Queen of Hearts: Animating

Animating this scene was tricky. It took me a while to get a believable sliding rotation path on the card that I was somewhat happy with. Initially I made the mistake of trying to animate the rotations whilst key framing its trajectory. So I started again and this time focused on the slow in and slow out of the card. To begin with I wanted it to have some momentum, but not too much. The idea is that the previous shots are when Frank deals the card, attempting to get it into the hat(shot08), the card then misses its target (shot09) and then the card loses momentum and slides across the tabletop before coming to a stop at the edge of the table narrowly avoiding falling off the table (shot10). I worked on this part of the animation for some time. I wanted the speed of the card just right. I wanted to get the animation of the card slowing down right also. A lot of the time the card was far too slow or far too fast, bearing in mind that I had little space to play with. Through trail and error I had to animate the card between the right hand side of the frame and the edge of the table towards the left of the frame. To get the card to have some speed and then slow out I needed to space key frames relatively close together along the timeline and then when it came to the slow out I had to key the movement of the card with intervals much wider apart. It had been a while since I had animated anything and I was a bit rusty. I then added in the rotations last along the trajectory. This worked out far better. The animation is still a little slow but I think that if I do anymore to it I may ruin the animation. I will therefore speed up the animation using Adobe After Effects.

The purpose of this shot is symbolic. The queen of hearts represents the love of Frank's life. The irony is that he has been instructed to kill the one he loves. Te fact that the card doesnt slide off the table suggests that Frank will not go through with this terrible deed and that the woman he loves will survive.