Final Marvel Animation

Marvel Digital Comics promotional animation from Tom Thiel on Vimeo.

Here's my final animation for Marvel Digital comics. Although I'm by no means disappointed by my finished animation, there's is a lot more I would've liked to have done to improve it. The animation has a lot of scenes cut from the ones I lined out in my original animatic. I think losing a few of the scenes was a positive thing, as it helped prevent the animation being too drawn out, but there are details I would have liked to have included that didn't make it into the final piece. Things I would have liked to have added to the animation include rain falling diagonally across the screen in the scenes outside the building, as not only would it have been a nice visual but it would've allowed for the sound of rain drops falling to be added. As i didn't create the rain, I used the sound of wind howling down the street for these scenes instead. I'd have liked to have added an illuminating glow effect around the candles flame. The silhouette of Doom in the doorway and his shadow could have done to have his cape rippling slightly as if catching a slight breeze. The bookshelf flickering into sight, which was supposed to represent tube lights flickering on after the switch is pressed really need the tk tk tk sound that occurs as they start up, but I was unable to find or create this sound. That whole scene is different from how I originally intended it to look as all the perspective involved in my original idea, and the gradual lighting of the room from the back to the front proved to be a bit beyond my abilities. In fact a lot of the perspective in the first scene isn't quite right, but its not noticeable enough for me to be able to get away with it. I would have like to include a proper full blown walk cycle at some point. The Dr Doom in the doorway after the archive room is illuminated would have looked better if it were a more detailed graphic, rather than just a lighter version of the earlier silhouette. And the computer screen and the information that appears on it at the end are a little on the unattractive side, I'd have liked to make them a lot more polished. The sounds in the animation are fairly minimal, and I didn't really want to have music running in the background, but I'd have liked to make a bit better use of sound to create the atmosphere. And the whole thing could've done with a lot more tweening.

Now that I've finished picking apart what's wrong with it, I have to say I really enjoyed this module, and I've learnt some useful things in Illustrator and Flash, but I've still got a whole lot more to learn about them both before I'm able to create work up to a standard I'm really happy about. Now that I have this animation in place I'll probably go back over it and add in extra elements to it. It'll provide a nice testing ground for different effects and ideas I'd like to try out.

I've re-uploaded my animatic as the one hosted on blogger looks frankly awful. I've tried hosting it on youtube and vimeo, but the same thing kept happening on both, the first scene kept getting cut off and the sound ending up out of sync inspite of the original quicktime movie playing back fine. I've gone back into final cut to tweak the begining so the first scene shows up, but when uploaded the sound still doesn't sync up. Weird.


Marvel Digital Animatic from Tom Thiel on Vimeo.