Notes

As we created the character of Edgar and his little menagerie of crows, we fleshed out his character far beyond what you will see in the film. In his studio he has a little pet squid, as well as a loving portrait of his mother and father.
We entertained the thought at one point of putting in Edgars girlfriend - a similar bird character called Lenore. We established that she did the opposite job to Edgar. Whilst he represented death, she would be life. Lenore's job was to take down the heart stars that had gone out, rekindling them herself and then sending her flock of doves to implant the new hearts in young babies. Thus the cycle continued!
This was too much to put into the film, but we enjoyed having more of a story around Edgar and his world, and it allowed us to really leap into the animation.

Edgar, and his girlfriend Lenore.

Post-Production

In post production I took on the role of Lead Editor. Luckily our film did not require much complicated edits or changes, so most sequences were easy enough to put together. However there were a number of layers for certain shots that needed to be comped together in After Effects, as well as pans, zooms and moving backdrops.
We created the project, named Lullaby (this was eventually the title we decided upon, as we had grown attached to it during the project) and began to import all of our animation files. Each sequence would be its own comp, as well as some of the more complicated shots having their own comp window, as shown below.

On the more simple shots, it was simply a matter of sequencing the animation (command+a >animation > keyframe > sequence layers)  and then going in, frame by frame, to check everything was working. With this scene we had a few 'white flashes' that we had to manually crop out using command+ctrl+d.

This shot was comped seperately, as it required the background to move and then stop, matching the animation. It took a lot of tweaking, and I realised that there was not enough animation to cover the full length of the background. Luckily we didn't need the shot to be that long, and I was not precious about missing a lot of the artwork so long as the action worked properly.
After finding the right speed to match the walk cycle, I eased in the animation so it stopped gradually, the same way the girl does.

I manually keyed the opacity for this scene. The sharp cut was not working for the melancholy of the scene, so a gentle, barely noticeable fade made it much softer and easier on the eye. It was simply a matter of overlaying them both and then animating the opacity.

The final shot was the most important. It would be the one that left a lasting impression, and as such needed to be edited well enough. At first I was unsure as to whether I would be able to accomplish it, but once all the separate elements of the shot were imported and arranged, the shot began to come together. The slow zoom reveals the hearts, and I eased the zoom so it slows to show the entire scene. All in all I was fairly proud of it.

The final touches was to arrange every completed shot into a final composition, and add the music/sound fx track created for us by Danielle Crooks, a student from Audio Production. A final few checks and we rendered it out as a .mov file, (H264) as well as in blu-ray for the degree show.

Animation - Sequence 3

 In sequence 3 I animated the first shot of the crows meeting up and placing their hearts in Poe's (the round crow) jar. This was a brilliant opportunity to try and get across some of their personalities whilst beside one another.
Eric flies in, and lands, hopping over to the jar - not entirely sure where he needs to be - as Poe watches. Eric is my favourite to animate, I'll admit, thanks to his body shape having some excellent squash and stretch, and the tail that flickers and twitches as he moves.
I animated the flight by first tracking the body, head and tail, with no wings - in order to get a smooth descent and keep the volumes in check. It was a simple technique that I believed helped me a great deal in understanding the flight animation. Below is a quick test that demonstrates how I did this. The orange overlay is a shot guide, as this shot also pans down later on.

I repeated this technique with Allen, the harsher crow, and made sure his flight was more sharp and precise - he pauses for the others to move so he can alight. He is proud and a little bit egotistical, and I think I got this across fairly well in his posture and his actions.