Diner Animation Process

 For the Diner script, the beats are a continuous flow and doesn't have multiple angles which means the animation for the entire scene needed to be as smooth as possible. For this reason I decided to animate the entire 750 frames together in one go to make sure the transition between movements was steady and there was no overlap. The downside to this is my laptop not being able to handle many frames of animation at a time. Whilst I made the animation as smooth as possible, the playblasts were coming out juddery in places. 

Below is a short clip of the reaction from Moom Snr to the water spill. 

As well as animating the characters, I also needed to figure out how to create the mess of drinks during the interaction of Moom Jnr and Moom Snr. I decided that using Parent Constraints for Moom Jnr to hold the tray with milkshake was likely the best. Below is a screenshot of how I applied the use of Locators and parent constraints to attach the objects. This included having to animate the tray in places to turn on and off the constraint so that I could control when Moom Jnr picked up the try and when it came out of his hand. 

In the Diner scene, we had originally written into the script that there would be other characters in the scene, like other diner workers. I discussed this with the group and we decided to eliminate these for the sake of being able to load and animate extra characters within the time given. This was slightly an issue when it came to Moom Jnr receiving the tray with milkshake, as there would be no 'cook' to hand off to him, so I tried to make it seem like the tray was slide towards Moom Jnr from out of shot. 

Whilst I'm happy overall with the animation of the Diner given the limitations of my personal computer, I feel I could have improved upon certain actions, such as Moom Jnr's skating. Here they appear to be quite straight legged, instead of the V position of the legs which would normally be typical of a skating movement. With more time, I would have liked to develop these movements to be more lifelike.