I used the school’s render farm for this render, although it was a bit of a struggle as I found that the render farm often reported errors and I found that some shots would skip frames.
Although I usually preview the animation when I’m done in maya, I still adjust the speed of each clip slightly or delete some frames once it’s rendered.
This time I used PR to compose the sequence frames, edit the colour grading and make sound effects. For the dubbing I spent a lot of time looking for material including sound effects and background music. I think my animated short has a high demand for sound because there are a lot of sound effects to match the action and ambient sounds. Although I already had some sound effects from working on the dynamic subs, the final version incorporates the action for a more accurate positioning. It also makes up for some of my movement deficiencies, as I’m not very animated, but I’m still happy with the musical effects.
One of the things I struggled with the most regarding colour grading was the amount of time spent painting to render a sense of atmosphere due to inaccurate computer screen colours, and one thing I regret is that I didn’t render depth of field and motion blur, which I wish I had done in post, but it was more difficult. I hope to go through the colour grading to make up for the lack of colour tendency in the images rendered directly in maya. Added warm highlights and dark shadows.
Before and after contrast.