Applied Animation: Animating The First Scene

I was pleased with how my testing was going so I thought it'd be best to start animating for real. I wanted to try and animate in order as much as possible as I thought this would be easiest considering I want the scenes to flow into one another. This meant that in order for me to get started I was to draw London's skyline, as this is where the story is set.

Cityscape

The cityscape took a lot longer than expected. Although it is just simple lines and block colour (consistent with the colours used in my testing) it took a while to work out what I wanted on each layer. I separated the city into a number of different layers as I was wanting to create a parallax using After Effects. Once I had finished the colouring of the buildings, I realised I NEEDED to include windows as I was going to zoom into one of them for the next scene. I chose the building I was going to zoom in on and added windows to it. My original thought was to add windows to a selection of buildings in the scene, but once I had finished this set I realised I didn't need to. I liked how it looked and as it is the only building with windows, your attention is drawn to it and it makes it clear that this is where the story takes place.

Once I had finished I imported the layers just as before, and began animating a panning sweep across the city.

Version One

When I first tried making the 3D space it didn't really go to plan. As my original drawings don't extend to the very edge of the image (only to where they "collide" with other layers) when I adjusted the positioning of the different layers you could see where the buildings finished when the camera panned. So for my first (technically second) attempt I didn't adjust the depth of each of the layers, but instead kept them inline as if it wasn't layered.

Version Two

I went back to my original photoshop file and extended the drawings on each of the layers to try and resolve my problem. Once I had done so, I tried again, and the second (third) attempt worked much better, and I definitely prefer it over the first video as it looks much more 3D. 

Version Three

I then extended my workspace and added in the camera zooming in on one of the windows on the building, creating the transition from this scene to the next. Again I encountered the same problem I had the first time around in that the image becomes very pixellated as I get closer, even though I drew these components on a much larger scale. For now I am going to leave it as it is. I like the movement, and I'm hoping that when I include the room inside the window it will seem less "bad quality" and more "the camera is shifting it's focus".