Shadows

For a scene in my animation I wanted to have a shot of a door opening from inside a pitch black room, revealing a silhouette of Doom in the doorway. I made the graphics and then animated the door sliding open, with the motion reflected in the shadow on the floor. After having made it and watched it back, I realised it didn't look right. I didn't know exactly how it should look, but the shadow moving across sideways in time with the door just seemed wrong.



Not having any sliding doors around the house to check how the shadow should move, I knocked up a cardboard model of a wall and a door. I placed a lamp directly behind the door space and filmed the cardboard door cut-out sliding across, so I could observe how the shadows movement.



Watching this back allowed me to see what was wrong in my first attempt. The shadow pivots from the bottom corner of the door as it moves across, making a straight line with the door edge when it reache the halfway point of the doors movement across the doorspace. After a few unsuccessful attempts I managed to get my animated shadow to move in a more natural fashion, and it definately looks about 100 times better than the initial version.