A Time Apart: Scene 1 Animation + Lighting Revisit

After talking to Alan and Phil yesterday about my animation in Scene 1, I spent today revisiting it, in addition to carrying over the lighting from Shot 1 to Shots 2 and 3. One of the things that needed work was the eye darting to make it more lifelike - I revisited the facial animation presentation from second year and attempted to do some more eye darting for my characters and changed the positioning of the eyes individually which I hadn't before. They also pointed out how my characters move quite slowly, to be honest I don't really know why I did it, I think it's to do with how my mind understands and mimics life, I slow it right down to process what's actually happening within a second that speeding it back to real time feels strange but also when I work with something for so long I lose any sense of judgement. My focus mainly was with Doris's timing - I think I might need to speed Fred up a bit, I can't really tell at the moment. Doris still needs some refinement, however I've cut out a bit of what was in the first version, they no longer look out the window together, instead Doris looks straight at Fred. Part of what I struggle with is getting inside the head of my characters, it would be easier if they were made up characters but I'm trying to think of who they actually were and what they had done. 

This version is missing the matte paintings and clouds as it's animation I've been focusing on and am showing in this post. I also decided to test the object wipe cut shot using an old playblast of Scene 2, Shot 1 - I think it works. Below the video is a render.

After yesterday I have a better understanding of lighting and what I'm trying to do with it. Before I was trying to get as close as I can to my finished shot in maya which in my case isn't what I should be trying to do. In maya I should be getting my tones right and using lighting to make my characters stand out from the background. The moodiness I want in this shot I can do in after effects with the use of blending modes, filters, desaturation etc. But also a render doesn't capture 100% of the tones, the little bit it doesn't I get back in post production. In the render view you can turn off luminosity and have it just show black and white which makes it easier to see where character tones blend in with background tones.

Untouched Render

To understand more of what I'm doing now I needed to have a better understanding of what I'm going to do later, so below Alan showed me in photoshop a few effects on a render of what I would perhaps do in After Effects and showed me how I'm going to get the light to show in the carriage from my matte painting, (gaussian blur on a layer above). 

(This is just an example and not what my final shot will look like.)

Touched Render