Luke's Student Animation Blog: November 2016

For our new project, we were asked to pick an image to inspire us to create a completely finished scene which would have depth, a camera move, some form of animation and be longer than 3 seconds. This could be an establishing shot or a big 'money shot', but it was meant to be a finished shot which would come out of a look development process and be used to pitch the project we've developed.

When I thought of a money shot I knew I wanted to do a big action setpiece with a fight scene and so I chose this concept art from Captain America Civil War as I liked the dynamic poses in the image as it captures a sense of movement and showcases an entire fight similar to a comic book splash page.

I looked at these scenes from both Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Age of Ultron to help further develop my idea, particularly focusing on the shots where all the characters take up the frame.

For this project, we were allowed to work in groups and I felt like this would be the best way to move forward as this is how many people work within the industry. I wanted to carry on in the medium of 2D and so in my group, there is another 2D artist, but our group also has a 3D artist as we were all eager to explore 2D 3D integration. We chose to animate the characters in 2D but have them placed inside a 3D environment.

We looked at different examples of 2D characters moving in a 3D environment as well as the use of multiplane and decided that we would have the characters on different planes within the 3D scene and have the camera track through them as they are fighting.