Heartless Henry E4 Sting



Well I've completed my E4 Sting called Heartless Henry and have finally decided to put it up on my blog.
I have already mentioned how I animated my character in articles below so I shall not repeat the process, What I will mention here is how I created the background. Firstly, what better way to start than with a short movie clip - enjoy kiddies.



I Wanted to created a background that the Heartless Henry character could believably exist in, I knew I was going to have to stick to the colour scheme I initially started with (Gray scale - pencil drawing) as my character would look out of place in a nice, Millions of colours, Fully textured background. I also created the character with the intent to be standing in a 3D background as his feet positioning will give away - It also had to be surreal as my character was too. I built the set above using Google sketchup and tried to make it look habitable yet and extremely strange place to want to live, Initially I was just going to leave it as blank walls with shadows and maybe a few Photoshop effects but then I came across some very nice sketch textures which fitted perfectly. I then decided it would be a worthy idea to try different techniques in Photoshop anyways and see if I could create a different ambience, I was truly considering adding fog but it didnt work in the end, here are a few examples of angles and filters I tried - apart from the last one titled White block.JPG which was used to create the fade out effect in my final production. - PLEASE CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO MAKE IT BIGGER AND GET A BETTER VIEW.

After playing around with the character on these backgrounds I came to the conclusion that I would not have to add any effect to the background as it suited quite nicely (less can be more sometimes)

I then put the character into Adobe After effects (or should I say put the background behind my completed character) and BAM! it worked very well. The problem I had next was that Adobe After effects did not have the ability to do real time sound editing so I would have to make a sound, put it in and then render the whole damn thing as an AVI file before I could see it. This was unacceptable as sound editing required exact timing and even 0.2 of a second can make one hell of a big difference. I came up with a quick solution for this... Render the animation with the background to a PAL/AV format and then import it into Adobe Premier - I then proceeded to add the sounds in there and it worked fine. The only problem I ran into again was when I tried to 'Export' the new file using the DIVX compressor (It was reccomended by the Youtube Website to obtain best results on their systems ) I got lots of 'Artifacts' -> (which are blobs, irregularities and distortion on the clip) . I suspect it was due to the fact that my animation was rendered at 30 FPS and I was compressing it at 25 FPS again. I didnt bother trying to prove this theory and just exported it as a PAL File again with no compression as it turned out to be a relatively decent sized file anyways.

Here it is (not in it's full glory as the Youtube compressor Screwed the quality up just a little and made it more blurry but it is still acceptable) - I will try to upload it to www.Motiono.com at a later date though, this site offers better quality and faster uploads, another thing is it does not feature as much spam as Youtube either in my humble opinion.



And there you have it, Heartless Henry is born.