As I knew I was going to be very busy with the Debbie edit, I wanted to make sure the animation for Anxiety Dance would have sufficient attention. To assist Shahid with animating the branches, I created a (very loose) instruction manual that included everything I wanted to achieve from the animation, alongside diagrams and descriptions that I drew in Photoshop of how I envisioned the branches' movement and style. Although, I did make it clear that this was only for Shahid to follow as a rough guide, and if he figured in the process that things worked better done in a different way, I was happy for him to make those changes. Here are my descriptions : 



Unfortunately, due to limited time, Shahid wasn’t able to complete the branch animation, but got a very rough version of the first 28 shots started and as a result I offered to take over on his behalf, as at this point the Debbie edit was finalised. However, this meant I had to learn how to animate the branches very quickly within a small time frame using After Effects, and I was worried that my skills were not good enough to work efficiently. Luckily, having done the animation of the Indiegogo trailer for Through the Medium in a similar fashion, I had already some knowledge of the process, and alongside support from Thomas’ technical skills whenever I had problems, I was able to pick up the skills very quickly. Here is a brief time lapse (feat Lucy's draft of sound) of me working on placing the branches and beginning to animate them for a particular shot :



In short terms, to get the branches and camera movement to correlate with each other, I created a "Null object" which I used key points to track either a mark on the green screen or a part of the dancer that stayed within the frame. The branches were then parented to the "Null object" and tracked alongside its movement. To make the branches appear in the background I placed them underneath the layer that contained the dancer and added a "camera lens blur," adjusting this depending how far back I wanted the branches to appear. Adjusting the size of the branches also assisted with this, making them larger the closer to the camera I wanted them. The movement of the branches was done using the puppet tool which moved various parts of each branch, kind of acting as different limbs. This was recorded in the video using key points on the timeline.

The animation still took a lot longer than expected, and as I hadn’t scheduled in that I would be animating for Qualia, some time from Through the Medium got taken away unfortunately, which pushed us back quite a bit after final edit was finished. It was also a race to get a rough version of the branches done for Lucy in order to do the sound design for the piece, which added quite a lot of stress. However, I’m glad that the situation did occur, as now my confidence has grown a lot in using software such as After Effects.

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Lauren Fox
Third year at UCA studying Digital Film and Screen Arts
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