Final Sunset Scene

My most challenging compositing scene was the final sunset one, as this scene was so vital to the story I needed to make it both clear and visually good. The background was where most of the work went into, as I needed to make a version for both the sun being up and the sun being set/the castle being on fire. To do this, I focused on first how the bg would look with the sun being up, and then added layers after to change the colour quality as well as the castle and sky. I then cleaned this up and took it to after effects to composite, along with the image sequence of the animation. The final scene looks like this:

Overall it took me 3 hours to composite due to how many layers there were as well as getting the timing right, and finally genereating the smoke for the fire.

I started again with the sky, animating the clouds moving across over a 20 second duration. I then keyframed the sun setting, getting the timing right with easing. I used this as a reference to keyframe the second versions of the background's transparency, so that it would fade from sunset to night time. I also did this with the castle fire layers, to reveal that as the sun sets.

Once the background was mostly done, I placed the image sequence in, colour corrected it, added the shadow and adjusted the timings to fit with the background animation.

The final step was to create the smoke to make it clear that the castle was on fire. Originally I was going to do this in tvpaint, however I decided to try creating the effect with after effects. I used CC particle world to generate the smoke, and used a blur to make it softer. After playing with the settings to get it to look right and be in the right postion, I moved it in the background so it'd be behind the sky's many overlay layers, thus making it fit in with the composition. The final step was to keyframe the transparency to make it reveal itself along with the castle fire.

I'm very pleased with this scene, and it's probably my favourite from my animation as I love watching the transition. I also think the smoke - although subtle - really sells the scene, and Beram's reactions are very fitting.

To improve I think I could make the smoke more obvious, by maybe duplicating the smoke and putting it on top of the sky layers but at a lower opacity. It's something to experiment with.