World in a room

With the world in a room project I knew that i would have basically no freedom with visual aesthetic so I thought I might as well make a story that I find somewhat interesting. I wanted to make something sentimental but I think my idea didn't really execute well. I wanted to convey 2 people that had been separated at some point but had a close relationship before this. Norman is in his room looking out of the window, there is a door behind him that he has never opened. As he shuts the window he hears a muffled noise from behind him. He slowly walks to the door to which there is a peephole. He looks through and sees someone at the window, they turn around and he realises it is the person who he once had a very close replationship with. He pulls back and is over come with emotion, he begins to cry with shock and happiness of seeing the person. The other character hears some noise from behind the door and begins to walk slowly to the door. Norman recovers and then slowly looks through again. He sees the character coming towards him and hides under the peephole. we see the other character now at the door looking at the peephole. Norman slowly inches up to look through again. he sees nothing, confused he looks again, cut to the other character looking through the hole blocking his view. Norman then believes that the character is gone and begins to cry. suddenly a knock at the door, he is shocked and then smiles. Fade to black an then the door opens.
I made this idea into an animatic but after showing it in the crit I realised that my idea was not conveyed, there was too much back story for such a short film.

So i decided to change it slighly. I thought I could just have norman hear a noise from the door, look through the peep hole, see the character, be shocked and then knock the door, then cut to the other character reacting to this strange knock on the door. I was fairly happy with this idea so I began to work on my maya scenes. 

I like to work on getting the basic animation down first and then go back and refine. 

When it came to the stop motion I decided I wanted to have a daytime scene so I decided to have a green screen at the window so I could superimpose a sky late. I used the green screen sheet so I could still have lighting through the window but it didn't quite key out properly, a better solution would be to have this green paper on the window and have the light shine though it.

As for maya I continued to refine my shots as I went along. 

After completing the stopmotion I created a rough cut of my shots to see how everything had turned out. 

After that I made a second cut without sound, i thought however it could do with some timing improvements and made another cut.

Finally I managed to add the sound.

I found some of the sound to be slightly clunky so i re-edited it and came out with this final version.