'Hikers' Shot Progression

'Hikers'

Conceptually this project came from a desire to practice a 
"walking and talking" type of shot, as my other dialogue pieces up to this point were centered around characters either mostly stationary, or cropped at the waist due to the positioning of the camera.

Shot Progression

The staging for this shot ended up being tweaked slightly throughout each iteration to make the camera cut work nicely, and also to save myself some unnecessary work on the screen left character.

Initially I was not considering doing it in two shots, but thanks to some timely feedback from an instructor I was able to make the change before I had sunk too much time into it.

One of the biggest challenges was ironing out the footwork for the killer, and allowing him to cover that distance to the stump without any strikingly unnatural movement. Thanks to some character translation between the cut, it ended up working out nicely.

Camera Tricks & Props

Above are the two starting frames between cuts, which demonstrates some of the slight repositioning with the character and the environment objects, such as the tree.

Interestingly, in order to use the trees branches as a framing device, I had to place it at strange angle offscreen. The staging works well to disguise this, but it's funny to see the illusion being broken

Extras

Although they don't show up too well in the final polished shot, I played around with drawing some little smears using Maya's built in blue pencil. I used this same technique in my body mechanics shot with the staff, and I think that it ended up being a nice little touch.

Animating faces to the camera is a lot of fun, but it usually requires you to position controls in very unnatural ways. Just don't orbit the camera around too much...

Overall this assignment was a ton of fun, and gave me the opportunity to play with some fun staging and constraint systems. I think that it does a great job of showcasing the many different aspects of animation that I learned during my time at the Centre for Arts and Technology, and was a great shot to wrap up on.