Final

My final!

Rationale:
My research revealed a darker side to the nursery rhyme that I hadn't considered before, in reality I see it as a rhyme all about the suddenness of change and the upset of the established order. I can see how Little Miss Muffet has it's root in things executions.

I've interpreted the rhyme by looking at the idea of upset, and having 'Little Miss Muffet' as the bad guy and the 'spider' as the good guy showing a form of enslavement and having a hero come through and upset the order.

I chose to present it like this in order to get people to look further into things instead of taking it at face value. I like the idea of making people look further into things they're used to, like making Muffet into a   nasty human harvesting beast.

I liked the way my characters developed and I think the kind of dark world i've shown with the hordes of mindless humans being harvested worked well. The music I chose played a part in setting up the world, giving an suspenseful feeling and the sound effects worked to accentuate the actions.

Sound

For sound i had a lot of trouble finding the correct ones, I settled with a nice suspenseful ambient drums background track, and stumbled upon this.

https://soundcloud.com/simonus/ethnic2a

Which i really like, I used sounds from http://freesound.org/, I managed to find with some searching some good sounds like bass drum kicks, and suspense building effects.

I had a lot of trouble with sound really, working with sound in after effects was a nightmare so I switched to Sony Vegas which allowed me a lot more control over the sounds (pic related), I've never worked with it before but I managed to get a result.

Changes and Improvements

After emails with Claire i've got some changes to make to my animation.

Remade the human heart to fit better with my aesthetic.

Added in some muscle texture, textures on the horns, eyes, back of the mouth. Also remade his head a little, gave him larger, more spread out horns.

Textures added to the hero, Wanted to do something other than the default textures you might see on the kind of clothes he's wearing so i added a bunch of dots fading out from sections to give him an effect I really like.

Took Claire's advice and replaced the gold with a dark woodened brown, got rid of a lot of the shine and added in some wood textures to fit with the look more. Also darkened and upped the contrast to lend a darker look to my animation.

A happy human for a celebration scene at the end.

Working on the final scene of the human celebrating as the hero stands out on a cliff above them.

Animation with textures, needs sound still.

Animating.

Just starting out. Figuring out how to loop animation and getting the grasp of precomping, Using the Puppet Pin tool to experiment with moving static images (creep.png)

First scene mostly sorted. Moving into animating the second scene, getting to know cameras and things like that.

Working with high quality images i've created, adding in manipulatable characters and learning more about camera movements, beginning to add text and work with yaw and rotation of cameras on 3d scale for character introduction.

Working on the third scene trying to set out this seperate head to work properly. Starting to get the hang of key framing and don't feel so lost when working in After Effects anymore.

Getting into more complex stuff, multiple cameras and whatnot. Starting to see the sheer amount of effort that goes into animation.

The big fight scene, Started by making a big stage and animating everything on there, planning on changing the resolution and using camera work to show what's going on.

Discovered the joys of trying to properly animate articulated PSDs, I think i'm getting the hang of it, made a nice crouching animation that doesn't look bad. More text work for the Little Miss Muffet rhyme.

Working on the stabbing scene, don't quite understand the fifty key frames 'recommended' on the brief, i'm easily using many many times more than that.

Starting to put what I have together to get some feedback on it.

 

First real draft of animation, quite long, needs some chopping down.

Background and Props

Jeweled heart of the humans.

The Beast's chest full of hearts

Side view of the chest

Red impact background, used in the Beast intro scene.

Door entrance that hero enters from.

Throne room

Side on view of the throne room, scene used for the fight scene.

Throne room for zoom in from hero's point of view.

Characters for use in animation

Human character

Human character while turning

'Drained' Human character

Articulated beast from front, used a psd, all bodyparts move.

Articulated hand, used for the heart eating scene

Beast head, used for the eating scene, mouth opens quite wide.

Fully articulated side on view of the Beast

Front on Hero for door scene

Articulated Hero psd

Storyboard animation

Things not shown: Creep digesting Being, Creep taking heart from chest and putting it on conveyor belt, Beast dissolving to smoke, creeps dissolving to smoke.