Over the last week I have been adding the finishing touches to my film. I haven't managed to fully render the animation with colour but I think that it was more important for me to finish the actual movements that conveyed the story that make it look fully polished, and this I have managed. Since Easter I have animated more animals to listen to the Bear and Bard's music to break up their last tune a bit more. This included a fox, a badger, a wild cat and a raccoon, as well as a butterfly gently moving its wings to an earlier song to replace some leaves that I didn't animate very well.
To animate these aspects of the animals I found footage on Youtube of them and followed them as a guide on how they moved. I also used x6ud.github.io to alter thee angle of the raccoon's head accurately, I wanted them to look less cautious and attentive and more like they were whistling while they worked. Some of the animation was just part of the animal like the cat's tail and the butterflies wings. Once I put these into the timeline I did some further editing of the film and took out two shots from the middle when the bear puts down the lute awkwardly as I felt that the pacing of the sequence didn't feel right and the shot itself wasn't necessary.
This week I have also been working on some backgrounds. I decided it would be nice to fit them in even if I had to put a fade on them to see the animation over the top, as the setting is important to the project. I used textured brushes in Photoshop to draw them out and used colours from my initial setting sketches at the beginning of the project to keep to a palette.
For some of these backgrounds I coloured in parts of the animation I knew would be still to give an idea of what the colours would be if I had time to colour it all in, or to simply have a clear space below the animation to not distract from the details. Overall I'm pleased with the look of my backgrounds as I used a good earthy yet colourful palette and some nice textures, making it feel fun but but still natural.
As I drew the backgrounds I also broke one long background into separate parts for the tilt shot at the end of the film. I then put them into After Effects and used the camera with 3D layers to have them move against each other as the camera moves up amongst the trees to the sky.
I tried to make the movement of the camera ease out so that it slowly and calmly arrived at the tree tops.
I wanted there to be an ending screen once the camera reaches the tree tops so I started working on a title. I kept with 'The Bear and the Bard', which I had used in some of my previous progress video titles as I thought the alliteration was good. I also wanted to use some illuminated lettering to give it a sort of medieval feeling to it, as I had been going with medieval/renaissance vibes when designing the bard and picking the instruments. I did a couple vague sketches, then some research and some more developed sketches, which you can see below:
I used a variety of references, including actual medieval illuminations, Victorian adaptations and modern interpretations.
I then placed my sketches into the title arrangement I had planned in Photoshop. For the lowercase letters I used a font called Oldprint that felt like a good gothic type that would be used in old illuminated books. Some o my designs felt better as titles than others did, like the first two, but didn't feel era-appropriate. My favourite option is probably the penultimate lettering but it felt more Celtic-inspired than medieval. The third had a similar problem but instead feeling too Victorian. I ended up choosing the fifth title style as I thought that it kept the the time period aesthetic enough whilst being interesting and decorative but not in a distracting way.
This is my finished title work, I coloured the letters in with those used throughout the film, and also applied the worn texture to them with one of the brushes I had used in my backgrounds.
The last touches I made to the film were adding and altering sounds. I needed the drumming for the bear's paws and some foley sounds for when the different animals listen in at the end. I ended up making the drum sounds in GarageBand using the software instrument as I was unable to make a good recording of my own due to background sounds, lack of good recording equipment, and not having anything right for the drumming sound itself. I was able to make the drumming sound in the right tempo for the bear in GarageBand as well as get a good clear sound, which is what I needed. For the added foley sounds of the stream and some insects I was able to simply download them from freesound.org, and finally I added an echo effect to some parts of the ending song so that it sounded like the animal's hearing the tune from through the trees.
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