"The Chess Player" Rational

Throughout the making of my animation, I have come across many difficulties. One of the biggest difficulties was the making of the robot arms. This is due to the difficulty of changing the design of the arm to that of the tutorial. Because of this, I decided to keep the arm section the same, but change the hand part. By doing this I was still able to keep the effect I wanted, which was to make the arm seem like a crane game claw.

The making of the chess pieces was pretty simple as I just had to lathe the outline of the piece, making it whole, instead of a line. When drawing the outline, I used the ‘brezier’ setting so that I could create smooth corners for the pieces, making them look more realistic and less blocky. The horse piece was probably the hardest piece to make as I had to make it from scratch, because it wasn’t circular like the other pieces, I could lathe a line for it.

In order to make the animation more realistic, I placed the scene within a box with lighting so that it wasn’t just two robots playing in a black void. With the lighting I had one main light that stood above the robots but then I had one light that lit the whole box and it enabled me to start the scene off with a spot light over the chess board and two robot arms at the edge of the light, then light the rest of the scene up gradually as the robot arms made their way to the board.

One thing about animation that animators have to be weary of is the render time. The more effects, you put into an animation, the more time it has to render. Knowing this I was able to make sure I had created the animation in plenty of time before rendering, so that I would have enough time to change anything if I needed.

The sounds for the animation were recordings from the internet of different squeaks and thuds. I mostly used only a couple of squeaks and then edited them in Adobe Soundbooth, so that they don’t all sound the same. I also added music to the animation on top of the sound effects as it was too quiet without the music. The music I chose was The good, bad and the ugly, as the camera angles and the quick clips makes the robots seem like they are having a standoff in a cowboy film and the music really helped the animation come to life.