Scene 1

The opening scene of my animation.

I wanted to have the opening shot of the lumberjack walking through the forest with the trees all staring at him as he walks by. I used footsteps mode on the lumberjack in order to get him to walk on a set path. Although this meant that I would not have to animate the legs myself, I in turn had to animate the arms. This is because footsteps mode would automatically move the arms into an unnatural position. To fix this I had to set 2 key frames for each arm, 1 with the arm at the lowest point, and another with the arm at the highest point. i then repeated these key frames throughout the animation.

I was lucky enough to find a background that really suited my scene. The only problem i had was trying to get it to blend in with the material I used for the floor. In some scenes it worked well, but that was all because of the lighting. In this scene it just wouldnt really blend no matter what lighting I added. However, it still works well and I am very happy to have found such a good background for my animation.

I chose to use only 1 omni light in this scene. I stuck it behind the camera at an angle that would light the faces of all of the models. I also had another reason for sticking this light here, but I will come to that in another blog post.

I used a target camera in this scene. I couldnt have the lumberjack just appearing in the forest, or walking through the background. So in order to cover this, I decided to use a swoop down effect. This way I could start the camera with one of the trees blocking the lumberjack from view, and then as it swoops down he slowly appears. I believe that this camera effect works very well for an opening shot.