I animated the hands in his shot rising up and then sinking below the ocean surface in Callipeg.I got away with using copies of each arm and turning the wrists a bit to loosen up the action. I did have to animate one hand since it turned as it rose from the water. This project is becoming a lesson for me on when full animation is needed and when it isn’t.
I decided not to animate the woman in the three life preservers. She is dimensional thanks to some parallax and she seems to sink a bit because of the wave, thanks to a camera move.
The frantic hand movements will capture the audience attention. The hand animation is done but now I need to animate the splash effect. That is a huge challenge but I now have a plan of attack for the day. I tried randomly painting in a splash effect but it didn’t turn out very well and I threw it out. Today I will actually animate the curves of the splash and the circular patterns around the arms on the ocean surface.
The splash seen above is just a held cell and that will not due. I am hoping that by tonight I will have something in place that is worth seeing. I also plan to set up the virus attacking a crowd in Times Square. That will involve animating another crowd running towards the camera. That should be second nature by now but will take days to complete.