creating a big tilt shot

one of the hardest shots in my film is one that involves a camera tilt (moving on its axis) whilst the camera was also panning (moving laterally). This shot is supposed to show what the main character sees in the cave and reinforce that it is him who is seeing all the weird creatures. I started by looking at Fraser Mcleans book about layout design, although it was helpful it did not fully resolve my issues with the final shot.

I attempted to create the shot experimenting with line work in photoshop and then moving it in aftereffects but all my attempts did not look right.

After speaking with a tutor the best cause of action was to test with live action filming to see how I could create this shot. After a few ideas I settled on a test that worked well, I draw a rough cave on a very long piece of card, which I shaped into the shape of a cave. I then moved a camera in the space how I want it to move in the animation. It was at this point that I realised how the layout of the shot would work.

paper test

Once I understood how the shot would move I started to do further tests. I drew the layout to the correct size and tested it in after effects. This confirmed that the layout worked and I could create the final background in the layout. 

Once I had finished the entire background I went to animate all the characters that would fit into the space. I used past designs from this project as reference. There were all animated to loop so I can run them for as long as needed meaning I could work out the timings of the shot at a later date.

The problem with working with this shot was that it was very large which meant it ran very slowly in aftereffects. This was significantly slowing my workflow so I needed to solve this. I decided to pre-render all the separate animations in the sequence then put them back in, this sped everything up a lot.

This is a breakdown of creating the shot