The Void Animation Project: Animating 54's Arm Extending and Knocking Everything off the Grid

So we had a 54 that could extend his arm at will and now we just had to animate it in one of by far our most complicated shots. The shot involves 54's arm extending to such a point he basically cannot control it and ends up knocking everything off the grid. Matt offered to animate this scene so I left it completely in his hands and I feel the results looked great. But it was not over just yet. Matt and put together some incredible camera shots to go with the action that perfectly fit the tone of what was going on screen. Unfortunately, Maya crashed, so we had to film the scene again and I tried to carefully replicate the shots Matt had previously filmed as best I could. In the end I feel it looked pretty good and I think we can both agree it is one of the most successful scenes in the animation.

The scene starts with us initially watching 54's arm extend. Matt originally tried to film it with a 'fish eye' effect but unfortunately, because it wash't a real camera in Maya we could not render any footage using it. The fish eye gave the really nice effect that the arm, because it goes into the middle of the screen gives the effect that it's almost 3D and coming out the screen. Unfortunately we just had to film it normally, but the arm still grows as it goes underneath the camera so it still had the nice effect of being where the viewers eye will go.

Then Matt zoomed in on Number 1's face to capture his emotions at a point of genuine horror where he sees his surroundings, basically his entire world become erased forever. The shot is similar to the dolly zoom shot in Jaws where Brody believes he has just witnessed a shark attack and in those seconds of footage his world shatters.

Then the camera pulls back at an incredible pace to sum up the chaos of the moment.

Finally we pan to an above shot of the grid where we get a true sense of scale. You'll notice the camera always remains on the left of the grid and never goes past the black line in the middle, this is so we never break the 180 degree rule. 

I had learnt about this rule in A Level Media studies, and admittedly it had moved to the back of my mind since, until it was brought up again when animator Barry Pervis gave a talk with us and specified the importance of the rule. And he was right, if we were to break the rule it would be jarring and take audiences out of the animation.

This last shot was not originally conceived by me, it was conceived by Matt, but I still like how it again reminds me of the Homer3 episode of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror…