FINISHED ANIMATION- 'CAPTURED'

Here is my finished animation uploaded onto YouTube. I feel it represents my three key words 'mysterious', 'strings' and 'oriental' and moves with the piece of music. The lighting and quick movement creates drama and pace. The initial concept, illustrated on the my storyboard, was maintained and is a easy 'story' to follow. For my first ever animation and first time using After Effects I am pleased with the results.

I added a pale murky green colour to the light throughout, this intensifies as the tentacle appears.

LIGHTS & CAMERAS

LIGHTS & CAMERAS- Due to the 3 waves being on separate layers the camera and select '2 view' was important, this enabled me to position the waves in distance order to the camera. To this I then could place the ship and tentacle.  I followed my original intentions and added a light, starting at the left, it follows the ship and then directs at the bottom right as the tentacle enters. As the sea rises the spot light lowers then widens as the eyes appear. Finally as the eyes blink shut, the spot light closes central and the frame ends in black. 

BACKGROUND- SKY & CLOUDS

I decided to use the softer crumple light blue as the sky, the texture darkened looks similar to smudged charcoal and this is a nice subtle effect. I simply cut the clouds out the other papers using the Lasso Tool. I think the block white will fit better with the design of the boat and sea rather than a feathery, realistic cloud I could of created with the brush tools. The first shows the lighter paper clouds, this had a   light blue photo filter and then I used the filter 'rippel' to create a softness to the lines. The second is the darker paper and the brightness was lower with a darker blue photo filter applied. The darker clouds with come into the animation when the tentacle enters to show the mood changing.

BACKGROUND- SKY & CLOUDS

TEXTURED PAPER

These are crumpled pieces of paper which I scanned in, the top two and last one are the same piece and the third was gently pressed to create softer, less frequent crumples. I put these on Photoshop and applied different contrasts, brightness's and photo filters to make different effects suitable to use as clouds and sky. These four pieces were the most successful as they have the right balance between light and dark and won't take too much attention from the animation. 

END SCENE- blinking eyes

Digital Paintings- The first one I did and thought they looked too cartoon like and cute. The eyes to the right are the same but with more of a eye lid created and bags under the eyes. The effect of this is sinister, it ages the eyes and add more mystery. Next to this are the eyes shut, covered by the eyelid, I did this to use for when the eyes blink. 

Tentacle Puppet Pin Tutorial AE

I found this tutorial really useful as it showed me how less puppet pins worked more effectively to create the worm like motion, he also copied and pasted frames so that the original puppet pin stayed in the same place. His result is a really nice movment and the motion blur helps this.