As April turned, whilst still animating, we were still reviewing the animatic and what we could do to improve it or make it clearer.

We thought that the gap bit was the most poignant part of our film so wanted to emphasise it. Instead of a simple cut to reveal that the characters were on either side of the gap, we shrouded the gap by placing "foliage" type cells in the forground and nesting the camera in it so we could only see jay and kay on either side of the screen, in the distance. When they started to move towards each other the camera moved in, through the foliage and finally, when it emersed from it, the gap was revealed. This had to be quickly boarded and made so we could see what it looked like.

As some of Bronny's group work hours, she animated both the characters in this shot, moving towards each other in the distance (Brons blog - adventures-of-bron.blogspot.com)

Here is a playblast of the new scene:

 

At this point, we were still aware that the inital location of the neurons at the start may not have been as clear as it could have been . What we were thinking of putting in was a pan through the environment near the beginnning which would clearly show two small points of light at either end. A background for such a scene was made and then created in maya

Here is the backround that we used:

Here is a movie of one of the tests we did to see how this was looking (Bron also animated these characters):

This shot didn't quite gel well when we inserted it into the animatic. (It was inserted after the top down shots at the beginning.) We would cut to this scene, panning across the environment and then into the pink character. However, an intermediate shot was required as the cut was a little too severe. We thought it would have to be some kind of wide shot just not as extreme as pan shot. The following playblast shows what we came up with - we were pleased with the result:

Things were going well. A lot to animate but we were confident it would be done. There was always more to problem solve though.

In our animatic, when the blue and pink sparks from the neurons came close to one of the characters, we wanted a nice glow to appear on the characters, just as in the animatic. However, this was not as simple as it sounds to do because the shader used on the characters did not respond to light in a normal way. Heres a playblast of one such scene where this was needed to work:

It took a while to work out but a solution was found. 

What had to be done was set up two additional render layers; one where the character rendered totally in the highlight colour (e.g, if it was the blue spark, then the character would be blue) and one which textured the character with a lambert shader. This was affected by the sparks light in the expected way, creating shadow and highlight. These values were then used to drive a key mix in compositing where the value of the lambert shader corresponded to the coloour which was shown in the mix.  

Below is a clip showing the stages in how we got this effect. Additionally, it also shows the stages gone through in making this particular scene, involving adding backgrounds, and the spark rushes. This was a small scene yet quite a few processes were needed in the compositing stage: