Cameras, Rendering and Sound.

Renders: I wanted my animation to be quite clean, with simple colours and smoothed shapes, as it was based on a toy so I wanted to keep a 'pre-school' type feel. Originally I planned to add a white background and smooth the characters manually (as they were quite blocky - see pictures to the right) but was then shown how to render using Mental Ray.

This created a really nice finish to my animation with the lighting looking really soft and the characters looking more whole. It allowed me to create some nice visuals, and mimic my storyboard to the extent I wanted. It was quite exciting to see the render-previews as I was animating, as it illustrated how it would look finished, which gave me hope for the overall finished product.

Camera: Knowing how my rendered shot would look like I then focused on the camera angles, as I wanted to be able to illustrate the story clearly. (The little cat thing being scared - the big cat thing being dominant and scary)

Sound: After positioning the Camera angles and Rendering all my frames the animation needed sound. Though I searched for copyright free sounds and music it became very time consuming and hard to find exactly what I was imagining. Instead I used the soundbooth to create the sounds myself, such as the footsteps and cats 'meows'. I also enrolled help to create some simple backing music and additional sounds. This hopefully added to the over all animation.