The Void Animation Project: Inserting The Live Action Animators Video into the Animation

Now that we had edited the footage of the animators at work together, we now needed to insert it into our animation. I knew this would not be easy. The fun part was filming and editing the footage, now this was the hard part. Luckily tutor Mat had talked us through exactly how to do this. I knew I would have trouble following his steps. That is one of my weaknesses, I often find that my memory lets me down. So I decided to film him showing us how to do it on my phone. With all this captured on film I knew I would have hop problem following the steps. I was inspired to do this by how helpful Mat's online Maya modelling tutorials were, I'm a very slow learner, but once I know how to do something, I rarely forget again.

It was basically a case of inserting the footage onto a UV map of the TV in After Effects. Matt was very smart in the way he initially designed the UV map as he gave the TV a bright green screen that stood out like a sore thumb from the rest of the image (applying the skills he learnt from the green screen inductions). This meant I could easily replace the green with the cropped footage of us animators, see below…

Then on Maya we simply had to insert the UV map as an image sequence into our animation sequences. Now we still would run into obstacles. One of these was that Maya would find which jpeg we were inserting, for example 0111 and put it on frame 0111 which would not always sync up. For the most part this did not matter but there were times we needed the animators to interact with the characters. To fix this problem, Emma showed me how to Batch rename files in Adobe Bridge nice and simply so the problem was easily sorted.

Once we had everything correctly UV Mapped the TV looked amazing. It looked exactly how we had envisioned in our heads and I think we were both very glad we didn't wait till post production to insert this footage of which was our original intention.

But I could not have been happier with the results and loved how it reminded me of our inspirations for the project…