AE final project - Preproduction

The very first post on this blog was "The Great Eggscape" project that was done by myself and Thomas Meek and it is basically a live action cartoon. What we spent almost no time doing were the titles. What I would like to accomplish is doing new titles for the project where the text slides in from the sides with particles in the background that are also the names (this is actually why on the particle project I used a particle made of text) in the same color scheme already present on the end titles. My plan is for the entire title sequence to be about 30 seconds in length. I would like to include many text effects as well as mixing in images of the hero egg from the film. The film currently has all the titles at the end but these that I will be creating are to be added to the beginning. There will be seven total title slides with transitions between each of them. My plan is to have the transitions use the egg images as coverage for changing between slides while manipulating the image for improved visuals to (hopefully) have seamless transitions.
Asset List:
1. find main font
2. find font to use as the particle
3. select image stills (or small snippets of animation) of the hero egg from film
Schedule:
Week 1 - compile images, finish story boards.
Week 2 - layout the slides in AE with the film, get basic placement of all elements, get transitions working.
Week 3 (and until turn in) - finish all animations, lighting and camera movements. Polish and render.

First Maya Animation

This is my first attempt at animation in Maya. It went pretty well, although it gets easy to misplace objects. Below is a different view showing how I actually screwed up the first bounce with first the angle and then moving on the z-plane incorrectly. That took me forever and a day to figure out lol.




I had kind of a rough time adjusting keyframes, but finally got it together. I kind of feel the rendering process out of Maya is crazy (really, can't go directly to an .mov or .avi??) but AE easily deals with it of course. Now if I could only manage to make a model that looked half decent...