Animatic 13

Today I added more detail to my asset list, making sure I included every single asset for each scene as well as more depth such as how much of a character's body is showing and what kind of eyes they have etc. I also made a seperate one for each scene folder, so I can use them as kind of check lists when I go into the scenes to make sure I have everything, and know what I have to work on.

After that I drew the bag in Photoshop, it was more difficult than I thought as I had to make it look like it was actually sitting on the ground. I also added a few extra frames for the moment when the emu chick pushes open the bag to peck at the food.

Once the bag was done and imported I worked on the emu chick. I did a frame by frame leaning, saved as pngs and imported that way, then made into a composition. I thought that it would be easier that way than trying to rotate it in Aftereffects with the lines on the neck. Then I made a walk cycle for it, using the same technique. It only runs one in the but it gets it from the side of the screen up to the bag.

Then I struggled to figure out how to animate the neck movement for it reached down for the bag. I found that the bag was a little too close to it so I had to play around with the placement of both the bag and the emu chick. I found that I couldn't just rotate the neck, because of how long it is (I hadn't realised how long emu chick's necks are when I drew my storyboard) it has to bend in a strange curvy way, where it goes down then back up, like a 'U'. I drew a few frames of this bendy neck using the solid base colour and some different head placements, to match up with the movement of the bag opening. I still have to fix up the neck, adding the outline and pattern. Which shouldn't be too difficult to achieve.

Another thing I notised while doing this (which is something I anticipated) is that the scene will have to be extended in order to fit in all of the actions and to achieve effective timing.