For Scene 3 Lighting, I encountered the largest obstacle, which was the “Shadow” Problem.
My animation technique was to hide the extra movements and pieces changes outside of the frame so it would flow well and transition well between pieces, however, as my Key spot light shines over my room, it casts the shadow on to the background wall, which reveals my transitions.
I came up with couple solutions at first, I tried to turn off cast shadow on either light or cutout itself, and cast another individual shadow on Timmy’s cut out, but that did not work because the overall visual for shadow looks wrong. It turned out extremely unnatural. Even my animation style is very forgiving, yet the shadow looks very unpleasant and fails.
So I came up with the best solution, “ta-da”~ SHADOW DIFFUSION ! , I crank up the shadow diffusion when it comes to the transition, It will not affect any existing lighting, but only blurs out the shadow, and I set the diffusion timing along with the camera movement to co-exist both movements smoothly, and essentially hides the blur within the camera movements. An extra surprise I noticed, is that the “blurs” during the camera movement also act as a field of depth illusion, so its a win-win technique. However, one thing I noticed that is crucial is the key framings for the shadow diffusion points. It takes time to adjust it one by one, and shuffles around different pixels to get the transition looks natural.
