The Void Animation Project: Creating the Footage of Live Action Animators at Work

So it was always intended that on a giant TV screen in the animation would be live action footage of Matt and I as live action animators. This simulates the reality that the world in the animation is the Maya template grid and the screen is like a window to the real world.

Now we both knew that adding live action footage to a Maya project would be a bit complicated as we had previously no idea how to do it. But we had been told it was possible so we knew it would be worth it.

So we filmed the Live Action Footage. Originally I wasn't sure how to film the footage since the university computers didn't have webcams attached. I then tried to attach my phone to a computer monitor to give the effect of being filmed from a computer height. Then we used Matt's webcam that was on it's laptop, and this did seem like a simpler option.

We filmed three minutes of footage of us at the computer with the storyboard for reference of how we should act, but a lot of it was improvised. Three minutes of footage seemed to me like a good amount to cut down and get only the best. I know Matt really enjoys editing but for this I did ask if I could edit it together. This was because I had an idea of how it should look in my head that I was really passionate about and I knew I wouldn't have been able to describe it.

But since I'm blogging about this process, I might as well try to describe what I was going for. When I edited the footage together I basically cut all the footage of us acting and actually kept the segments when we are looking at an animatic on the screen behind the laptop filming us and when we were just completely natural. This was with the purpose of creating footage that is as realistic as possible. Of course in the scene where 54 jumps onto the TV screen I kept in the segment where we react with surprise that was acted, but pretty much the rest is natural.

I edited the footage together in a way where it is basically subtle and just watching us at a computer. But every so often I would jumble up the clips and put in a quick second clip of footage where there are no animators, just their seats, and I would sometimes cut clips abruptly, reverse and speed them up, just to make the footage slightly unsettling which fits the tone we're going for.