Episode 25 'The Money Tree Production'

Well we are now finished. The Money Tree production has finally come to a close and the four of us can now sit back and watch it all upload online. It has been a hectic few weeks to put the animation together, and considering the final day of animating was saturday 21st May (deadline being 24th!!) it was rather a close call.

I had been editing throughout the weeks anyway, so the last few days when we all viewed the rough cut were not as pressing as we once thought. I had shown May what I had edited together, after exporting all the files from Stop Motion Pro 7, and we all agreed that the layout (which was still very close to the original animatic) was just what we wanted.

I used my own Magix Movie Edit Pro software to edit the animation together as all the exported files were saved as WMV files. It still exported the final film in the format we wanted and kept the quality also.

Rig removal was a new technique we used in this animation. I went through each individual frame (on a couple of sequences) and painted out any mistakes that were made, for example, any branches that had been moved whilst animating.

The final edit was completed last night with the addition of a couple of last minute sound effects. Alex and myself were in charge of the foley sound effects and matched them up to the series of actions or movements throughout the film. We also had the idea of using a range of muffled expressions as oppose to actual dialogue - although this was decided at the very start of the project where we knew there would be no lip synch. So we went ahead and recorded badger growls and grunts, footsteps on leaves, dog panting and Barneys many emotions (amongst loads of others).

Jon Colenso, Alex Young and myself animating the final scene

The final animation can be viewed on Vimeo on the following link. The Money Tree