previous animations and to see how long it would take. And while end results was successful, and while I was happy at the work I had put into it, I ultimately felt like I hadn’t really achieved much in the larger setting.

I generally went about the production in 6 Stages

• Planning/Storyboard (1 Week)
• Developing Assets and Environment (1 Week)
• Animation (2 Weeks)
• Rendering (About 2 Months)
• Foley / Sounds (1 Weeks)
• Post Production effects (1 Week)

Originally I wanted a quick turn around, and to finish the entire project with a month, but rendering pushed back a fair bit of that process.

I suppose starting off with what could have been improved in retrospect, the character Mico glides across the scene, and pacing at the last third of the animation is far too fast paced. I liked the effort I had put into the sounds, but most of the effects were drowned out by the artificial static I added to match with the environment. While rendering I quickly realized that while making a static sky was artistically interesting, it ultimately made the renders messy, and added a much longer render time to each frame (In retrospect, I would probably opt to render a transparent sky, then add in the static sky post production).

I did like the final results of the Neon Clouds, and the process of making the multiple kinds of cubes was also pretty interesting. Within this animation, most of the time I spent setting up NLA strips in blender, and using those, as I’m working on further projects, I’m learning to better sync up those strips with what I need.

Most of the technical stuff is that I used three cameras and all in one scene. If I were to do it again, I would probably split the project into multiple scene’s (since constantly messing with the camera’s can have the potential to mess up previous work) and try to do most of the work using at least one or two cameras.