The final update

The animation is finally done but with few issues. The increment saves for both mine and Steph's Morpheus rigs worked well with Callum and Ben's Norman rigs however we did have to do each shot one at a time, this would have been a massive problem so the renders were divided out between myself, Callum and Steph which cut the workload down a lot. As we separated the workload I will talk about the shots that I dealt with which were the 'panning running shot' and the 'kicking the front gate down' shot. Using the storyboard for reference I decided to use a panning camera to combine the first and second shots into one, cutting down the workload and render times further. The first problem was that each shot had to constructed each time. This caused a problem with Callum's rig rendering incorrectly as its right arm and leg were a strange cell shaded grey material that couldn't be changed. We traced the problem to the fact it was saved as and ASCII and not a Binary and we found that if the ASCII was opened in Maya and that had everything else imported into it then there would be no rendering issue. The second issue was not really a problem but more of an annoyance as I had to select all the controllers on the Morpheus rig so I could add them to a new layer then turn them invisible so they wouldn't render in the playblasts, I'll explain why we did a playblast a little later. The final major problem was the render time. Callum discovered that the render times would be an issue even though we were doing several scenes each, he also found that by editing the playblast settings the quality could be improved to the point of workable without sacrificing too much quality. This proved to be a good idea as once the controllers were hidden the playblasts look great and it allowed us to quickly see what issues were arising if any.
Something I kept forgetting were the character sets. While animating the camera I found that it would mess with the Norman rig by making the legs or arms clip through the rig in strange ways. After consulting Callum he found that while I was editing the trax editor to create a longer looping sprint animation I started animating the camera while I was still on the Norman character set. Once I switched back to No Character set I didn't have a further problem.
When I was animating a panning camera that spins round from the front to the back of the runners I came across a strange problem where not only would only one transformation would Key, for example the move transformation would key but the rotation wouldn't. This was fixed by simply restarting Maya and never came up again.

After all the scenes were rendered Callum began editing them and adding music and sound effects. After he was finished he showed us the finished product and overall I am quite pleased with our result given the problems we were having with the Trax editor and the fact we were using 2 different rigs which seemed to be incompatible. The playblast method of rendering the scenes did prove effective and once it was put together did look nice. On the animation side of things looking at my animations next to other ones from my group I do feel mine are lacking. I feel that my animations are at least passable but compared to others they look rather simplistic and not particularly good. This I think does let the group down a little and brings the quality of the final animation down as well however you can clearly understand what the animation is supposed to be so in that respect I think my contribution does its job just fine. However I still maintain my stance on animation. It really is not my strong point.