responsive: animating a full scene

At this point in the project I had only animated small sections to see how they would look but they were only small parts of the animation. The next section of animation I needed to tackle was much longer, which was the opening scene which featured two of the divers. I ran into a few problems during this section however everything was simple enough to fix. The way we wanted to put the final piece together would be on one massive composition in after effects. Since the background was so large we wanted as many pre-rendered assets as possible. That meant the diver animations needed to be in the exact right places so they would be able to interact with the background seamlessly. The first part of the scene I started to animate was the diver jumping off the boat. I placed the boat from the main background into my diver comp and created a blue solid to show where the water would be. I was essential that the boat and water were the exact same distance apart in the final comp. Again I looked a lot of reference footage of divers jumping from boats. Another challenge that came up was animating the splash. I used some animation I saw on my summer internship (from a show called messy goes to okido) where all the fx animation is done in aftereffects to get reference for my splash. they use very flat rising and falling shapes to create splashes and it works very well. I did the same with shape layers however I also deformed the start and end to make them appear more natural.

(ref found at 11 seconds)

Another difficulty I ran into was lining up two separate pieces of animation. It would be very difficult and often something goes wrong when copying keyframes of a big movement across so I thought it would be simpler to line up the end of one piece of animation with the other so they appear seamless. I did this by changing the blending settings in after effects to difference this allows you to clearly see where they overlap is. The aim was to have as much overlap as possible. The final result worked really well and you could not tell two animations had been stitched together. 

The last issue I ran into during this scene was a problem with duik. I was unable to horizontally flip a character when it was rigged up that would have to be done on the comp'd animation. There may have been a solution using duik possibly with some kind of mast controller. I decided to just animate the female character separately and place the animation in as a comp which I could then flip so it would face the male diver.