Animals & Creatures - Session 206

Rough blocking of our 2 character interaction shot this week.

My layout from last week wasn't quite working staging and composition wise. So I found another plate of the same setting where I could get the characters to fill the frame a little bit more.

The problem with the new plate was that it was panning slowly across and didn't fit the action I had planned out very well - the camera was leading the action instead of the action leading the camera. When somebody in our Q&A pointed out that it looked like a security camera in middle of the forest, I figured I gotta do something about that haha - thanks by the way to whoever pointed that out :)

Then I remembered something that Glen Macintosh had mentioned in one of the previous lectures - in one of the Jurassic Park movies, he had deleted frames from the plate in order to get more intensity into an action that felt too slow.

The original plate I used was about 30 sec long and the camera eventually came to a stop. I went ahead and started to delete keys from the matchmove camera in Maya to speed up the pan to make it fit the action I had planned out.

Once that was working, I went back and deleted the exact same images from the plate and renumbered all of them to match the new keys on the matchmove camera. It took foooooorever. Ah well...pain is temporary - film is forever. And I think it works better now, so I guess it was worth it.

In a production I would probably not be able to do that, but I'm pretty sure the plate would have been shot to fit the action better in the first place - at least it's my way of justifying it :)

Here's my "old" new layout:


Here's the new layout after the camera change:


Here's the first rough blocking pass of my assignment: