Vader1 - Animation test

This shows my first attempt to animate the vader ident/ intro piece.

To start with i created some rough storyboard ideas shown below. I wanted to keep it all really simple as explained before so I decided to go with the first idea which shows just the lightsaber and the black background together. 

I drew up the story board in a bit more detail so that i could use it to animate perfectly. 

Next I started animating. I needed to find a way to represent a lightsaber properly and make it looks kind of realistic while still keeping a cartoon style. I quickly decided to use masks and the blur effect to create the lightsaber simulation.

To start with I used illustrator to create the two vector images shown below: The whiteish middle and the bright red glow. 

All I did then was apply a blur effect to the red glow layer and it already looked like a lightsaber. 

Next came the hard bit which was animating. Because they were on two different layers I needed to make sure that they were always lined up which would have been easy enough with the parent action.

However, I also needed to create the specific star wars motion blur effect which the regular motion blur couldn't do itself.

That meant that I had to manually almost frame-by-frame animate the lightsaber swinging motion. it took ages but the effect worked well and I am really happy with the manual motion blur. Underneath here you can see some of the frame by frame mask animating that i did.  

I also started using colour coodination with the layers so that certain sections were easier to find which you can see below. For example, all the particles of the lightsaber breaking can be found easily in the pink section or the two parts of the lightsaber until it is dropped can be found in purple. 

Here are a few video tests to show the lightsaber action and animations so far.