Final Submission

               
So after 14 weeks, 11,714 frames of animation and 34 shots of just under 8 minutes of unedited footage, I'm done. I enjoyed the module and I really liked working on this kind of style (I plan on developing it further and using it for either a class next term, a personal project, or my 4th year project). The final video is too big to upload to blogger, but here's a link:
              
https://vimeo.com/306883537
         

Week 13/14

                     
These last two weeks have been pretty uneventful, I've mostly just been adding a few final touches - things like additional fog layers, foreground ash fall, and the last few stills. These were made from pictures of Pompeii edited to be duetone (black and white initially, with a gradual fade to black and red):
               

                                   

Week 12

                             

I've pretty much finished everything now, and am in the final stages of editing. Here's an update on where I am with each shot:

                          

                            

As per Ryan's suggestion I've also made a short animation sequence for the horse's breath. each frame is semi-transparent and alligned with one another so that I can scale each short sequence down and position it to be exhaled by the horse to the beat of its gallop. The first and last few frames I also made more transparent in editing in order to create a dispersal effect.

                        

                                 

While I like the result (screenshot below) when used regularly I worry that it makes it look like the horse is running in the cold (a possible misconception that isn't helped by my intentional switching of what the viewer first assumes is snow to ash, the realisation of which dawns as the music first starts getting darker). To avoid confusion I've reduced the usage of the breath clouds and concentrated them around the time when the rider is galloping out from a cloud of ash, and there's all sorts of debris and ash streaming from him anyway that could explain it.