Improved Animatics

Sorry for the late blog post -- I was out of town last week.

I'm still improving our animatics. Here are before-and-after pictures of Scene F402a (when Darth Vader suffocates Stormtrooper Captain):

You may recall that I can't kneel or fall in the Stormtrooper armor because of the limited range of motion. As a result, when we shot the live footage of Stormtrooper Captain falling to the ground, the best I could do was bend over and pretend to fall. I had to digitally move Stormtrooper Captain in post-production so that it looked like he actually fell to the ground.

Unfortunately, the fall looked fake and I finally realized it's because there should be motion blur. So I added motion blur to the fake fall (see 2nd picture, above) and now it looks much more realistic. Sweet.

Here are before-and-after pictures of another improved animatic:


In the 1st version of this animatic, the 2 TIE Fighters had almost identical flight paths, which looked totally artificial. In the new-and-improved version, I varied the flight paths of the 2 TIE Fighters so that they look much more realistic.

Here are before-and-after pictures from the last animatic I improved. In this scene, Brad's Jedi Starfighter exits hyperspace, then flies past the camera:

In the original animatic, the Jedi Starfighter flew perfectly straight, which looked fake. In the improved animatic, the Jedi Starfighter wobbles a bit after exiting hyperspace. If you look at the wingtips on the "after" picture (2nd picture, above), you can see that the Jedi Starfighter is tilted slightly to the right.


And in this 2nd pair of before-and-after pictures, you can see the wobble to the left in the "after" picture (2nd picture, above).

Happy Easter!
Bob