Shot 3 - They ate together

Fot his shot I had to model some extra objects which were an apple and a dead fish. Originally, the apple was going to be some cheese but then I thought about where the cheese would have come from in our scene. An apple could easily fall from one of the trees and could also be used in our "they played together" shot.

The objects are quite basic but here are what they look like:

The animals do not have mouths so I had to animate them so it looked like they were eating without opening their mouths. I did this by just adding the movement to their heads. For secondary animation, I added a swing to the cat's tail. The rat's tail is static because he was on his hind legs so his tail was on the ground which would not move a great amount. The cat's tail was up in the air because she was bending down to eat. I thought it would look unnatural if her tail was staid too. 

This shot is not crucial to the storyline and is sort of a flashback to what they do together, so we decided to show it is different, to add some curvy animated lines around the action. When this was layered over the shot, this was my first attempt.

I did not realise how slow the movement of them eating was until I had put the scene together. I realised that I should have used play blasts within Maya to help with the timing. With this noticed, I went back to Maya to speed up the movement of their eating. 

The play blast goes on for longer than the shot but this will be edited afterwards. The movement of eating has better timing and works well with the speed of the tail swinging. When I was happy with this, I put this into the final edit of the shot.

The background of this shot was just a still image of a small area of our environment scene. The animation was rendered as .png so it would not have a background and was easily layered over the image in After Effects. The swills were created in Photoshop and then layered over and animated within After Effects so they moved as well. The music and narration still has to be added to this shot.