Redoing the Animatic

 In applying for jobs recently, I couldn't help but realize that my animatics looked awful, and nothing like the short in its current state. So I decided, since the camera has accumulated some advanced 3D movements, I decided to experiment with how to replicate those movements in 2D.

01 - Crazy Crane Shot
I noticed about five frames in that this animatic was going to be unintelligible if each action had multiple angles. To remedy this, I decided to pick an angle for each action, and the clarity was satisfactory.

03 - Rotating the Camera
To rotate the camera, I simply expanded the canvas to about 5760x180, and warped the perspective lines to augment the illusion. This is MUCH more interesting than the two-second entry I have filmed, and introduces Tom a little better as a solid character without having other characters in his head. The stammering apology for his near incident will also set up Ava's more frantic apology when she has an actual incident.

04 - POV

While Lefty's room was a straight-forward drawing with a hole in the middle, the meatspace hallway had to stretch from left to right and top to bottom. I used the same warped perspective lines from shot 3 but added 1080 pixels at the bottom for the paper with the class schedule.

21 - Panning Under the Stairs
Perhaps the most difficult, however, was the rotation under the stairs in the final shot. For this, I had the first stair sprite expand until the steps surrounded the camera. I then had the second sprite enter the screen from the left, with a slight scaling animation to aid the illusion that it's the same stairs.