Outback Adventure - The Great Emu Chase

Since submitting my thesis, including my animation a few weeks ago, I have edited my animation a little. Nothing major. Mostly the sound, cleaning it up and making sure it's not too loud, and re-added the temple vein to the emu's head in the flaming scene. I didn't realise it was missing. I must have hidden it while I was cleaning the emu up and forgotten to unhide it. But yeah, fixed those things in preparation for sending it to the Melbourne International Animation Festival :)

Outback Adventures Cover Design

As well as a DVD disc design, I also designed a DVD cover, around about the 23rd of November.
I used a number of DVD covers as references to try to make it look professional. To include a rating and the other details listed on the back. It only took about a day to put together.

Outback Adventures Disc Design

Yay a disc design, I made sure to include both main characters, I just used the image from the intro credits, since that way I had both characters and they could be far enough apart that they fit next to the hole. The ground, as an impression of their location.
And the title of the series also taken from the intro title sequence.

Animatic 41

I have recorded and added some outdoors ambiance, birds chirping in the background. I recorded a sound effect of the rustling of the bag in the background while the caterpillar is crawling. I increased volume of the dialogue, lowered the volume of the music a little so it could be heard. Also removed an unwanted shadow from the emu chick running with the bag.

Names

Yesterday my brother pointed out that my characters don't have last names. So I've looked up English surnames and we sorted through and eventually decided on their last names.

Louella (their grandmother), Robyn (the mother), and Arinya's surname is Moore. Then Robyn marries Stephen Taylor and so Robyn and Benji's surnames become Taylor.

Louella Moore
Arinya Moore
Robyn Moore/Robyn Taylor
Stephen Taylor
Benji (Banjora) Taylor

Jayden became Stephen, because Jayden is a modren name so it isn't likely that the name was around at the time he was born.

So surnames are worked out, I just have to continue with working out dates and planning out the series.

Animatic 40

Today I put my characters in my animation, and then decided that it would be best to animate a walk cycle, so I did that. I animated both the boy and girl walking. I then put them in. I found that having them walk across and off the screen to be too distracting, so it was better to have them move very slowly part way across the screen, and slowly fade out to disappear before the full title "Outback Adventure" appears.

I considered switching the walk from them with all their gear from the start of the series, to them as they are at the start of this episode...but it didn't work. Because of the items they are holding - the wagon and the map, I couldn't use the same walk cycle...and changing the cycle looked strange, so I scrapped it. It works fine as it is, apart from potentially causing some confusion to those who might not know it's part of a series who would see that the characters do not have the same stuff as they do in the title sequence. I don't consider it to be a big issue though.

Boy with gear walk cycle:


Girl with gear walk cycle:


Boy without gear walk cycle:


Girl without gear walk cycle:

Chibi kids for start

One thing I've been thinking of doing, is adding chibi images of the main characters in the opening titles, when the text is drawing, so that there is something interesting to look at while the text is drawing. The picture would be of the children with all their gear as they would have looked at the start of their journey...it would either be a still image or an animation of them walking on or across the screen. And may or may not show them with their full gear fading into them in their current state at the start of the animation.
Something that would have been an interesting intro to each episode would be to show mini animations of how they lose each item to the current point of the series. It would be kind of like those clips at the start of an episode that refreshes the viewer what has happened in the last few episodes.

Yesterday I drew sketches of the two states, and scanned. Then yesterday I started converting a chibi run cycle to this new image. I started with the boy, adding a jacket, shoes, and his wagon with the contents. Today I added the bag and experimented with the colour of the boy's jacket. I think I'll go with a shade of red. I also completely finished the girl today.

Sketch:


Chibi boy with red jacket:


Chibi boy with blue jacket:


Chibi boy with green jacket:


Chibi kids together: